Member-only story
2020 Is The Year We Must Solve The Climate Crisis
We can’t pretend that our biggest issue will solve itself.
For about a year now, I’ve been living with a conviction that the fate of the Earth is going to be decided during my lifetime.
It started with Greta Thunberg’s speech at COP24 in December 2018. I remember listening to her for the first time, tears growing in my eyes. Yeah, I become emotional easily. But that time, there was a good reason to be emotional.
For the first time in my life, I felt the harm we’re doing to the Earth as a species. I saw clearly that we’re destroying our very basis for survival. A lot of people have known this has been happening for the past few decades. Yet, somehow, we’ve been continuing as if this was all perfectly normal.
It’s like with the Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone sees that the Emperor is naked. Yet, no one dares to say the obvious. People are afraid to lose their face.
Only a child who doesn’t have full-blown social conditioning imposed on them yet points out what everyone knew all along. The Emperor is naked. Why do we all behave as if we didn’t see it?
Today, the symbolic child who speaks the truth is Greta — and other young people following her lead. They still haven’t accepted that the world isn’t…