signs that action is coming. Corporate com-
mitments to sustainable growth and net-
zero emissions are on the rise. More than 60
countries have pledged to have a net carbon
footprint of zero by 2050. American primary
voters, especially in states beset by wildfires
and flooding, are suddenly giving presiden-
tial candidates an earful on climate change.
In Austria’s September elections, the Green
Party more than tripled its support at the ex-
pense of the Social Democrats, a develop-
ment a leader of the Social Democrats attrib-
uted to Thunberg—just before he resigned.
Even as China burns half the world’s coal, it
too is changing. It’s now home to roughly 45%
of the electric cars and 99% of the electric
buses in the world.
Thunberg stands on the shoulders—and at
the side—of hundreds of thousands of others
who’ve been blockading the streets and set-
tling the science, many of them since before
she was born. She is also the first to note that
her privileged background makes her “one
of the lucky ones,” as she puts it, in a crisis
that disproportionately affects poor and in-
digenous communities. But this was the year
the climate crisis went from behind the cur-
tain to center stage, from ambient political
noise to squarely on the world’s agenda, and
no one did more to make that happen than
Thunberg.
It is not a moment too soon: emissions
would need to start falling next year by 7.6%
annually and continue at that rate for a de-
cade in order for the world to have any chance
of hitting the widely accepted targets for
stopping global warming. Thunberg’s wake-
up call is a necessary jolt. It is up to us all to
meet it with solutions.
ThaT Thunberg is the youngest individual
ever named TIME’s Person of the Year says
as much about the moment as it does about
her. The 92-year-old franchise is rooted in
the so-called Great Man theory of history,
the notion that powerful individuals shape
the world. Historically that has meant people
who worked their way up the ladders of major
organizations and were at home in the corri-
dors of power. But in this moment when so
many traditional institutions seem to be fail-
ing us, amid staggering inequality and social
upheaval and political paralysis, we are seeing
new kinds of influence take hold. It is wielded
by people like Thunberg, leaders with a cause
and a phone who don’t fit the old rubrics but
who connect with us in ways that institutions
can’t and perhaps never could.
When she first heard about global
warming as an 8-year-old, Thunberg says she
thought, “That can’t be happening, because
if that were happening, then the politicians
would be taking care of it.” That they weren’t
is precisely what motivated her to act, as it
has youth the world over who are forcing
us to confront the peril of our own inaction,
from the student-led protests on the streets
of Santiago, Chile, to the young democracy
activists fighting for rights and representation
in Hong Kong to the high schoolers from
Parkland, Fla., whose march against gun
violence Thunberg cites as an inspiration for
her climate strikes.
“I’d like to tell my grandchildren that we
did everything we could,” she told TIME from
the coast of Virginia in mid-November, as she
prepared to cross the Atlantic by sailboat,
“and we did it for them and for the genera-
tions to come.”
For sounding the alarm about humanity’s
predatory relationship with the only home
we have, for bringing to a fragmented world
a voice that transcends backgrounds and bor-
ders, for showing us all what it might look like
when a new generation leads, Greta Thunberg
is TIME’s 2019 Person of the Year.1°C
The amount that
temperatures have
already risen
since the
Industrial Revolution4M
The approximate
number of people who
participated in the
Global Climate Strike on
Sept. 20, from all seven
continents, making it
the largest climate
protest in history