THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 19
COMMENT
ACLI MATECHANGE?
L
ate last month, Greta Thunberg, the
sixteen-year-old climate activist from
Sweden, arrived in New York. Thunberg,
who is sometimes compared to Joan of
Arc and sometimes to Pippi Longstock-
ing, doesn’t fly—the emissions from avi-
ation are too high—so she’d spent two
weeks sailing across the Atlantic in a rac-
ing boat. When she reached New York
Harbor, she told Trevor Noah, on “The
Daily Show,” the first thing she noticed
was “Suddenly, it smells.”
Thunberg doesn’t adhere to social
niceties. (She’s spoken openly about hav-
ing Asperger’s syndrome.) She began her
crusade last year, sitting outside the Swed-
ish parliament building, in Stockholm,
handing out flyers that read “I am doing
this because you adults are shitting on
my future.” It’s a trait particularly well
suited to the cause she’s taken up: on no
other issue is the gap between what’s po-
litically acceptable and what’s scientifi-
cally necessary wider than it is on cli-
mate change. In an address to the French
parliament, in July, Thunberg put it this
way: “Maybe you are simply not mature
enough to tell it like it is, because even
that burden you leave to us children. We
become the bad guys who have to tell
people these uncomfortable things, be-
cause no one else wants to, or dares to.”
Thunberg had come to New York to
address world leaders at the United Na-
tions Climate Action Summit. The sum-
mit’s stated goal is to “rapidly accelerate
action to implement the Paris Agree-
ment,” which was negotiated in 2015.
Under the Paris Agreement, just about
every country on earth pledged to hold
“the increase in the global average tem-
perature to well below 2°C” (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit) and to try to hold it to 1.5
degrees Celsius. But, as Thunberg pa-
tiently explained on “The Daily Show,”
citing last year’s special report of the In-
tergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, the window for meeting these
targets is closing fast. To have a two-
thirds chance of holding the increase to
1.5 degrees Celsius, the signatories of the
Paris Agreement would, collectively, have
to limit future carbon-dioxide emissions
to roughly three hundred and fifty bil-
lion tons. Since global emissions are now
running at about forty billion tons a year,
this gives the world less than a decade
until, as Thunberg observed, “that bud-
get is gone.”
The first global conclave on climate
change was held in Geneva, in 1979, when
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Thunberg’s mother, Malena Ernman,
was eight years old. (A few years ago,
Thunberg persuaded Ernman, an inter-
nationally renowned opera singer, to give
up flying, which meant that she also gave
up her international career.) The first
treaty on the problem—the U.N. Frame-
work Convention on Climate Change—
went into effect in 1994, nearly a decade
before Thunberg was born. It soon be-
came clear that the treaty was ineffec-
tive, and so it was amended, with the
Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force
in 2005, when Thunberg was a toddler.
The Paris Agreement, it’s now evi-
dent, is also woefully inadequate. A pot-
luck supper of a pact, it asks each country
to contribute its own emissions-reduc-
tion target. According to Climate Ac-
tion Tracker, an independent research
group, only two nations—Morocco and
Gambia—have set targets consistent
with holding the world’s fever to 1.5 de-
grees Celsius. Five others have set tar-
gets consistent with two degrees. All the
rest have targets that are “insufficient,”
“highly insufficient,” or “critically in-
sufficient.” Into this last category falls
the United States. With less than five
per cent of the world’s population, this
nation is responsible for more than
twenty-five per cent of cumulative emis-
sions. On an annual basis, it’s the world’s
second-largest emitter, after China.
To accommodate the U.S.’s unfortu-
nate politics on the issue, the Paris Agree-
ment was not officially designated a treaty.
This allowed the Obama Administra-
tion to bypass Congress when it drew
up its admittedly “insufficient” targets.
The Trump Administration, of course,
