Greta Thunberg: Our House Is On Fire! | World Economic Forum 2019 – Transcript

00:01our house is on fire I am here to say our house is on fire according to the IPCC we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes in that time unprecedented changes in all aspects of society needs to have taken

00:24place including a reduction of our co2 emissions by at least 50% and please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extreme powerful methane gas

00:47being released from the thawing Arctic permafrost at places like divorce people like to tell success stories but their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag and on climate change we have to acknowledge that we

01:09have failed all political movements in their present form have done so and the media has failed to create broad public awareness but Homo sapiens have not yet failed yes we are failing but there is still time to turn everything around we can still fix this we still have

01:35everything in our own hands but unless we recognize the overall failures of our current systems we must probably those probably don't stand a chance we are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people and now is not the time for speaking politely

01:58we're focusing on what we can or cannot say now is the time to speak clearly solving the client crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that homo sapiens have ever faced the main solution however is so simple that even a small child can understand it we have

02:23to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases and either we do that or we don't you say nothing in life is black or white but that is alive a very dangerous lie either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming or we don't either we avoid setting off that if irreversible chain reaction beyond human

02:49control or we don't either we choose to go on as I civilization we don't that is as black or white as it gets there are no gray areas when it comes to survival now we all have a choice we can create transformational action that will safeguard the future living conditions

03:14for humankind we can continue with our business as usual and fail that is up to you and me so say that we should not engage in activism instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for change instead but what do we do when there is no political will

03:38what do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight here in Davos just like everywhere else everyone is talking about money it seems that money and growth are our own only make sense and since the climate crisis is a crisis that has never once been treated as a crisis

04:02people are simply not aware of the full consequences of our everyday life people are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget and just how incredible small that remaining carbon budget is and that needs to change today no other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide public awareness and understanding of our

04:29rapidly disappearing carbon budgets that should and must become a new global currency and the very heart of future and present economics we are now at a time in history where everyone with any insight of the climate crisis that threatens our civilization and the entire biosphere must speak out in clear

04:54language no matter how uncomfortable and unprofitable that may be we must change almost everything in our current societies the bigger your carbon footprint is the bigger your more Duty the bigger your platform the bigger your responsibility adults keep saying we owe

05:18it to the young people to give them hope but I don't want your hope I don't want you to be hopeful I want you to panic I want you to feel the fair I feel every day and then I want you to act I want you to act as if you would in a

05:39crisis I wanted to act as if the house was on fire because it is