No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, page 1
PENGUIN BOOKS
NO ONE IS TOO SMALL TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
GRETA THUNBERG was born in 2003. In August 2018, she decided not to go to school one day, starting a strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament. Her actions sparked a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, and earning her the prestigious Prix Liberté, as well as a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Greta has Asperger’s, and considers it a gift which has enabled her to see the climate crisis ‘in black and white’. In 2019, she was named Time’s Person of the Year.
No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference is Greta’s first book in English, collecting her speeches from climate rallies across the globe to audiences at the UN, the World Economic Forum, the British Parliament, and US Congress. She is also the author of Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, a memoir, jointly written with her mother, opera singer Malena Ernman, her sister, Beata Ernman, and her father, Svante Thunberg.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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First published, in different form, in Great Britain by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, 2019
Published in Penguin Books 2019
This edition with seven new speeches published in Penguin Books 2021
Copyright © 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 by Greta Thunberg
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Published in agreement with Politiken Literary Agency.
The speeches in this work were originally given in 2018, 2019, and 2020.
The text of “There Is Hope” and “Our House Is Still on Fire” were previously published, in slightly different form, in the exclusive Barnes & Noble illustrated edition of No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
The text of “Hope” was originally recorded for Sveriges Radio and the transcript was adapted into an essay that was published as “Chapter 12” in the series “Six Months on a Planet in Crisis: Greta Thunberg‘s Travel Diary from the U.S. to Davos” by Time on July 10, 2020.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Thunberg, Greta, 2003– author.
Title: No one is too small to make a difference / Greta Thunberg.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019045961 (print) | LCCN 2019045962 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133568 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505372 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental responsibility. | Environmentalism. |
Climatic changes. | Nature—Effect of human beings on.
Classification: LCC GE195.7 .T58 2019 (print) | LCC GE195.7 (ebook) | DDC 179/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045961
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045962
Cover design: Darren Haggar
Cover photograph: Anders Hellberg
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Our Lives Are in Your Hands
Almost Everything Is Black and White
Unpopular
Prove Me Wrong
Our House Is on Fire
I’m Too Young to Do This
You’re Acting Like Spoiled, Irresponsible Children
A Strange World
Cathedral Thinking
Together We Are Making a Difference
Can You Hear Me?
The Easiest Solution Is Right in Front of You
You Can’t Simply Make Up Your Own Facts
Wherever I Go I Seem to Be Surrounded by Fairy Tales
The World Is Waking Up
We Are the Change and Change Is Coming
We Are Fighting for Everyone’s Future
We Are a Wave of Change
The People Are the Hope
There Is Hope
Our House Is Still on Fire
We Will Not Allow You to Surrender on Our Future
Hope
Our Lives Are in Your Hands
Climate March
Stockholm, September 8, 2018
Last summer, a number of leading climate scientists wrote that we have at most three years to reverse growth in greenhouse-gas emissions if we’re going to reach the goals set in the Paris Agreement.
Over a year and two months have now passed, and in that time many other scientists have said the same thing and a lot of things have got worse and greenhouse-gas emissions continue to increase. So maybe we have even less time than the one year and ten months those scientists said we have left.
If people knew this they wouldn’t need to ask me why I’m so ‘passionate about climate change’.
If people knew that the scientists say that we have a 5 per cent chance of meeting the Paris target, and if people knew what a nightmare scenario we will face if we don’t keep global warming below 2°C, they wouldn’t need to ask me why I’m on school strike outside parliament.
Because if everyone knew how serious the situation is and how little is actually being done, everyone would come and sit down beside us.
In Sweden, we live our lives as if we had the resources of 4.2 planets. Our individual carbon footprint is one of the worst in the world. This means that Sweden steals 3.2 years of natural resources from future generations every year. Those of us who are part of these future generations would like Sweden to stop doing that.
Right now.
This is not a political text. Our school strike has nothing to do with party politics.
Because the climate and the biosphere don’t care about our politics and our empty words for a single second.
They only care about what we actually do.
This is a cry for help.
To all the newspapers who still don’t write about and report on climate change, even though they said that the climate was ‘the critical question of our time’ when the Swedish forests were burning this summer.
To all of you who have never treated this crisis as a crisis.
To all the influencers who stand up for everything except the climate and the environment.
To all the political parties that pretend to take the climate question seriously.
To all the politicians that ridicule us on social media, and have named and shamed me so that people tell me that I’m retarded, a bitch and a terrorist, and many other things.
To all of you who choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself.
Your silence is almost worst of all.
The future of all the coming generations rests on your shoulders.
Those of us who are still children can’t change what you do now once we’re old enough to do something about it.
A lot of people say that Sweden is a small country, that it doesn’t matter what we do. But I think that if a few girls can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could do together if we wanted to.
Every single person counts.
Just like every single emission counts.
Every single kilo.
Everything counts.
So please, treat the climate crisis like the acute crisis it is and give us a future.
Our lives are in your hands.
Almost Everything Is Black and White
Declaration of Rebellion, Extinction Rebellion
Parliament Square, London, October 31, 2018
When I was about eight years old, I first heard about something called climate change, or global warming. Apparently, that was something humans had created by our way of living. I was told to turn off the lights to save energy, and to recycle paper to save resources.
I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could be capable of changing the earth’s climate.
Because, if we were and if it was really happening, we wouldn’t be talking about anything else. As soon as you turned on the TV, everything would be about that. Headlines, radio, newspapers. You would never read or hear about anything else. As if there was a world war going on.
But. No one talked about it. Ever.
If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal?
To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal.
I have Asperger’s syndrome, and to me, almost everything is black or white.
I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential th
We have to change.
Countries like Sweden and the UK need to start reducing emissions by at least 15 per cent every year, to stay below a 2°C warming target.
But, as the IPCC has recently stated, aiming instead for a 1.5°C target would significantly reduce the climate impact. But we can only imagine what that means for reducing emissions. You would think every one of our leaders and the media would be talking about nothing else – but no one ever mentions it. Nor does anyone ever mention anything about the greenhouse gases already locked in the system, nor that air pollution is hiding a warming, so when we stop burning fossil fuels, we already have an extra 0.5–1.1°C guaranteed.
Nor does hardly anyone ever mention that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, with about 200 species going extinct every single day.
Furthermore, does no one ever speak about the aspect of equity, or climate justice, clearly stated everywhere in the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris Agreement work on a global scale? That means that rich countries need to get down to zero emissions, within six to twelve years, so that people in poorer countries can heighten their standard of living by building some of the infrastructure that we have already built. Such as roads, hospitals, electricity, schools and clean drinking water. Because how can we expect countries like India or Nigeria to care about the climate crisis if we, who already have everything, don’t care even a second about it or our actual commitments to the Paris Agreement?
So, why are we not reducing our emissions? Why are they, in fact, still increasing? Are we knowingly causing a mass extinction? Are we evil?
No, of course not. People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn’t have a clue about the consequences of our everyday life. And they don’t know the rapid changes required.
Since, as I said before, no one talks about it. There are no headlines, no emergency meetings, no breaking news. No one is acting as if we were in a crisis. Even most green politicians and climate scientists go on flying around the world, eating meat and dairy.
If I live to be 100 I will be alive in the year 2103.
When you think about ‘the future’ today, you don’t think beyond the year 2050. By then I will, in the best case, not even have lived half of my life. What happens next?
The year 2078 I will celebrate my seventy-fifth birthday.
What we do or don’t do, right now, will affect my entire life, and the lives of my children and grandchildren.
When school started in August this year I decided that this was enough. I sat myself down on the ground outside the Swedish Parliament. I school-striked for the climate.
Some people say that I should be in school instead.
Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‘solve the climate crisis’. But the climate crisis has already been solved.
We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.
And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future?
And what is the point of learning facts within the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly mean nothing to our politicians and our society?
A lot of people say that Sweden is just a small country, and that it doesn’t matter what we do. But I think that if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we all could do together if we wanted to.
Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day.
There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground.
So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules.
Because the rules have to be changed.
Everything needs to change. And it has to start today.
So everyone out there: it is now time for civil disobedience.
It is time to rebel.
Unpopular
UN Climate Change Conference
Katowice, Poland, December 15, 2018
My name is Greta Thunberg, I am fifteen years old and I’m from Sweden. I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now.
Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn’t matter what we do. But I’ve learnt that no one is too small to make a difference. And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school – then imagine what we all could do together if we really wanted to.
But to do that we have to speak clearly. No matter how uncomfortable that may be. You only speak of green, eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess. Even when the only sensible thing to do is to pull the emergency brake.
You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children. But I don’t care about being popular, I care about climate justice and the living planet.
We are about to sacrifice our civilization for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue to make enormous amounts of money. We are about to sacrifice the biosphere so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. But it is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.
The year 2078 I will celebrate my seventy-fifth birthday.
If I have children, then maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask about you.
Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything, while there still was time to act. You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future.
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there’s no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground and we need to focus on equity.
And if solutions within this system are so impossible to find then maybe we should change the system itself?
We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again. You’ve run out of excuses and we’re running out of time. We’ve come here to let you know that change is coming whether you like it or not.
The real power belongs to the people.
Prove Me Wrong
World Economic Forum
Davos, January 22, 2019
Some people say that we are not doing enough to fight climate change. But that is not true. Because to ‘not do enough’ you have to do something. And the truth is we are basically not doing anything.
Yes, some people are doing more than they can but they are too few or too far away from power to make a difference today.
Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we all have created. But that is just another convenient lie. Because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame.
And someone is to blame. Some people – some companies and some decision-makers in particular – have known exactly what priceless values they are sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money.
I want to challenge those companies and those decision-makers into real and bold climate action. To set their economic goals aside and to safeguard the future living conditions for humankind. I don’t believe for one second that you will rise to that challenge. But I want to ask you all the same.
I ask you to prove me wrong. For the sake of your children, for the sake of your grandchildren. For the sake of life and this beautiful living planet.
I ask you to stand on the right side of history. I ask you to pledge to do everything in your power to push your own business or government in line with a 1.5°C world.
Will you pledge to do that? Will you pledge to join me, and the people all around the world, in doing whatever it takes?
