How dare you! Wie könnt ihr’s wagen! Greta Thunberg’s UN Rede.

Greta Thunberg klagt in einer emotionalen Rede die politischen Führer der Welt an. Ich halte diese Rede für ein eindrucksvolles und wichtiges Dokument und habe daher die englische Transkription des Textes ins Deutsche übersetzt.

Greta Thunberg – UN Speech SEP 23, 2019 New York
Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in New York City on SEP 23, 2019 . Here’s the full transcript of Thunberg’s speech:

“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!
“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. 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.
“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and 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 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.
“To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
“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 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.
“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.

Die deutsche Version:

Das ist alles falsch. Ich sollte nicht hier oben sein. Ich sollte wieder in der Schule auf der anderen Seite des Ozeans sein. Doch ihr kommt zu uns jungen Menschen, um Hoffnung zu schöpfen. Wie könnt ihr es wagen! Ihr habt meine Träume, meine Kindheit mit euren leeren Worten gestohlen, doch bin ich noch eine der Glücklichen. Menschen leiden, Menschen sterben, ganze Ökosysteme kollabieren. Wir stehen am Anfang eines Massensterbens, und alles, worüber man redet, sind Geld und Märchen über ewiges Wirtschaftswachstum, wie kannst ihr es wagen!
Seit mehr als 30 Jahren ist es für die Wissenschaft glasklar. Wie könnt ihr es wagen, weiterhin wegzuschauen und hierher zu kommen und zu sagen, dass ihr genug tut, wo die Politik dafür und die notwendigen Lösungen nirgendwo in Sichtweite sind? Ihr sagt, ihr hört uns und dass ihr die Dringlichkeit versteht, aber egal wie traurig und wütend ich bin, ich will das nicht glauben. Denn wenn ihr die Situation wirklich verstanden habt und immer noch nicht handelt, wärt ihr böse, und ich weigere mich das zu glauben. Die gängige Idee, unsere Emissionen in 10 Jahren zu halbieren, gibt uns nur eine 50%ige Chance, unter 1,5 Grad zu bleiben und das Risiko, irreversible Kettenreaktionen außerhalb der menschlichen Kontrolle auszulösen. 50 Prozent mögen für Sie akzeptabel sein, aber diese Zahlen beinhalten keine Kipppunkte, Rückkopplungsschleifen, zusätzliche Erwärmung durch versteckte toxische Luftverschmutzung oder die Aspekte der Gleichheit und Klimagerechtigkeit, sie lasten auch auf meiner Generation, die Hunderte von Milliarden Tonnen CO2 mit Technologien, die es kaum gibt, aus der Luft saugen soll . Ein 50-prozentiges Risiko ist also für uns, die wir mit den Folgen leben müssen, einfach nicht akzeptabel. Um eine 67-prozentige Chance zu haben, unter einem globalen Temperaturanstieg von 1,5 Grad zu bleiben, was die beste Option des IPPC wäre, demnach hatte die Welt 420 Gigatonnen CO2 übrig, die sie bis zum 1. Januar 2018 hätte emittieren dürfen. Heute sind es bereits weniger als 350 Gigatonnen. Wie könnt ihr es wagen so zu tun, dass dies nur mit business as usual und einigen technischen Lösungen geschafft werden kann? Bei den heutigen Emissionswerten wird das verbleibende CO2-Budget innerhalb von 8,5 Jahren vollständig aufgebraucht sein. Es wird heute hier keine Lösungen oder Pläne geben, die mit diesen Zahlen übereinstimmen, denn diese Zahlen sind zu unbequem, Sie sind immer noch nicht in der Lage und willens, es so zu sagen, wie es ist, ihr wollen uns täuschen, aber die jungen Leute beginnen, euren Verrat zu begreifen. Die Augen aller zukünftigen Generationen sind auf euch gerichtet, und wenn ihr euch entscheidet, uns zu enttäuschen, sage ich, dass wir euch nie vergeben werden! Wir werden euch damit nicht davonkommen lassen. Genau hier, genau hier ist es, wo wir die Grenze ziehen!
Die Welt wacht auf und der Wandel kommt – ob es euch gefällt oder nicht!

Who is Greta Thunberg?

Thunberg became well-known after she protested outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, when she was 15.

She held a sign saying “School Strike for Climate”, to pressure the government to meet carbon emissions targets.

Her small campaign had a global effect, inspiring thousands of young people across the world to organise their own strikes.

December 2018, more than 20,000 students – from the UK to Japan – had joined her by skipping school to protest.

A year later, she received the first of three Nobel Peace Prize nominations for climate activism.

Greta Thunberg sits in silence in the cabin of the boat that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, there’s a cow skull hanging on the wall, a faded globe, a child’s yellow raincoat. Outside, it’s a tempest: rain pelts the boat, ice coats the decks, and the sea batters the vessel that will take this slight girl, her father and a few companions from Virginia to Portugal. For a moment, it’s as if Thunberg were the eye of a hurricane, a pool of resolve at the center of swirling chaos. In here, she speaks quietly. Out there, the entire natural world seems to amplify her small voice, screaming along with her.

“We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow,” she says, tugging on the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt. “That is all we are saying.”

It’s a simple truth, delivered by a teenage girl in a fateful moment. The sailboat, La Vagabonde, will shepherd Thunberg to the Port of Lisbon, and from there she will travel to Madrid, where the United Nations is hosting this year’s climate conference. It is the last such summit before nations commit to new plans to meet a major deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Unless they agree on transformative action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution will hit the 1.5°C mark—an eventuality that scientists warn will expose some 350 million additional people to drought and push roughly 120 million people into extreme poverty by 2030. For every fraction of a degree that temperatures increase, these problems will worsen. This is not fearmongering; this is science. For decades, researchers and activists have struggled to get world leaders to take the climate threat seriously. But this year, an unlikely teenager somehow got the world’s attention.

Thunberg began a global movement by skipping school: starting in August 2018, she spent her days camped out in front of the Swedish Parliament, holding a sign painted in black letters on a white background that read Skolstrejk för klimatet: “School Strike for Climate.” In the 16 months since, she has addressed heads of state at the U.N., met with the Pope, sparred with the President of the United States and inspired 4 million people to join the global climate strike on September 20, 2019, in what was the largest climate demonstration in human history. Her image has been celebrated in murals and Halloween costumes, and her name has been attached to everything from bike shares to beetles. Margaret Atwood compared her to Joan of Arc. After noticing a hundredfold increase in its usage, lexicographers at Collins Dictionary named Thunberg’s pioneering idea, climate strike, the word of the year.

The politics of climate action are as entrenched and complex as the phenomenon itself, and Thunberg has no magic solution. But she has succeeded in creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change. She has offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not. She has persuaded leaders, from mayors to Presidents, to make commitments where they had previously fumbled: after she spoke to Parliament and demonstrated with the British environmental group Extinction Rebellion, the U.K. passed a law requiring that the country eliminate its carbon footprint. She has focused the world’s attention on environmental injustices that young indigenous activists have been protesting for years. Because of her, hundreds of thousands of teenage “Gretas,” from Lebanon to Liberia, have skipped school to lead their peers in climate strikes around the world.

“This moment does feel different,” former Vice President Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of climate advocacy work, tells TIME. “Throughout history, many great morally based movements have gained traction at the very moment when young people decided to make that movement their cause.”

Thunberg is 16 but looks 12. She usually wears her light brown hair pulled into two braids, parted in the middle. She has Asperger’s syndrome, which means she doesn’t operate on the same emotional register as many of the people she meets. She dislikes crowds; ignores small talk; and speaks in direct, uncomplicated sentences. She cannot be flattered or distracted. She is not impressed by other people’s celebrity, nor does she seem to have interest in her own growing fame. But these very qualities have helped make her a global sensation.

I want you to panic,” she told the annual convention of CEOs and world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

Thunberg is not a leader of any political party or advocacy group. She is neither the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis nor the most qualified to fix it. She is not a scientist or a politician. She has no access to traditional levers of influence: she’s not a billionaire or a princess, a pop star or even an adult. She is an ordinary teenage girl who, in summoning the courage to speak truth to power, became the icon of a generation. By clarifying an abstract danger with piercing outrage, Thunberg became the most compelling voice on the most important issue facing the planet.

Along the way, she emerged as a standard bearer in a generational battle, an avatar of youth activists across the globe fighting for everything from gun control to democratic representation. Her global climate strike is the largest and most international of all the youth movements, but it’s hardly the only one: teenagers in the U.S. are organizing against gun violence and flocking to progressive candidates; students in Hong Kong are battling for democratic representation; and young people from South America to Europe are agitating for remaking the global economy. Thunberg is not aligned with these disparate protests, but her insistent presence has come to represent the fury of youth worldwide. According to a December Amnesty International survey, young people in 22 countries identified climate change as the most important issue facing the world. She is a reminder that the people in charge now will not be in charge forever, and that the young people who are inheriting dysfunctional governments, broken economies and an increasingly unlivable planet know just how much the adults have failed them.

“She symbolizes the agony, the frustration, the desperation, the anger—at some level, the hope—of many young people who won’t even be of age to vote by the time their futures are doomed,” says Varshini Prakash, 26, who co-founded the Sunrise Movement, a U.S. youth advocacy group pushing for a Green New Deal.

Thunberg’s moment comes just as urgent scientific reality collides with global political uncertainty. Each year that we dump more carbon into the atmosphere, the planet grows nearer to a point of no return, where life on earth as we know it will change unalterably. Scientifically, the planet can’t afford another setback; politically, this may be our best chance to make sweeping change before it’s too late.

Next year will be decisive: the E.U. is planning to tax imports from countries that don’t tackle climate change; the global energy sector faces a financial reckoning; China will draft its development plans for the next five years; and the U.S. presidential election will determine whether the leader of the free world continues to ignore the science of climate change.

“When you are a leader and every week you have young people demonstrating with such a message, you cannot remain neutral,” French President Emmanuel Macron told TIME. “They helped me change.” Leaders respond to pressure, pressure is created by movements, movements are built by thousands of people changing their minds. And sometimes, the best way to change a mind is to see the world through the eyes of a child.

Thunberg is maybe 5 ft. tall, and she looks even smaller in her black oversize wet-weather gear. Late November is not the time of year to cross the Atlantic Ocean: the seas are rough, the winds are fierce, and the small boat—a leaky catamaran—spent weeks pounding and bucking over 23-ft. seas. At first, Thunberg got seasick. Once, a huge wave came over the boat, ripping a chair off the deck and snapping ropes. Another time, she was awakened by the sound of thunder cracking overhead, and the crew feared that lightning would strike the mast.

But Thunberg, in her quiet way, was unfazed. She spent most of the long afternoons in the cabin, listening to audiobooks and teaching her shipmates to play Yatzy. On calm days, she climbed on deck and looked across the vast colorless sea. Somewhere below the surface, millions of tons of plastic swirled. Thousands of miles to the north, the sea ice was melting.

Thunberg approaches the world’s problems with the weight of an elder, but she’s still a kid. She favors sweatpants and Velcro sneakers, and shares matching bracelets with her 14-year-old sister. She likes horses, and she misses her two dogs, Moses and Roxy, back in Stockholm. Her mother Malena Ernman is a leading Swedish opera singer. Her father Svante Thunberg is distantly related to Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist who studied how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the temperature on the earth’s surface.