When I was 16, I was devoting most of my time to figuring out the best way to get out of class so that I could smoke behind the prefabs.

This is just part of the reason why 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg puts me to shame. She puts most people to shame, especially world leaders who haven’t done everything they can to halt climate change.

(Then there’s Trump, who doesn’t know what climate change is.)

On 20 August, 2018, Thunberg didn’t attend her first day back at school. Instead, she made a sign that read “school strike for change” and stationed herself in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm, where she demanded that government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris climate agreement.

Her protest started the international movement, Fridays for Future, where children skip school to petition their governments to take action against climate change, reports The Guardian.

Since then, Thunberg has given a TED talk on the subject, been named one of the world’s most influential teens by Time magazine, and been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. After she addressed the Houses of Parliament in April, MPs endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s call to declare a climate emergency, aiming to “set off a wave of action from parliaments and governments around the globe”.

Thunberg first became concerned with the climate change aged eight when she learned about it in school.

By the age of 11, she had fallen into a state of severe depression about the world, which led her to stop talking and eating. She has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism, and has said that being on the spectrum has been in some ways an advantage, “as almost everything is black or white”. Thunberg has taken part in protests around the world and to save on carbon emissions she does not travel by plane, doing most of her travelling by train; she is also a vegan.

Last night, Thunberg appeared on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN show:

.@GretaThunberg: “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like when people say one thing and then do another thing. And that was the case with climate change.

“Everyone said that it’s the most important issue of all… and yet they just carried on like before.” pic.twitter.com/UILa7EeaDZ

— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) February 1, 2019

You can watch the full interview here.

Here she is schooling celebrities and world leaders at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna this past Tuesday:

For more from Thunberg, here’s her TED Talk:

Goes to show, you’re never too young or too small to make a difference.

We could all learn a lot from Greta Thunberg.

[source:guardian]