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  • Greta, 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'll be watching you.

  • 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,

  • and 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!

  • 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.

  • The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years

  • only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C,

  • 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 a 1.5°C global temperature rise

  • the best odds given by the IPCC* – *[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]

  • the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on January 1st, 2018.

  • Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

  • 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 8 1/2 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 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.

  • We will not let you get away with this.

  • 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.

Greta, your first climate strike was a lonely event a little over a year ago.

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