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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 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 uswe who have to live with the consequences.

  • 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)

  • The world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1, 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 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."

  • 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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