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  • 3/25/2025
"How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you're doing enough?"

Greta Thunberg's furious speech on behalf of the youth at the UN...
Transcript
00:00My message is that we'll be watching you.
00:12This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here.
00:17I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
00:22Yet you all come to us young people for hope.
00:26How dare you!
00:29You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.
00:34And yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
00:38People are suffering. People are dying.
00:42Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
00:46We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.
00:49And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
00:56How dare you!
01:05For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear.
01:11How dare you continue to look away
01:15and come here saying that you're doing enough
01:18when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
01:24You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
01:29But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that.
01:35Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act,
01:41then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.
01:46The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years
01:56only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees
02:01and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
02:0650% may be acceptable to you,
02:12but those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops,
02:17additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice.
02:23They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air
02:32with technologies that barely exist.
02:35So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us,
02:40we who have to live with the consequences.
02:43To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise,
02:51the best odds given by the IPCC, the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit
02:59back on January 1st, 2018.
03:02Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
03:08How dare you pretend that this can be sold with just business as usual and some technical solutions.
03:16With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8.5 years.
03:27There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today
03:36because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
03:43You are failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.
03:51The eyes of all future generations are upon you.
03:56And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.
04:06www.ipcc.org

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