Op-Ed: Climate change is a big problem. Citizens must demand many small solutions to save our planet.
In a New York Times op-ed on November 11, 2018, and a Guardian interview on December 16, 2018, Greta Thunberg urged her fellow students to “take action” against climate change. At the Guardian, she said: “We need to make the transition away from fossil fuels as soon as possible. Our generation, our children, belong to the generations that will inherit this crisis.”
In her op-ed, the Swedish teenage activist said that her “personal journey to school became a catalyst for the movement for climate justice.” Thunberg urged her peers to take action:
“If we remain silent, that’s a choice. But if we make the choice to stand up and to fight back, then we will show that we belong to the generation that saves the planet.”
Thunberg was not alone in her call to action. In her op-ed, she wrote about the “massive problem” the world is facing.
“The facts are incontrovertible. We are heating the planet,” she writes. “Humans are burning the planet faster than it can absorb the heat. We are driving rapid changes in the climate. Our future is being destroyed. We must act fast.”
Greta Thunberg’s journey of her own, from a school project on climate change to leading climate activism and calling for action on a global scale, is a story of a teenager with a message for her peers that seems to be catching on.
Greta Thunberg is now 15. When she was just seven, she read a newspaper article about the Arctic melting and how people needed to do more to stop climate change.
Thunberg said she would try to talk to her classmates. But before that, she thought she would try to just write all about the issue. “I would say, people! Do something!” she wrote to her mother. “It was a way of showing that I could, but still, I was not ready.”
The idea struck