Greta Thunberg’s fiery speech at the UN left a powerful impression on many. Journalist Caleb Hill, however, found a speech Severn Cullis-Suzuki gave at the UN in 1992. It is eerily similar to Thunberg’s speech.
Cullis-Suzuki is now in her 40’s. The Maldives and Bangladesh are not underwater. Snow has not stopped falling. The polar ice is not gone, but healthier than it has been in decades. That was all predicted with certainty in 1992. What happened? Was the “science” wrong?
Paul Plante says
A CAPE CHARLES MIRROR EXCLUSIVE
“When Greta Thunberg met Paul Plante: Two voices on the climate speak for the first time”
GRETA: My message is that we’ll be watching you.
PLANTE: HUH?
Watching me do what?
And who exactly is it that is going to be watching me?
What is this all about, anyway?
Who are you?
GRETA: This is all wrong.
PLANTE: What’s all wrong?
What on earth are you talking about?
GRETA: I shouldn’t be up here.
PLANTE: Uh, okay, and who am I to disagree with you, especially when you seem to have your own ideas as to what is best for you to do.
GRETA: I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
PLANTE: (getting more and more confused and perplexed by what this little girl is saying while scratching his head, searching for a proper reply to that assertion) Uh, okay.
GRETA: Yet you all come to us young people for hope.
PLANTE: HUH?
Who is the “you all” you are talking about there that comes to you young people for hope?
What’s that all about?
GRETA: How dare you!
PLANTE: HUH?
How dare me?
How dare me what?
What on earth are you talking about?
GRETA: You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.
PLANTE: Now, young lady, I have no idea where you have gotten that idea from, that I have in some way stolen your dreams and your childhood, but let me tell you right now that you are dead wrong.
I have no idea whatsoever as to what dreams of yours might have been stolen, but let me assure you that as a grandfather, I do not go around stealing the dreams of little girls like yourself, nor do I steal their childhoods.
To the contrary, I do everything I can to enhance their childhoods by keeping them healthy, so they can have dreams.
So if somebody has stolen your dreams and your childhood, let me take pains here and now to assure you that it was not me.
GRETA: And yet I’m one of the lucky ones.
PLANTE: Okay.
GRETA: People are suffering.
PLANTE: People have always been suffering – that seems to be a part of life.
Look at me, an old man crippled up by war wounds from a long time past, and I am suffering chronic pain, and yet, I do not let it trouble me overmuch, as that is mind-crippling to do so, and I do that by remaining positive and having hope for tomarrow based on right actions today, such as not eating the seed corn and not crapping in your own nest.
You know, waste not, want not?
Haven’t you ever heard that before?
GRETA: People are dying.
PLANTE: Uh, okay.
But isn’t that what people do in life?
Not to be flip about it, but people have been dying since I was young, and I am a lot older than you are, and they were dying in droves before that, by the millions going back in time as far as I can go.
So dying seems to be a part of living, does it not?
Or do you think that somehow, people can be immortal and live forever?
GRETA: Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
PLANTE: They are?
Where is that happening?
GRETA: We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
PLANTE: Whoa!
Now you have really lost me.
What is this mass extinction actually going to be of?
Everybody and everything?
Are you talking about a mass extinction such as occurred during the earth’s Miocene Epoch,
when kelp forests appeared for the first time, as did sea otters and other critters unique to those environments, while such ocean-going mammals as the Desmostylia went extinct, and grasslands first appeared, and mammals and birds in particular developed new forms, whether as fast-running herbivores, large predatory mammals and birds, or small quick birds and rodents?
Or perhaps you are referring to the Pleistocene Epoch, whose biotas were extremely close to modern ones with many genera and even species of Pleistocene conifers, mosses, flowering plants, insects, mollusks, birds, mammals, and others surviving to this day, and yet, the Pleistocene was also characterized by the presence of distinctive large land mammals and birds to include mammoths and their cousins the mastodons, longhorned bison, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and many other large mammals that characterized Pleistocene habitats in North America, Asia, and Europe where native horses and camels galloped across the plains of North America and great teratorn birds with 25-foot wingspans stalked prey and then around the end of the Pleistocene, all these creatures went extinct?
Is that the mass extinction you are talking about?
Or a different one?
I’m confused …
GRETA: How dare you!
PLANTE: Whoa, young lady, no offense intended, I was just trying to find out what mass extinction you were talking about, but if it offends or upsets you, we don’t have to talk about it now.
GRETA: For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear.
PLANTE: Okay.
I’m on.
Which science?
And what has it been clear about?
That there was a mass extinction at the end of the Pleistocene?
I think in reality it has been clear about that for over a hundred years now, to be truthful.
GRETA: 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.
PLANTE: Look away?
Look away from what?
I really would like to help you here, little girl, but this conversation is really turning weird!
GRETA: You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
PLANTE: Are you perhaps confusing me for somebody else?
What is it that I am supposed to understand the urgency of?
That the climate is changing and winter is coming?
That it is time to make sure that you have enough firewood to get through the next five or six months until hopefully, the warmth comes back again?
That its time to harvest the potatoes so we have something to eat besides roots and berries during the winter freeze?
Believe me, little girl, having lived in a harsh climate for many years now, and having been through blizzards and ice storms and cold down to 30 below the Fahrenheit zero, and having felt what is like to live in an old farmhouse with no automatic central heat, where you spend the winters huddled in a little ball under a down quilt freezing and hoping you will live to see another morning and that some day the cold and clouds would depart and the sun would shine again, I do understand the urgency, very well.
GRETA: But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that.
PLANTE: Okay.
GRETA: Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.
PLANTE: No, young lady, if I failed to act, I wouldn’t be evil; I would be found frozen stiff after having starved to death, which would be stupid on my part, not evil.
GRETA: And that I refuse to believe.
PLANTE: Be my guest.
GRETA: 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.
PLANTE: Okay.
But if we are setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control, exactly what is it you expect us to do to stop them?
How do humans control something humans have no control over?
Something in the math is eluding me there.
GRETA: Fifty percent may be acceptable to you.
PLANTE: Fifty percent of what?
And where have you ever heard me say that I was in favor of fifty percent of something?
Do you mean that old sage advice I give out that half a loaf is better than nothing when you are poor and starving?
GRETA: 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.
PLANTE: Which numbers?
Look, I’d really like to help you if I could, but this conversation is becoming totally incomprehensible to me, because you talk about things without ever saying what those things you are talking about really are.
What tipping points?
What feedback loops?
When you talk about “additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution,” exactly what is it that you are talking about there?
Can you be more explicit?
And aspects of equity and climate justice?
What on earth is climate justice?
That is a term I have never heard before in my life.
How is that going to be achieved?
And by whom?
I’m curious about that, because I was born poor and now I am old and still poor, and in all that time, I have ever seen the climate give a damn, pardon the language, about being just to anyone, or at least not the poor folks like me.
As far as the climate is concerned when it comes to poor folks is that we are very much on our own, and if we fail to survive, the climate keeps on keeping on because it flat doesn’t care if we live or die – that is solely up to us.
GRETA: They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
PLANTE: My CO2?
What about your CO2?
GRETA: So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.
PLANTE: We who have to live with the consequences?
Consequences of our actions?
Isn’t that all of us?
Or are some somehow exempt?
GRETA: 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.
PLANTE: Why?
GRETA: Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
PLANTE: Okay, but here I have to simply take your word for what you are saying, because I frankly am lost here.
The math is making my head spin around.
GRETA: How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions?
PLANTE: So we are back to the “how dares you,” are we?
And what is it you think that I am pretending about?
What on earth is it that you are trying to solve, anyway?
GRETA: With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.
PLANTE: Okay.
What then?
GRETA: There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable.
PLANTE: (very confused now) Look, I don’t know what you are talking about, or why you have picked me out to blame for whatever your problems really are, but you are getting angry here and you are scaring me.
GRETA: And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
PLANTE: We are rapidly spinning off into outer space here, young lady, with these wild accusations of yours.
GRETA: You are failing us.
PLANTE, Uh, okay, have it your way, because I can see clearly that you are not going to have it be any other way, so there we are.
I have failed you.
At what?
GRETA: But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.
PLANTE: My betrayal?
Seriously, young lady, you are truly becoming irrational and hysterical here, because I have betrayed no one.
GRETA: The eyes of all future generations are upon you.
PLANTE: Okay, I have no problems with that.
GRETA: And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.
PLANTE: Why do you think I would choose to fail you when I do not even know who you are?
Where on earth are you getting these wild and frankly paranoid ideas from?
Do you think I owe you something?
GRETA: We will not let you get away with this.
PLANTE: Okay.
GRETA: Right here, right now is where we draw the line.
PLANTE: Sounds fine with me – do you need a pencil, or maybe a sharpened stick to draw your line with?
GRETA: The world is waking up.
PLANTE: And wouldn’t that finally be fine if they did, young lady!
Would be past time, would it not?
GRETA: And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
PLANTE: Young lady, I’m over 70 now, and you know what?
Change has been coming every day of my life, and if I live to be a hundred, it will still keep coming and in all that time, change has never bothered to ask me my opinion about it, probably because the poor folks like me never really get to have an opinion, now do we?
AND WITH THAT, THE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW ENDS!
Paul Plante says
For anyone wondering where Greta’s lines come from in that dialogue, those are Greta’s own words from her address to the people of the world, including all the people in the United States of America, when she spoke to all the people of the united nations of earth on September 23, 2019.