Greta Thunberg: How a teenager became the face of the fight against the climate crisis in three short years

In August 2018, a schoolgirl began her own ‘climate strike’, sitting outside the Swedish parliament. Today the ‘Greta Effect’ has galvinised millions around the globe to call for urgent action – at Cop26 in Glasgow she’ll find out whether the world’s leaders have started listening, writes Sean O’Grady

‘When I was younger, I pictured my future being some kind of scientist, working in a lab, never seeing the daylight, that’s what I thought… but it didn’t really turn out like that’ (TT/AFP/Getty)

Given that no one else has done as much to help preserve life on Earth, it seems odd that Greta Thunberg seemed not to have been invited to the Cop26 summit in Glasgow. In an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, she admitted that she didn’t actually know if she was supposed to be there or not: “I don’t know. It’s very unclear. Not officially.”

As to why that might be, she could only hazard a rather shrewd guess: “I think that many people might be scared that if they invite too many radical young people, then that might make them look bad.” Certainly, the chair of the conference, the smoothiechops British cabinet minister Alok Sharma, a man so soporific he should be prescribed for chronic insomnia, is the very opposite of the impassioned, urgent and famously direct Thunberg. With her encouragement of the likes of Extinction Rebellion, she might indeed cause a stir, and spoil the calm progress of international environmental diplomacy towards the inevitable bromides, but she’d be making trouble wherever she might happen to be. It is, after all, what she has been doing almost non-stop in the mere three years since she embarked on her mission to save her fellow 7.9 billion citizens of the world.

Some world-famous public figures – Joe Biden, the Queen, Angela Merkel – are celebrated for their longevity: Thunberg is remarkable for her youth and her meteoric progress across our polluted skies. She turned 18 last January, and thus eligible to vote for the first time in her native Sweden (not that she places much confidence in politicians anywhere). It was only on 20 August 2018 that she decided to organise her one-girl “SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET” and sit down in front of the Swedish parliament until elections the following month, in order to encourage her country to live up to its obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement. (She pointed out at the time that, contrary to its right-on image, prosperous industrial Sweden had one of the higher rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita – a typical example of her attention to the details of her argument.) The revolution began with a tweet: “We kids most often don’t do what you tell us to do. We do as you do. And since you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either. My name is Greta and I’m in ninth grade. And I am school striking for the climate until election day.”