She's 16. Yet, Greta Thunberg has managed to do what others have not.
The young Swedish activist has at least momentarily gotten the attention of the world, speaking up for her generation and for generations yet unborn on the risks posed by climate change.
This week, her audience has been world leaders at a U.N. climate summit in New York City. Last week, she inspired literally millions of young people and others worldwide to take to the streets.
Her activism began as a lonely protest by then-15-year-old Thunberg. The Stockholm native skipped school and sat outside the Swedish Parliament in August 2018, in what would be the first school strike to oppose inaction on the climate front.
Other young people, in nations around the globe, have since followed her example.
Many have held similar Friday strikes, taking time away from school over the past year. And they turned out in the millions in cities all over the world this past Friday, effectively speaking as one.
These young people, beginning with Thunberg, have used their individual and collective voices against the climate-change deniers and against political leaders they see as too slow to respond to clear warnings by scientists of impending crisis.
That was a large part of Thunberg's impassioned plea to world leaders at the climate summit.
"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear," she said. "How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?"
Her words were blunt, even unforgiving, and pointedly aimed at people empowered to make changes in policy and practice to slow global warming.
Her full speech to the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit is readily available online, but here is a part of what she said.
"This is all wrong. 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!
"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
"People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"
She said her generation is expected "to suck hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist." They are the ones who will have to "live with the consequences" of earlier inaction, she said.
"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you."
Nor, she said, will the youth of the world "let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line."
The world is waking up, Thunberg said. "And change is coming, whether you like it or not."
She was speaking of hopeful change, the sort that could be brought about by a worldwide realization of the climate threat.
But the message can also be heard more bleakly.
Change is coming, whether or not the world responds to the concerns expressed by this remarkable 16-year-old or the scientists she is begging world leaders to heed.
The kind of change depends on how and how quickly the world responds.
Commentary on 09/25/2019