september 16–29, 2019 | new york 29formative righteousness as they addressed the crowd. “All of this
is very overwhelming,” Greta said when she finally took the micro-
phone. Losing her train of thought, she apologized: “My brain isn’t
working correctly.”
Greta has delivered 12 speeches in her short but very public
life, now packaged together in a Penguin paperback called No
One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. But they have all been
relatively quick, her interviews often briefer, and while she is
regularly enveloped by supporters during climate strikes, she
seems generally uncomfortable in crowds. “Greta’s in the mid-
dle there, looking miserable,” a reporter whispered to me, a few
days later, when she joined Villaseñor’s weekly climate strike
at the U.N.
Her natural medium—as it is for many celebrities roughly of
her generation—is the controlled stage of social media. There, she
has called her atypicality a “superpower” and has been quite open
and unguarded about the details: As a young child, she says, she
was diagnosed not only with Asperger’s but obsessive-compulsive
disorder and what’s called “selective mutism.”
Beginning at age 11, seized by a deep depres-
sion about the fate of the world, she stopped
talking and eating. That has led, she says, to
the stunted growth that today gives her the
appearance of a preteen, a wise-beyond-her-
years golden child.
This atypicality has not proved, as you might
have expected, a challenge in her public life. In
fact, the plot points of Greta’s rise could have
been lifted from Joseph Campbell: an Everygirl
turned reluctant crusader, a dark night of the
soul, a forbidding and intrepid journey from
the imperial periphery to the very center of
global power. The saga was irresistible. And as
was the case for the Parkland students who
originally inspired her strike with their protests
against gun violence in the U.S., Greta serves as
a wish-fulfillment fantasy for members of an
older generation, the one she so pointedly and
repeatedly calls out, who seem desperate to
believe in a next-generation savior—and who
seemed gratified to be flagellated a little bit for
their selfishness and shortsightedness.
Along the way, Greta’s childlike clarity has
been her best and most unique asset—fortify-
ing her moral standing and underlining the standing of her gen-
eration as a whole. She has been alive for fully a third of all the
carbon emissions ever produced in the entire history of human-
ity, yet she is only now truly coming into political consciousness,
just as the window for avoiding catastrophic warming is, the
scientists tell her, almost closed. Perhaps for this reason, too, she
does not appear to be grandstanding, even when she is.
That she delivers her message with such direct, uninflected
matter-of-factness is another aspect of her disarming rhetorical
power. Unlike alarmist activist groups like Extinction Rebellion,
she cannot be accused of hyperbolic license in her presentation
of the state of the science—they say the U.N. understates the
crisis; she takes its reports at face value. Unlike policy-makers
like Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders, and those working
on Green New Deal legislation, she cannot be faulted for push-
ing “too fast,” however necessary change may be, because she is
not advocating any particular policy at all, merely describing the
problem as scientists do and showcasing the failure of leaders to
do much, yet, about it—a failure anyone with eyes can plainly
see. And unlike climate celebrities like Al Gore and Leonardo
DiCaprio, she cannot be attacked as a hypocrite, because she isalready living an exemplary low-carbon life—abjuring plane
travel, going vegan, denouncing consumerism.
Greta’s visit to New York was occasioned by two essentially simul-
taneous but in other ways counterpoised events. There is the U.N.’s
Climate Action Summit, beginning September 23, where many
nations are expected to unveil new emissions-reductions commit-
ments more ambitious than the ones they have all, to this point,
failed to meet, and the Global Climate Strike, on September 20 and
September 27, the first of its kind to invite adults to join the ranks
of schoolchildren and walk out of work. There will be strikes in at
least 500 places in the U.S. thanks to the organizing efforts of other
teenage leaders, from Villaseñor and Bastida-Patrick to 13-year-old
Haven Coleman and 17-year-old Jamie Margolin, among others.
(“Many activists stand in the shadow, not being focused on, high-
lighted, being appreciated for what they’re doing,” Greta told me.)
And there will be thousands more strikes elsewhere in the world.
Which means Greta will have flanked with disruptive politics the
whole project of addressing climate change through the existing,elite-governed order—though of course she will be a star attraction
at the U.N. events that week too.
At the pier in Battery Park City, teenagers waiting for Greta to
arrive burst now and again into call-and-response chants: “Show
me what democracy looks like,” followed by “This is what democ-
racy looks like.” But a strike, of course, is what you do when conven-
tional politics has failed. The summit, like all U.N. activity on cli-
mate change, is aimed at stabilizing the planet’s temperature safely
below two degrees of warming. At that level, a recently leaked U.N.
report suggested, climate change would increase damages from
storms and sea-level rise a hundred times over, displacing at least
280 million people. Already, the planet’s landmasses, which warm
faster than its oceans, have surpassed 1.5 degrees. A report pub-
lished in September found large parts of the ocean too had already
hit that threshold of warming.
The stated goal is to keep global temperature rise below 1.5
degrees. Practically speaking, by the time her yacht carried Greta
into New York, that ship had already sailed. Nevertheless, she
arrived buoyed by a kind of unpersuadable relentlessness of pur-
pose, one that could almost look like optimism, it so contrasts with
the reflexive resignation of so many older than she.British Labour leader President Obama
Jeremy CorbynU.N. Secretary-General
António GuterresPope FrancisTrevor NoahJesse JacksonSix People Greta Met This Year
PHOTOGRAPHS: KIARA WORTH/IISD/ENB (GUTERRES); KARIN TORNBLOM/TT/SIPA USA (JACKSON); VATICAN MEDIA/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS (POPE); STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PRESS ASSOCIATION VIA AP IMAGES (CORBYN); PHOTO MAX MODEN/TT/SIPA USA (OBAMA)