Greta Thunberg, despite her short career as a climate-change activist, is a masterful speech-maker. During the past year, she has traveled around the world making speeches everywhere from the U.N. to Capitol Hill to various street protests that have made grownups quake in their shoes.
With the release of her new book No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference this week, you'll be able to read a collection of the 16-year-old climate activist's public addresses in one place. And courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio, we have exclusive audio excerpts from the book so you can hear her speeches in her own voice.
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In the first one, Thunberg addresses the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland, on December 15, 2018. She excoriates the adults in the room:
"You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. 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 to pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is."
In the second one, Saskia Maarleveld, an award-winning audiobook narrator (whose voice you may recognize from the whistleblower statement), reads Thunberg's speech — the famous one she ends with "We are the change, and change is coming" — from the Global Climate Strike in Montreal on September 27, 2019.
"They say, 'Let children be children,'" Thunberg said to a crowd of at least 500,000. "We agree. Let us be children. Do your part. Communicate these kinds of numbers instead of leaving that responsibility to us. Then we can go back to 'being children.'"