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By James Healy

Greta Thunberg, who has become a leading voice on tackling the climate crisis, was three years old when Al Gore released his Oscar award winning documentary an Inconvenient Truth. Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swede, who just recently arrived in the U.S. on a solar powered yacht – as she’s against flying, began skipping school on Friday’s over a year ago to protest her government’s lack of action on climate change. What initially began as a small strike in solidarity with Greta, has now become a global movement that has seen millions of young people leave their classrooms and ask their government officials to take the science of climate change seriously and act.

Truthfully, the situation facing the world’s future generations is much more than inconvenient. A 2018 report released by the U.N. detailed a forecast for what a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in temperature would look like in comparison to the 2 degree Celsius goals of the Paris Climate Accord. The picture was bleak but looked like a much more viable reality to that of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels which entails a 40% increase in extreme heat occurrences and the near extinction of all coral reefs.

Thunberg recognizes the urgency of the moment and so too do her fellow generation of Bostonians. This Friday, the 20th of September, thousands of young people and older allies are expected to gather at City Hall Plaza in Boston for the Boston Climate Strike at 10.00 a.m. Their demands, like Thunberg’s, are to take the science of climate change seriously and make bold, structural changes to our economy as the U.N. recommends. See you there.