Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was at the origin of the international youth climate movement “Fridays for Future”, believes that the climate crisis can only be solved with knowledge and information, and calls for “billions of climate activists”.
“My conviction is that the only way to avoid the worst consequences of this emerging existential crisis is to create a critical mass of people who demand the necessary changes,” says the young woman in the work. the weather bookwhich he himself organized and which brings together texts from more than a hundred specialists.
In the book, already on sale in Portugal, Greta Thunberg insists that it is “necessary to educate each other”, that information and democracy are fundamental, and that when the populations understand the dimension of the climate problem, they will act, which it hasn’t happened. It has not yet been done because “people’s knowledge about climate change is very low.”
“And as long as those responsible say one thing and do another, people will not believe in climate change. It matters little to say that we are in an emergency if nobody behaves as if they were in one”, he also observes, referring to political leaders, whom he criticizes several times in the texts he writes throughout the book.
the weather book It was published in Portugal by the Editorial Objectiva
“We live in an age of communication, where what we say can easily overlap with what we do. This explains the fact that we have such a large number of large countries that, producing fossil fuels and having high levels of emissions, call themselves climate leaders, despite not having any policies to mitigate climate change. We live in the era of ecological whitening at all levels, ”he says in the book.
Greta Thunberg believes that societies are still in a state of denial about climate change. And she goes back to the time when humans were hunter-gatherers to find one of the justifications: “We continue to function largely as we did 50,000 years ago. We were designed for another reality (…) and our brain has difficulty reacting to threats that are not immediate and sudden for many of us, such as the climate and ecological crisis”.
But since it is not sudden, the young activist emphasizes, the threat is real and unequivocal.
“Since the dawn of human civilization, we have cut down half the world’s trees, eliminated more than two-thirds of the world’s wildlife, and filled the oceans with plastic. And we began to destabilize the systems that guarantee the vital functions of the planet”. “We are sawing off the branch on which we live,” warns the young woman, adding that as people distance themselves from nature, it becomes more difficult to remember that they are part of it and that they do not own it or the planet.
Now, with the world experiencing a climate crisis, entering “a new era of more drastic changes”, “nothing is done” to solve the problem, which is solved in one way: ending greenhouse gas emissions ( GHG).
It is a problem (global warming), he says, that was not created by humanity but by a minority, “the people in power”, the richest 10% who are at the origin of 50% of GHG emissions.
Greta Thunberg adds: The world is ruled by politicians, big business and financial interests. The goal of companies is not to save the world, it is to make a profit. And as for politicians, the priority is not to save the world either, it is to stay in power and manage it not based on elections but on polls and newspaper front pages.
“There is still a long way to go before we start to face this emergency, but above all there is a lack of honesty, integrity and courage” on the part of politicians, he charges, insisting that the real figures for GHG emissions are unrevealed, and that fossil fuel subsidies add up to $11 million per minute.
In the various texts that she signs, the young activist talks about the failure of the objectives set by politicians, says that the ambition of these politicians was never to save the climate, but to maintain the Western lifestyle, and gives one more example: ” The fact that three billion people use less energy, on an annual ‘per capita’ basis, than a typical American refrigerator gives us an idea of how far we are, at this moment, from equity and climate justice.”
For all these reasons, last year Greta Thunberg invited leading scientists and specialists to contribute to the weather bookEdited by Objetiva, which covers topics ranging from the economy to the extinction of species, from pandemics to rising sea levels, from deforestation to the loss of soil, water or food shortages.
There are 446 pages divided into five large chapters: “How the climate works”, “How the planet is changing”, “How it affects us”, “What measures we have taken”, and “What is urgent to do”.
Greta Thunberg does not draw conclusions from the participations, she says that it should be the reader who draws them. But she also leaves a message of hope: humans are not evil and as soon as they realize the magnitude of the crisis they will act. “It’s never too late to save as much as we can.”
Source: Observadora
