Today, Explained - Person of the Year

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Time named Greta Thunberg its ‘Person of the Year.’ David Wallace-Wells from New York Magazine explains why. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier this year, Greta Thunberg became the youngest human to ever be named Time Magazine's Person of the Year. It was a big year for Greta, but she wouldn't want all the attention. She'd want the attention to be on climate change, and it was a big year for that too. We had climate strikes this year, climate summits, students walked out of classes around the world, and there's no denying that many of the people who participated were inspired by Greta. We ran an episode about her back in September, and now that Times made it official that this was her year, we thought we'd revisit it.

The episode began with the big news of the week. It might sound familiar. This was a real banner week for President Donald Trump. He spent most of it denying any wrongdoing, then released a White House record of himself doing something that looked quite wrong, then he casually praised how, in another time, the people who complained about his wrongdoing might have been executed. With all the whistleblowing and impeachment talk, it's easy to forget that the president also made fun of a 16-year-old girl this week. 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?

Responding to a tweet that contained a long clip of that speech, President Trump seemingly mocked Thunberg. He tweeted the following. He said, she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see the president. And it wasn't just him. Laura Ingraham at Fox News compared Greta Thunberg to children of the corn.

I can't wait for Stephen King's sequel, Children of the Climate. And a guest on another Fox News show just... Well... But none of that matters because the climate hysteria movement is not about science. If it were about science, it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.

If you, a person who doesn't make fun of children, find yourself wondering what could make all of these grown people want to dunk on a kid, David Wallace-Wells has a theory. She is the most powerful teenager living on the planet today. David wrote about Greta for a New York magazine where he's an editor. She's a Swedish teenager. She's 16 years old. Last August, when she was just 15, she decided to start a climate strike. We are outside the Swedish parliament. I sit here every Friday.

I am not a scientist. I don't have the proper education. I am only a messenger. but sort of young people more generally protesting in various ways the inaction of the global community of business people and policy leaders in combating what this generation, I think, rightly sees as the existential challenge of climate change. How does this become her mission in life, so early in life? Basically, Greta came home from school, having learned about climate change at the age of eight or nine. They showed us films and pictures, and I just thought it was very worrying. I was very scared of it. I thought that it was very strange that there was such an existential threat that would threaten our very existence and our civilization, and yet that wasn't our first priority. And starting at about age 11, Greta fell into a really deep depression. I stopped talking and I stopped eating.

In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight. Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. And a family friend who I spoke to a few weeks ago told me that her father, who is a sort of close presence in her life, nursed her back to health, the person said, one yuki at a time. So that was just a few years ago. I mean, but it was a period of time that was protracted enough that it actually, at least according to Greta, had a meaningful impact on her physical health. I mean, one of the things that really makes her stand out

is that while she is 16, she actually looks quite a bit younger than that and i think that's one of the keys to her power her rhetorical power is that she's speaking with the wisdom of an informed teenager but sort of through the figure of a wise child that makes you different that makes you think differently and especially in such a big crisis like this when we need to think outside the box we need to think outside our current system. We need people who think outside the box and who aren't like everyone else. She basically wasn't a real activist until last August when she started the school strike in Stockholm.

And at the time, you know, she was 15. She basically didn't have any know, she was 15. She basically didn't have any friends. She was unhappy. She felt socially isolated, uncomfortable around other people. And it really was a kind of crusade that she was launching. The kind of thing that, you know, occasionally you see on social media, somebody making a kind of noble protest, but you don't necessarily assume that it's going to amount to much. And this really took off. In December, she was giving a speech at a UN climate conference that sort of went especially viral. The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will

ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn't do anything while there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all else and yet you're stealing their future in front of their very eyes. Until you start focusing on what needs to be done, rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. And by March, she had led a global climate strike in which about one and a half million people marched in the streets around the world, everywhere from Africa to Asia to the US and all throughout Europe. She had just turned 16. Of course, she wasn't done. She continued speaking. She gave a series of speeches. She gave one notable one at Davos. But her profile seemed to move up an additional notch

beyond just the person who had inspired a global school strike numbering in the millions when she announced that she would be coming to this UN summit in New York and that she would be doing so by boat. I might feel a bit seasick and it's not going to be comfortable, but that I can live with. And if it's really hard, then I just have to think it's only for two weeks, then I can go back to as usual. It showed people on the left that some of these choices that we thought were impossible to make were at least for some people like her possible to make that one could travel across the Atlantic without imposing a carbon footprint on the world. It also really irritated people on the right who took it as a kind of trolling and took that as the opportunity to really cut into her. I mean, none of the other moments in her trajectory

really produced much pushback. And the boat trip really changed that and made her a kind of lightning rod for both sides of the issue. And I think that's ultimately only elevated her stature more. I think she is being manipulated. I think she's being exploited. I think she's being pushed to the forefront of a very misanthropic, depressing form of the politics of fear. I think that's bad for her

because we know that she is a rather mentally fragile young girl. And I think it's bad for political debate because the end result is that anyone who raises any criticisms of this campaign is shouted down as someone who hates children and who hates Greta Thunberg. It's become one of the themes of this conversation that she is being stage managed by people around her. In general, my experience with those people has been that they're just protective over her

because she's quite fragile. She's uncomfortable in crowds. She's not really happy being the center of attention in general. And while she feels that there's sort of an urgent need to continue speaking, it's not easy for her. And again, she's just a teenager. I think it's easy to look at a teenager who struck a chord and like the March for Our Lives comes to mind as well and say like, oh, these kids are smart and they speak truth to power and they're good at social media and they built an audience.

But it sounds like that's not quite a chord with the entire planet? Or is it some sort of greater social media savvy and media prowess or something like that? Well, she actually was inspired by the Parkland kids. That's why she went out on strike for the first time. So there is a kind of a continuity there. Well, it started with a couple of youth in the United States refused to go to school because of the school shootings. And then someone I knew said, what if children did that for the climate? I also do think that she is pretty savvy on social media. I think almost anyone who's a teenager now is, but she wrote a series of posts about her own disabilities and the way that they

were being used to target her among right-wing critics. That was also, I think, quite powerful. But in general, I think that those factors are less central to understanding exactly what's happening here than the simple fact that the science of climate change is terrifying. And there are those people who are sort of activists and advocates who take that science seriously and talk about it in urgent honest terms but they're also they're activists and so to the world they seem like you know maybe a little hysterical maybe a little alarmist greta is so cool why are we not reducing our emissions? Why are they in fact still increasing? Are we knowingly causing a mass extinction? Are we evil?

No, of course not. People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn't have a clue about the actual consequences of our everyday life. Her affect is always so flat and direct that it really does seem like she's just presenting the incredibly harrowing facts of the matter to the public. And I think there's something powerful about that. I think that that is the scale of the crisis that we're facing. And just being direct about it is incredibly eye-opening. Does Greta have any policy proposals? Did she endorse any particular ideas at the UN this week? I think for the most part, she's done an incredibly savvy job of avoiding making

particular policy asks. You know, in the climate world, once you get into particular agendas or, you know, particular programs, there are always going to be some people who have objections, who think you're being unreasonable or think you're focusing on the wrong thing. At the moment, you know, two big areas of disagreement in the climate world are about the fate of nuclear power and of what's called carbon capture technology, which could allow us to take carbon out of the atmosphere, but which activists see as sort of a moral hazard because it'll encourage fossil fuel businesses to keep operating. She hasn't taken a position on those things exactly. She's made some gestures about them,

but in general, she's just saying very clearly, I read the science. The science says the world is about to change very dramatically if we don't change course very dramatically. The science says we need to do that immediately. And the science says that something like all of civilization is at stake if we don't. And I look at the world and I see nobody acting as though that's the case. And I'm confused and I'm frustrated and I'm angry. And I want you to know what I know about the scale of the crisis, because I can't understand if you did understand it, how you would be doing anything but what I'm doing, which is devoting my entire life to this challenge.

David, you've met with Greta. You've talked to her in person. I wonder, how is she handling all of this insane attention for her voyage across the Atlantic, meeting Barack Obama, going to the UN to be the sort of marquee speaker of this climate summit? How does that weigh on a 16-year-old like her? I mean, it seems to me like she's tired. and it's been a really crazy couple of weeks for her. I think she feels gratified that all of these people are out with her sort of in, you know, speaking in unison about the urgency of the crisis. But I don't think it's something that she relishes. In the one-on-one interview, I think

it was easier for her to kind of focus and have a kind of direct exchange. The sort of impression I had of her then was that she was the most teenager-like that I've seen her in any context. She was self-deprecating, you know, she made a few cracks about other people in the room and that kind of thing, which is not something I've seen from her in any of her public statements. But I think that you see the speech that she gave at the UN during this climate summit, someone who is a bit being pushed to a sort of breaking point. I mean, for the first time, she was speaking in much more heated tones, much more emotionally. I shouldn't be up here.

I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope How dare you? You have stolen my dreams in my childhood with your empty words 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

she's up there i mean really with some of the most powerful people in the world who have invited her into the sanctum to talk to them about how they're doing and she's basically cursing them out and saying don't patronize me with your compliments for giving you hope. Do something! David Wallace-Wells wrote about Greta Thunberg for New York Magazine, where he is the deputy editor and climate columnist. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. This is Today Explained. Thank you.