Truth: The Power of Greta Thunberg
By: Danny Schleien
Tags: Climate Science, Greta Thunberg, Climate Change, Activism, Environment

How has Greta leveraged the truth? If you haven’t watched/listened to her speak, it’s well worth your time. Here are two examples of Greta’s blunt and surgical diction:

“You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular,” she told the attendees of the United Nations’ COP24 conference in Poland in December 2018. “You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.”

And then there’s of course her famous speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in September 2019, delivered one year ago before the world stopped. You can find the full transcript here; below is the most famous and hard-hitting part.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

Two commonalities stand out between those two excerpts. In both, she disparages the idea (or fairy tale, as she puts it) of eternal economic growth. It’s a critical piece of the climate conversation, but in the interest of brevity, I’ll leave that for another article.

She’s dead right about that fairy tale. But the other message she delivers — sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly — is what I believe to be her defining quality as an activist.

Every time she steps on a podium, Greta points her rhetorical finger directly at the adults who in her estimation are responsible for this mess. She makes grown adults feel guilty, castigating them for “not being mature enough to tell it like it is.”

By contrasting her chronological youth with her greater sense of maturity (anytime Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin say you have anger problems or need to go back to school, you’re doing it right), Greta hits the sweet spot. And although she is low-key and lacks the imposing physical presence common among well-regarded public speakers, she does not beat around any bushes whatsoever.

I think this is why Greta is so powerful. She leverages the truth to ‘overcome’ her youth, passionately placing the blame on adults. She knows that children are more sympathetic figures than adults, so she parlays the sympathy of her audience to excoriate them. By complementing her fiery diction with cold-hard facts based on climate science, Greta delivers one iron-clad speech after another. It’s fire and ice, Greta-style.

The most mesmerizing speakers earn commendation by delivering truths in an unexpected or surprising way that feels authentic and relatable while keeping the audience on its toes. Predictability and monotony don’t earn you speaking invitations to global diplomacy summits and other places normally reserved for the rich and privileged.

And there’s a reason all of this is even more remarkable.