-Your first climate strike was a lonely event
a little over a year ago.
And in the intervening time, you have sparked the interest
of millions, literally, of children around the globe,
demanding action for climate change.
What's your message to world leaders today?
-My message is that we will be watching you.
[laughter, applause]
This is all wrong.
I shouldn't be up here.
I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
Yet you all come to us young people for hope.
How dare you.
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood
with your empty words.
Yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
People are suffering.
People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction,
and all you can talk about is money
and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you.
[cheers and applause]
For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear.
How dare you continue to look away
and come here saying that you're doing enough
when the politics and solutions needed
are still nowhere in sight?
You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
But no matter how sad and angry I am,
I do not want to believe that.
Because if you really understood the situation
and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.
And that I refuse to believe.
[applause]
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years
only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees
and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions
beyond human control.
Fifty percent may be acceptable to you,
but those numbers do not include tipping points,
most feedback loops,
additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution,
or the aspects of equity and climate justice.
They also rely on my generation
sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air
with technologies that barely exist.
So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us,
we who have to live with the consequences.
To have a 67% chance
of staying below 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise,
the best odds given by the IPCC,
the world had 420 gigatonnes of CO2 left to emit
back on January 1, 2018.
Today, that figure is already down
to less than 350 gigatonnes.
How dare you pretend that this can be solved
with just business as usual and some technical solutions?
With today's emissions levels,
that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone
within less than eight and a half years.
There will not be any solutions or plans
presented in line with these figures here today
because these numbers are too uncomfortable
and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us.
But the young people are starting to understand
your betrayal.
The eyes of all future generations are upon you.
And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.
[cheers and applause]
We will not let you get away with us.
Right here, right now is where we draw the line.
The world is waking up, and change is coming
whether you like it or not.
Thank you.
[cheers and applause]