Greta the Wonder

From winning a competition to winning over the world is quite an achievement.  When Greta won a climate-change essay competition in a Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, at just fifteen, the world, outside Sweden, hadn’t really heard of her plans to change the world. Three months from that point, May 2018, she launched her first protest, a School Strike in January 2020. Since then Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg has become an environmental activist for action against climate change.

Few people would have expected this not-very-imposing youngster (she’s only 1.5m tall) from a nation not often splashed across the press pages of many papers to be making headlines. Apart from their main export to the world, ABBA starting in 1974 (their first win) to 1999 their second win, Sweden has not had exceptional banners to unfurl till Greta came on the scene in these last few years. ABBA craze has not faded away and still plays in the background (or on many radio stations) while a new crop of enthusiasts are rooting for a new package, that of the brand of this 17-year old who brazenly talks to world leaders challenging them to do better. Greta is somewhat of a voice in the wilderness shaking up the political order so that the world can have a better future.

Greta Thunberg grew up in Stockholm, in Sweden and is the elder of two girls. Her mother, Malena Ernman, is an opera singer and former Eurovision Song Contest participant. Her father Svante Thunberg, is an actor, and is a descendant of Svante Arrhenius, a scientist who came up with a model of the greenhouse effect. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903. Greta says she learned about climate change when she was eight, but didn’t express any views early on as her parents were not climate activists. Greta has Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder, and has described it as a gift and said being different is a “superpower”.

From August 2018 she started protesting in front of the Swedish parliament building, vowing to continue until the Swedish government met the carbon emissions target agreed by world leaders in Paris, in 2015. At her protests she held a sign that read “School Strike for Climate” and began regularly missing lessons to go on strike on Fridays, urging students around the world to join her. Her protests went viral on social media and as support for her cause grew, other strikes started around the world, spreading with the hashtag #FridaysForFuture. By December 2018, more than 20,000 students around the world had joined her in countries including Australia, the UK, Belgium, the US and Japan. She joined strikes around Europe, choosing to travel by train to limit her impact on the environment.

The teenager took the whole of 2019 off school to continue campaigning, to attend key climate conferences, and to join student protests around the world. In September 2019, she travelled to New York to address a UN climate conference. Greta refuses to fly because of its environmental impact, so she made her way there on a racing yacht, in a journey that lasted two weeks. When she arrived, millions of people around the world took part in a climate strike, underlining the scale of her influence. Addressing the conference, she blasted politicians for relying on young people for answers to climate change.

She said: “How dare you? I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?”  She was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

Greta says big governments and businesses around the world are not moving quickly enough to cut carbon emissions and has attacked world leaders for failing young people. Initially, her protests focused on the Swedish government’s climate targets, and she urged students around the world to make similar demands in their own countries. But as her fame has grown, she has called for governments around the world to do more to cut global emissions. She has spoken at international meetings, including the UN’s 2019 climate change gathering in New York, and at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos. At the forum, she called for banks, firms and governments to stop investing and subsidising fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. “Instead, they should invest their money in existing sustainable technologies, research and in restoring nature,” she said.

Millions of students around the world have been inspired by her strikes, and Greta has received support from climate activists, scientists, world leaders and the Pope, who told her to “continue” her work. Broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough told her she had achieved things many others have failed to do, adding: “you have aroused the world. I’m very grateful to you.”

But her message has not been well received by everyone. After her UN appearance in September 2019, US President Donald Trump appeared to mock her by saying she “must work on her anger management problem”. Greta then changed her Twitter biography to include Mr Trump’s words. She did the same weeks later when Russian President Vladimir Putin called her a “kind but poorly informed teenager”. In January, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the teenager to go away and study economics before lecturing investors.

Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World: is a three-part BBC documentary series following the climate change activist Greta Thunberg from August 2019 to late 2020, when she was aged 16–17. She travelled North America and Europe, hearing experts talk about the complex and diverse effects climate change has had, including damage to forests, the retreat of glaciers, ocean acidification and flash flooding. The series also explores methods to combat climate change such as carbon capture , but finds that such solutions cannot be rolled out fast enough.

Thunberg speaks at conferences, meets the natural historian David Attenborough and attends climate strikes. Plans for filming in other parts of the world were abandoned when the COVID-19 pandemic restricted travel from March 2020 onwards.

–T.D’Souza (info from Wikipidia & internet sources) April 2021