3: No One is Too Small to Make a Difference

A book by Greta Thunberg

They don’t come much greener than Genghis Khan. Although better known for his murderous proclivities, the Mongol leader was also responsible for perhaps “the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling”. That’s according to a 2011 study by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, which found that Khan’s policy for aggressive expansionism “helped scrub about 700 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere”, making him history’s “greenest invader”. Around 40 million people were killed during his descendants’ conquests, accounting for 10 percent of the world’s population, and a byproduct of the slaughter was the return of forests to areas of previously cultivated land.

Fast forward the best part of 800 years to 2010 and an Icelandic volcano named Eyjafjallajokull made a similarly unexpected contribution to the environmental cause. Spewing out an estimated 150,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide would not, on the face of it, look like the best way of advertising your green credentials. But by grounding flights across Europe for six days, Eyjafjallajokull prevented the emission of a further three million tonnes of CO2 and surely secured itself a spot on Al Gore’s Christmas card list.

A decade later and one of the few bright-side consequences of the coronavirus pandemic is the positive impact the subsequent global shutdown is having on the environment. Figures from April indicated the pandemic could lead to emissions cuts in the region of two billion tonnes of CO2, although Simon Evans of CarbonBrief.org warned “this would not come close to bringing the 1.5C global temperature limit within reach”.

All of which serves to illustrate that humans as a species are so utterly pig-headed and lacking in perspective that only warlords, volcanoes and pandemics can prevent us from driving the planet into a not-so-metaphorical pit of fire. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, though, is doing her utmost to slam on the brakes before it’s too late using less drastic measures: namely activism, realism and a healthy dose of disdain.

In No One is Too Small to Make a Difference—a collection of 11 speeches Thunberg delivered between September 2018 and April 2019—her disdain and anger are directed squarely at the world’s power brokers “who have never treated this crisis as a crisis”.

Thunberg’s messages are straightforward, and straightforwardly expressed. But of course they are: it’s a painfully straightforward problem. “Humanity is now standing at a crossroads,” she states. A simple metaphor, yes. But clarity is Thunberg’s most effective weapon and a result of her natural inclination that “almost everything is black and white”. The case she makes in NOITSTMAD (as nobody is calling it) is that, given the lack of urgency which currently surrounds the climate crisis, it seems most likely we will pick the wrong road, the one that ends in the fire pit, simply because it means not interrupting our current way of life.

At around 12,000 words in total, Thunberg’s book should take most people less than an hour to read. And read it they should. There’s little new here (including the sickening acknowledgement from the then 15-year-old that her activism has led to her being labelled “retarded, a bitch and a terrorist”). But Thunberg’s singular voice calmly issues from the page tinged with the most righteous of anger, and it makes for a compelling read.

“I hope you could all hear me,” she finishes. Well, quite.