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Greta, your first climate strike was a lonely event a little over a year ago.
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And in the intervening time, you have sparked the interest of millions literally of children around the globe demanding action for climate change.
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What's your message to world leaders today?
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My message is that we'll be watching you.
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This is all wrong.
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I shouldn't be up here.
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I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean.
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Yet you all come to us young people for hope.
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How dare you!
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You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.
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And yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
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People are suffering.
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People are dying.
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Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
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We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
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How dare you!
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For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear.
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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.
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You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
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But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that.
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Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.
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And that I refuse to believe.
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The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 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.
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Fifty percent may be acceptable to you.
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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.
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They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
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So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.
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To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise, the best odds given by the IPCC...(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
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The world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1, 2018.
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Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
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How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just "business as usual" and some technical solutions?
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With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.
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There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today.
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Because these numbers are too uncomfortable, and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
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You are failing us.
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But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.
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The eyes of all future generations are upon you.
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And if you choose to fail us, I say, "We will never forgive you."
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We will not let you get away with this.
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Right here, right now is where we draw the line.
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The world is waking up.
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And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
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Thank you.