On Monday, climate change activist Greta Thunberg gave a much-publicized speech in front of the United Nations in which she chastised world leaders for supposedly bringing us to “the beginning of a mass extinction.”
While Thunberg’s alarmist speech was widely praised by the Left, it was met with widespread backlash from the Right. Many critics blasted the use of children as “human shields” in political debates and condemned the climate fear-mongering that has so clearly terrified the 16-year-old — who has been formally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome coupled with high-functioning autism and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) — as a form of “child abuse.”
As The Daily Wire reported, among those on the Right who responded to Thunberg was President Trump, who issued a trolling tweet referencing the young activist Monday night.
“She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” Trump wrote in a tweet dripping with sarcasm and linking to a video of her speech.
In apparent reponse, Thunberg changed her status on Twitter. “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” it now reads (screenshot from New York Times’ reporter Astead Herndon below).
In front of the United Nations Monday, Thunberg warned world leaders “we’ll be watching you” and condemned them for supposedly forcing her to appear in front of them instead of being “back in school on the other side of the ocean.”
“You all come to us young people for hope,” she said. “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 fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Claiming that the science has been “crystal-clear” for over 30 years, Thunberg charged, “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.”
“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil — and that I refuse to believe,” she said.
She then declared that cutting carbon emissions in half by 10 years is “simply not acceptable” to her generation.
“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting of irreversible chain reactions beyond human control,” she said. “50% may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So, a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us, we who have to live with the consequences.”
“How dare you pretend that this can be sold with just business as usual and some technical solutions with today’s emissions levels that remaining CO2 budgets will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years,” she continued. “There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.”
“You are failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” she concluded. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you, and if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now, is where we draw the line the world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not.”
Related: BACKLASH: Critics Lambast Melodramatic Greta Thunberg Speech As ‘Child Abuse’