Greta Thunberg on video: "You are failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal!"

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      Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist, delivered the following message today at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York:

      "My message is that we'll be watching you. 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 cosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

      "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear.

      "How dare you continue to look away and come here saying you are 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.

      "The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius] at the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

      "Fifty percent 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 tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us—we who have to live with the consequences.

      "To have a 67 percent chance of staying below a 1.5-degrees global temperature rise—the best odds given by the IPCC—the world had 420 gigatonnes of CO2 left to emit back on January 1, 2018.

      "Today, that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes.

      "How dare you pretend that this can be solved 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.

      Video: Watch Greta Thunberg's address today at a UN climate conference in New York City.

      "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. 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. Thank you."

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