94 | Rolling Stone | April 2020
has an acute noise sensitivity, which
has meant at times the rest of the family eating in
a guest room with plastic plates to keep noise to a
minimum. When Beata went to dance class, Malena
wasn’t allowed to move during the two-hour session
lest Beata have a tearful meltdown.
Greta battled her own life-threatening demons.
When she was 11, she stopped eating and rarely spoke
to anyone outside of her family for months. Some-
times she would come home after being bullied at
school — recess was spent hiding out in the bathroom
— and either spend hours petting her dogs or crying
at her own pain. She lost 20 pounds as her parents
chronicled her food intake. (“Five pieces of gnocchi
in two hours.”)
Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness
into strength that made her a global icon. Accord-
ing to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in
school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting
our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quick-
ly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski
trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the
climate’s demise.
“I felt very alone that I was the only one who
seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in
Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bub-
ble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives
as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”
Greta read all she could and sometimes went on-
line and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming
triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She
eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for
a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her,
and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from
the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass
shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activ-
ists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slow-
ly broke out of her cocoon.
“I thought what the Parkland students did was so
brave,” says Thunberg. “Of course, it was not the only
thing that got me out of that feeling. I did it because I
was tired of sitting and waiting. I tried to get others to
join me, but no one was interested and no one want-
ed to do that. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this alone if
no one else wants to do it.’ ”
So in August 2018, Greta and her father bicycled
down to the Swedish Parliament, across the cob-
blestone street from where Greta and I now stand.
She propped up the first Skolstrejk för klimatet sign,
which she’d made from scrap wood. Greta also wrote
up an information sheet with climate data and a hint
of the defiant humor that eventually led her to make
her Twitter profile read, “A teenager working on her
anger management problem,” after Trump told her
to chill out. Her bio was simple:
“Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about
my future, neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in
ninth grade, and I am going on strike from school for
the climate.”
Her dad left, and she sat alone. She posted a cou-
ple of images to Instagram. It was passed on by a few
of her followers. Then a reporter noticed. And then
local activists from Greenpeace. Within two months,
there were hundreds of fellow travelers, and the
news spread through Scandinavia to Europe and on
to America. Within a year, climate student strikes at-
tracted tens of thousands, from London to New York.
Greta’s rise was the activist version of a perfect
storm. Her ascension from bullied Swedish studentto global climate icon has been driven by both a loss
and a regaining of hope. It is not a coincidence that
her ascent happened immediately in the aftermath of
the election of Trump. It’s impossible to see a Greta-
like phenomena emerging during the Obama- driven
run up to the Paris climate talks, when it actually
looked like nations of the world were getting their
shit together to deal with global warming. It became
obvious after Trump and the Paris implosion that 30
years of rhetoric and meetings had created very lit-
tle except more talk.
And then you had the natural disasters. California
could not stop burning. Floods ravaged Europe. We
now watch glaciers melt and collapse in real time.
The dawn of 2020 brought the Australian calamity,
with images of scorched earth, koalas and kangaroos
burned alive, and the death of a way of life.
The irony of the Greta Age is that we now have op-
tions, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy technol-
ogy has evolved to a point where old arguments that
fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to create ener-and getting politicians and getting whoever’s talking
to her back to the subject.”
All of this from a teenager who sometimes still
wears her hair in pigtails.
Thunberg and her fellow protesters head toward
Medborgarplatsen (Citizen Square), in central Stock-
holm. They pass over a bridge by the harbor, where
massive renovations are being done so the city can
host even more waste-multiplying mega cruise ships.
The kids chant in Swedish, “What do we want? Cli-
mate justice! When? Now! When? Now, now, now!”
At the square, the squirrelly tweens play tag and are
entertained by a rapper in a ski mask (some things
don’t translate).
Eventually, Greta takes the stage. She speaks
in her native Swedish, and her tone is faster and
more emotional than in English. She mentions that
temperatures in Sweden have been 5 to 10 degrees
Celsius above normal this winter, and how global-
ly 19 of the past 20 years have been the warmest on
record.
“I have been on the road and visited numerous
places and met people from all over the globe,” says
Greta. “I can say that it looks nearly the same ev-
erywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored
by people in charge, despite the science being crys-
tal clear. We don’t want to hear one more politician
say that this is important but afterward do nothing
to change it. We don’t want more empty words from
people pretending to take our future seriously.”
She pauses, and her face goes grim. “It shouldn’t
be up to us children and teenagers to make peo-
ple wake up around the world. The ones in charge
should be ashamed.”
The crowd chants, “Greta, Greta, Greta... .”
She must hate that.G
RETA KEEPS MOVING. In January, it was
Davos. This week it is Stockholm. Next Fri-
day is Hamburg, Germany, and then Bristol
the next week. It’s a debilitating schedule since she
doesn’t fly. Greta says it won’t go on forever. She is
nearing the end of her gap year, between high school
and university. “I really hope that we can solve this
thing now because I want to get back to studying,”
says Thunberg, shivering a bit in the Stockholm wind.
I can’t tell if she is joking or is having a rare moment
of optimism.
Still, she is so small, and the world is so big. I won-
der how she continues forward as the world pays lip
service and not much else.
For the first time, Thunberg softens.
“I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg qui-
etly. “I’m very tiny and I am very emotional, and
that is not something people usually associate with
strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also
needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we
don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and
we don’t have to earn the most money.”
A friend comes over and whispers in her ear. It’s
time to go, maybe home for a silent walk with her two
dogs, Moses and Roxy. But she isn’t quite finished.
“We don’t need to have the biggest car, and we
don’t need to get the most attention. We just need
to.. .”
Mighty Greta’s voice trails off as if she is lost in
thought or searching for the right word in English.
Then, she looks up, locks eyes, and smiles for the
first time.
“We need to care about each other more.”GRETA THUNBERG
[Cont. from 42]
gy are now obviously nonsense. The cost of clean en-
ergy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past
decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fos-
sil fuels no longer made economic sense anywhere,
anytime. What remains is the power and influence of
the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain
the status quo. No politician has the courage to face
them down. By 2018, it became even clearer that pol-
iticians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted. Com-
panies would continue to put profits before nature.
We were on our own.
And that’s when Greta came along.
Thunberg’s perceived psychological weakness be-
came her superpower. Her flat, affectless, blunt voice
was the perfect counterpoint to the bureaucratic
bullshit of the climate negotiators. It cut through all
the gobbledygook about offsets and the economic
necessity of coal and cost curves of solar power. She
put it in simple human language: We are losing our
planet. Unlike many activists before her, she is not
political. She is not interested in reforming the pro-
cess. Her voice is unabashedly and explicitly moral —
“How dare you.”
“I think she is extraordinary in her determina-
tion,” says Eva Jones, an American high school senior
who recently spent a week protesting for climate jus-
tice in Davos. “When you hear her speak, she doesn’t
do vanity interviews. It’s never like, ‘So what do your
friends think about this?’ She’s like, ‘No, I don’t want
to talk about my friends, I want to talk about the cri-
sis.’ She’s absolutely insane about getting reporters“I was tired of
waiting. I tried
to get others to join
me, but no one
was interested. So
I said, ‘I’m going to
do this alone.’ ”
Additional reporting by staff writer RYAN BORT