Greta Thunberg and her millions of school-age followers demand a 'concrete plan' to avert climate catastrophe. dwallacewells reports
Greta Thunberg in Berlin in July. Photo: ddp images/SIPA USA/ddp images This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Within four months of beginning her strike, Greta had spoken at the U.N.’s climate-change conference in Katowice, Poland, excoriating the crowd for its nihilistic self-interest: A month later, at the World Economic Forum’s orgy of plutocratic comity at Davos, where she traveled by train and slept in a small tent in the Swiss winter, she used even more direct language:
These were just pledges and may soon prove illusory, like every other pledge that has ever been made to fight climate change. But all are far more ambitious than would have seemed even conceivable a year ago. After all, when Greta began her school strike, late in August 2018, the U.N.
Her natural medium — as it is for many celebrities roughly of her generation — is the controlled stage of social media. There, she has called her atypicality a “superpower” and has been quite open and unguarded about the details: As a young child, she says, she was diagnosed not only with Asperger’s but obsessive-compulsive disorder and what’s called “selective mutism.” Beginning at age 11, seized by a deep depression about the fate of the world, she stopped talking and eating.
Greta’s visit to New York was occasioned by two essentially simultaneous but in other ways counterpoised events. There is the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit, beginning September 23, where many nations are expected to unveil new emissions-reductions commitments more ambitious than the ones they have all, to this point, failed to meet, and the Global Climate Strike, on September 20 and September 27, the first of its kind to invite adults to join the ranks of schoolchildren and walk out of work.
“It’d be great if we could stop at two degrees,” Gates said. “Unless there are huge surprises on scientific advances, I just don’t see it happening.” As for the U.N.’s stated goal of 1.5 degrees? “We’re not in that universe, period,” he said. “Unfortunately, the general literature, because it’s done by scientists, understates these things by quite a bit,” he went on. “I think of India as paradigmatic because it’s big enough to count and it’s poor enough. They deserve to have air-conditioning.
In dozens of conversations like these in the months leading up to the U.N. summit, not a single climate leader expressed great confidence to me that we would manage to avoid two degrees of warming. That may seem like a rebuke to the clarity of purpose embedded in Greta’s goals — and indeed to the whole U.N.-supported climate apparatus targeting, as she does, a safe landing at 1.5 degrees.
The politics show it, growing only more jagged.
“The arrival of Greta Thunberg in New York on Wednesday was one of many recent events that illustrate how rapidly modern environmentalism is degenerating into a millenarian cult,” Niall Ferguson wrote in the Sunday Times of London, another Murdoch paper. And in the New York Times, the conservative centrist Christopher Caldwell called her rhetoric a threat to democracy.
When she arrived in New York, Greta was asked what she thought she would miss about the boat now that she was back on land. Her second answer was about the beauty of the ocean; her first was about the solitude it brought. A few days later, on Twitter, she wrote, “When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you’re winning!” She added the hashtag #aspiepower and a photo of herself, smiling, aboard the Malizia II in New York Harbor.
When Greta arrived, she was carrying her sign from the strikes and looking tired, even a little sad, wearing gray sweatpants printed with stars and a short-sleeved, medium-blue T-shirt she’d later layer with a sweatshirt of the same color and then a classic yellow raincoat. She wore her hair in a long, single braid and, in a couple of nervous moments, switched it from hanging over one shoulder to the other.
I asked whether she thought the public as a whole saw the crisis more clearly than they did a year or two ago.
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