Greta reprimanded leaders of 200 nations at the UN climate change summit and also gave a compelling speech at Davos in January 2019, beseeching top leaders to act on climate change urgently.
16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The announcement comes in the wake of hundreds of thousands of students going on mass strikes in 1,659 towns and cities across 105 cities on March 15.
Thunberg is the founder of the Youth Strike for Climate movement, which has now become a global phenomenon, inspiring thousands of young people across the world.
When she was 15, Greta indulged in civil disobedience, protesting outside the Swedish parliament every day during school hours for at least three weeks. She sat on the steps of the parliament building demanding the government undertake radical response to climate change.
After the country’s parliamentary elections in September 2018, she would spend four days a week at school and reserve her Fridays for protesting on the steps of the parliament building. She said that she was inspired by the protests staged by American high-school students against gun laws in response to the Parkland shooting in 2018.
A curious mind, Greta had developed interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in her third grade. Her parents – Svante Thunberg, an actor and Malena Ernman, a very-well known Opera singer – have shown unconditional support to their daughter and the cause of climate change.
In a book, Ernmen mentions that Greta and her younger sister Beata have been diagnosed with Autism and ADHD. Greta attributes her special interest and her uncanny ability to concentrate to her autism. She began doing research on climate change when she was only nine and has stayed on the topic for seven years.
So attached she is to the cause and the belief that a small change can lead to a large difference, something known as the Butterfly Effect, that Greta has stopped eating meat and buying anything that is not absolutely necessary. In 2015, she stopped flying on planes, and a year later her mother followed suit giving up on her international performing career. They have installed solar batteries in their house.
The family grows their own vegetables on a small piece of land outside the city. They have an electric car, which they use only when necessary, and ride bikes for relatively short distances.
Sweden is said to have the most progressive legislation on climate change with its policies aiming to make the Nordic nation “the first fossil-free welfare state in the world”. In addition, the country is a signatory to the scientific census that countries must cut their emissions by 15 percent a year.
Calling the progressive legislation and scientific consensus “bu****it”, Greta says that in Sweden actual commissions had gone up by 3.6 percent in the first quarter of 2018.
Aiming to bring climate change at the centre of the political discourse of the country, Greta attended the United Nations climate change summit in December 2018. She reprimanded leaders of nearly 200 nations at the conference which took place in Poland, saying, “Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.” She also had a one-on-one discussion with UN Secretary General António Guterres.
She also gave a compelling speech at Davos in January 2019, beseeching top leaders to act on climate change urgently.
Angered by the lackadaisical stance of countries towards the cause of climate change, she told The News Yorker, “The politics that’s needed to prevent the climate catastrophe—it doesn’t exist today. We need to change the system, as if we were in crisis, as if there were a war going on.”
