From school strikes to condemning a UN summit for stealing her dreams and childhood, climate change activist Greta Thunberg could soon win a massive accolade: the Nobel Peace Prize.
The 16-year-old has become a force of nature for the plight against global warming – an environmental icon for some, but a ‘spoilt brat’ to (obnoxious) others.
Now, according to Oddschecker, Thunberg is the bookies’ favourite to win the Nobel Peace Prize at 4/7.
At those odds, if you placed a bet of £10, you’d only see £15.71 back – so it looks like Thunberg appears to be a safe bet at this point.
The teen kick-started her climate mission in October 2018, when she began a lone protest outside Sweden’s parliament. Thunberg said she wouldn’t attend school on Fridays until her government made solid steps on the growing climate and ecological crisis.
This ignited a massive worldwide movement: hundreds of thousands of students in more than 1,600 cities around the globe left school to march for climate change.
On March 15 this year, a coordinated event involving 133 countries saw more than 1.6 million turn out at climate change events – all this born from the powerful words of a teenager.
Thunberg made headlines again recently after appearing at a United Nations Climate Summit in late September, shaking the world with a thunderous speech about the surrounding adults’ lack of urgency on tackling the crisis.
Check out the powerful speech below:
Grabbing delegates by the shoulders and shaking them for betraying her generation, Thunberg’s speech was viewed millions upon millions of times online.
In the speech, Thunberg said:
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you.
People are suffering. People are dying and dying ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.
For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. 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.
The speech wasn’t the summit’s only gift: a GIF emerged from a brilliant piece of camerawork, showing Thunberg giving US President Donald Trump a hilarious, Paddington-esque hard stare.
Unsurprisingly, some people took issue with Thunberg’s words. Trump himself sarcastically mocked the 16-year-old, tweeting: ‘She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!’
Jeremy Clarkson also took time out of his day to slam the teen in a scathing column for The Sun, asking Thunberg: ‘How dare we? No. How dare you…’
Clarkson wrote:
How dare you sail to America on a carbon fibre yacht that you didn’t build which cost £15 million, that you didn’t earn, and which has a back-up diesel engine that you didn’t mention.
We gave you mobile phones and laptops and the internet. We created the social media you use every day and we run the banks that pay for it all.
So how dare you stand there and lecture us, you spoilt brat.
Fortunately, for all those adults who can’t bear the thought of an extremely intelligent, confident young woman telling the world what it needs to hear, there’s a helpline you can call.
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.