The Soundtrack to The End of The World
Greta Thunberg closes the Royal Festival’s Hall’s London Literature Festival ahead of the release of her new book, The Climate Book.
This was intended to be a review of Tylor Swift’s new album Midnights, but life happened, and now it’s too late to add anything that would be of any meaning to that conversation. Memes about being a sexy baby were shared, and whom Tay Tay was sleeping with at some point in time was discussed over and over. If you’re a fan of Swift, you were probably in heaven; if not, it will have fallen on deaf ears. The media clamoured to say the right thing about the album, and Swift and the album broke streaming records at the speed Kanye was losing money. The cultural event came and went and will essentially be forgotten until she needs to sell tickets for a world tour.
A week after Midnights came out, Greta Thunberg took the stage to close the London Literature Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall and deliver a keynote address ahead of the release of her new book, The Climate Book (you can watch the live stream of the event here for free). Soon after 8 pm on a Sunday, a quiet, unassuming presence appeared in front of a packed house to rapturous applause and calmly introduced herself, “I’m Greta Thunberg. I’m a climate activist from Sweden, and I want to use my platform to share the truth about the climate crisis. To tell the whole story of how our world is changing and what we need to do about it.” She doesn’t hang about. After a very brief mention of her book and the hundred-plus contributors she assembled to “tell the story of the crisis we face,” a book she started two years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, she quotes the well-worn platitude that was liberally thrown about at the time, “at that time many were already talking about going ‘back to normal.’’’ She says this, clearly annoyed at its naivety and drops the first truth bomb of the night, “but we are never going back to normal again.”
Thunberg took the Royal Festival Hall stage two days after the UN’s Emissions Gap Report came out. The website for the report says that our government’s pledges “make a negligible difference to predicted 2030 emissions and that we are far from the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 °C, preferably 1.5°C.” We are so far behind that they have concluded that we need to cut total emissions by 45 per cent by 2030. Think about that for a second — we have seven years to do this.
“Our global emissions of greenhouse gasses are still on the rise. We are still expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. Oil production is soaring all over the globe — new oilfields are being opened, pipelines are being built, new oil licences are being auctioned, and the search for even more production sites is ongoing. The global amount of coal-fired electricity reached an all-time high in 2021….” Thunberg continued. She rounded off this litany of WTF with the comforting news that of the money governments have pledged to reverse climate change, only two per cent has been invested in green energy. To ensure we didn’t miss the gravity of what she was saying, she added, “The planet is destabilising. The climate and biosphere are breaking down. We are never going back to normal again.” And this “normal” was the problem, as she says, “what we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on exploitation of people and planet…normal is the crisis that led us into the position we are in now.”
You’d hope that this would be front-page news, a young woman laying out the hard facts about our future and writing a book that offers ideas and solutions about how we can pull ourselves back from the precipice; a quick google shows that this wasn’t the case. Greta knows this, “the sustainability crisis is a crisis of information not getting through.” The media, as gatekeepers, fail to keep our leaders responsible. Thunberg is not one to shy away from this problem; she is not merely a doom-monger. Her book, The Climate Book, is a thorough deep dive into the crisis that is a must-read. Not only to grasp the profundity of the situation but also to prevent yourself from having a panic attack as she gives a detailed breakdown of what can and what must be done.
Credit: Pete Woodhead
After her address, she sat down with journalist, writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed for a far-reaching conversation about her life and her new book. Coming across as self-assured, quick-witted and confident, it is easy to see why she is a born leader and icon — though she quickly puts down any chance of her becoming a politician at one point during the conversation. Greta bats quips about her Twitter feud with the Trump family about with ease, the audience delighting in seeing this side of her. She is undoubtedly a star but never strays far from her message at any point. “We need both individual action and structural, systemic change” is a point she comes back to frequently, stressing that this is not a problem for individuals only. We managed to stop and change the world during the Covid crisis, and we must realise that this is the level of international cooperation we need to tackle the climate emergency. Our systems have to change, and that is the responsibility of the people in power, and we must hold them accountable.
It has been said that we need to start seeing the climate emergency as something that is not happening in the future but as something that is happening now. The planet is like a ship that is sinking. Once a ship starts to sink, we know it will eventually sink, but we don’t know what part of the hull will burst next. The planet is sinking, and we have no idea what will blow next. Yesterday the UN confirmed that the world population has hit eight billion (there were 4.7 billion of us in 1984). Climate protesters are shutting down motorways around the country, trying to shake us out of our stupor but seemingly just annoying people who don’t understand the dire straits we are in; the media deeming them a nuisance — well, duh! We mock the young protesters who are throwing soup on Van Gogh to try and tell us that we are fucking up the planet and world leaders are failing to see the insanity of flying around the world to attend the dick-measuring contest that is Cop. The world we live in is in a Mexican standoff between two inextricable parts, the natural world and the human world. Greta is right, the M25 protesters are right, the soup throwers are right —we shouldn’t be talking about anything else. Without a habitable planet, there is nothing. Maybe I should title this article “Taylor Swift Sucks.” That would make people angry.