Earlier this week I posted Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN. In the speech she is visibly angry. I believe this anger is justified. We have been collectively ignoring the ever bigger warning signs coming from science that go back many decades. Why should children not be angry at us? We deserve this until we start acting to a degree that is commensurate with the existential crisis we are facing.

Having grown up in Germany, I have read lots of books and had some intense discussions with adults from my grandparents generation, about the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. The same angry question stood at the center here too: How could you let this happen? And of course the circumstances were different and the details of the answers to this question are different also, but it does fundamentally come down to the same two cores: we were busy living our lives and we did what everyone else did.

I believe the most vicious reactions to Greta’s speech and her person overall come from people who deep down recognize how right she is. But it is far easier to attack the messenger and carry on as usual than to face the enormity of the changes that are required. Scott Aaronson, someone not given to sentimentality, wrote this about Greta:

You can make fun of her, ask what standing or expertise she has as some random 16-year-old to lead a worldwide movement. But I suspect that this is always what it looks like when someone takes something that’s known to (almost) all, and then makes it common knowledge. If civilization makes it to the 22nd century at all, then in whatever form it still exists, I can easily imagine that it will have more statues of Greta than of MLK or Gandhi.

That sums up my sentiment as well.