42 / ROLLING STONE / APRIL 2020
CLIMATE CRISIS
Back then, it was just Greta, a sign, and a lunch
of bean pasta in a reusable glass jar. Then it was
two people, and then a dozen, and then an inter-
national movement. I mention the bravery of her
speeches, but she waves me away. She wants to
talk about the loss of will among the olds.
“It seems like the people in power have given
up,” says Thunberg, taking her hat off and push-
ing back her mussed up brown-blond hair. She
remains on message despite the tourists and
teens taking her picture and mugging behind us.
“They say it’s too hard — it’s too much of a chal-
lenge. But that’s what we are doing here. We
have not given up because this is a matter of life
and death for countless people.”
It was my second encounter with Greta in
three weeks. Back in January, she was in Davos,
Switzerland, for the annual conference of the
World Economic Forum, where billionaires helo
into the Swiss resort town and talk about solving
the world’s problems without making their lives
any harder. Thunberg had appeared last year
and made her now iconic “Our House Is on Fire”
speech, in which she declared the climate crisis
to be the mortal threat to our planet. Solve it or
all the other causes — feminism, human rights,
and economic justice — would not matter.
“Either we choose to go on as a civilization
or we don’t,” said Thunberg with cold precision.
“That is as black or white as it gets. There are no
gray areas when it comes to survival.”
The speech made Thunberg the unlikely and
reluctant hero of the climate crisis. She crossed
the ocean in a sailboat — she doesn’t fly for envi-
ronmental reasons — to speak before the United
Nations. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize and was named Time magazine’s Person of
the Year, conjuring the manic jealousy of Don-
ald Trump, who called the honor “so ridiculous”
and suggested she go to the movies and chill out.
In Davos, the illuminati prattled on about
planting a trillion trees, even as we are still
clear-cutting actual trees from the Amazon all
the way to Thunberg’s beloved Sweden. This
did not amuse nor placate the hoodie-wearing
Greta. She seemed irritated and perhaps a little
sick; she canceled an appearance the day before
because she wasn’t feeling well. She was in no
mood for flattery and nonsense. So when Time
editor Edward Felsenthal asked her how she
dealt with all the haters, Greta didn’t even try to
answer diplomatically.
“I would like to say something that I think
people need to know more than how I deal with
haters,” she answered, before launching into
details from the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-
mate Change’s latest report. She mentioned that
if we are to have even a 67 percent chance of
limiting global temperature change to under 1.5
C, the point where catastrophic changes begin,
we have less than 420 gigatons of CO2 that we
can emit before we pass the no-going-back line.
Thunberg stated that, at the current rate, we
have eight years to change everything.
Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was
the persona: an adolescent iron-willed truth tell-
er. The Davos one-percenters clapped and rat-
tled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting
pattern for Thunberg appearances that would
be repeated at the European Commission: Greta
tells the adults they are fools and their plans
are lame and shortsighted. They still give her a
standing ovation. A few minutes later, she was
gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of
black BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into
the Alpine sky.M
Y GRETA TRAVELS featured a Vancou-
ver-Zurich round trip and then an
L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I
fly from Vancouver to L.A. for anoth-
er story. It’s the job, but I take stock
in horror and calculate that my three
flights burn more carbon than the
yearly usage of the average citizen of more than
200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can
hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.
“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has
come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me
in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta mo-
ment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She
said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say
you understand the science, but I don’t believe
you. Because if you did and then you continue
to act as you do, that would
mean you’re evil. And I don’t
believe that.’” Gore shook his
head in wonderment. “Wow.”
He then gives a history lesson:
“There have been other times
in human history when the
moment a morally-based social
movement reached the tipping
point was the moment when
the younger generation made
it their own. Here we are.”
Activist-actress Jane Fonda
was so inspired by Greta that
she has been hosting a series
of Fire Drill Fridays. “I was
just filled with depression
and hopelessness, and then I
started reading about Greta,”
Fonda tells me one winter af-
ternoon in Los Angeles. “She
inspired me to get out there
and do more.”
But in Stockholm, the world
of presidential taunts, former vice presidents
slathering praise, and Oscar winners rhapsodiz-
ing seems far away.
Outside of the Parliament building, Greta tells
me she doesn’t worry about her safety despite
Trump and others speaking cruelly about heron social media. (According to her mother, lo-
cals have shoved excrement into the family mail-
box.) Later in February, she would march in Bris-
tol, England, and be met by social media posts
suggesting she deserved to be sexually assaulted.
“It’s just the people with 10 accounts who sit
and write anonymously on Twitter and so on,”
Greta says. “It’s nothing you can take seriously.”
Still, all is not rotten. America has come up
with the Green New Deal. In Trumplandia, that
seems like a beacon of hope, right?
Nope.
“If you look at the graphs to stay below the
1.5 degree Celsius global average temperature
and you read the Green New Deal, you see that
it doesn’t add up,” says Thunberg with some im-
patience. She references her Davos speech about
how the world only has 420 gigatons of CO2 to
burn over the next eight years or the 1.5 goal be-
comes impossible. “If we are to be in line with
the carbon-dioxide budget, we need to focus
on doing things now instead of making com-
mitments like 10, or 20, 30 years from now. Of
course, the Green New Deal is not in line with
our carbon-dioxide budget.”
Meanwhile, the main criticism of the Green
New Deal at home is that it moves too fast in get-
ting the United States to zero carbon emission by- But Greta doesn’t do politics.
“At least it has got people to start talking about
the climate crisis more,” says Thunberg in a tone
that suggests the slightest of praise. “That of
course is a step in the right di-
rection, I guess.”
There’s more to say, but
now it’s time to march. The
children’s crusade forms into a
regimented mob. Greta moves
to the front and holds a Skol-
strejk för klimatet banner with
some other teens. The taller
kids lift it too high, and she
nearly vanishes. All you can
see is Greta’s winter hat and
her gray eyes. That’s enough.
Al Gore was right. A child
leads us.
TECHNICALLY, Greta Thunberg’s
childhood continues for anoth-
er year. But she hasn’t been a
kid for some time. She is one of
two daughters of Malena Ern-
man, an opera- singer-turned-
Eurovision-contestant, and
Svante Thunberg, an actor. Ac-
cording to the family’s book, Our House Is on
Fire, the bohemian clan has endured a scroll of
psychological disorders beginning with Malena,
who suffered from bulimia and still deals with
ADHD. Greta’s younger sister, Beata, was diag-
nosed with OCD and ADHD, and [Cont. on 94]GET INVOLVED
Climate Strike!
fridaysforfuture.org
globalclimatestrike.org
Join Greta and her
allies this April to mark
a month of Global
Climate Action. In the
U.S., three days of
protests are planned,
starting on Earth Day
on April 22nd and
ending with a global
strike on April 24th.