their first response will be very, very straightforward.

"Let's try to fix it." -Hey, hey!

Ho, ho!

-Young people around the world

are fed up with inaction on climate change.

-Groups of students across America say

they will skip class tomorrow

for the first national school strike over climate change.

-Almost all of them are students.

This group behind me just 9 years old.

We spoke to a group of 17-year-olds,

who said they're here today to fight for their future.

-Young people are realizing that the generations above us,

the adults in the room, are asleep at the wheel.

And so you're seeing millions of teenagers

across the world step up, rise up to that challenge,

and strike from their schools

and their businesses and their communities, saying,

"We want action now, and we're not gonna stop until we get it."

-People! -Power!

-My name is Greta Thunberg.

I am 15 years old and I'm from Sweden.

I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now!

-A little more than a year ago, a then-15-year-old girl

in Sweden

decided that there was something very wrong with the world,

because she had learned about the climate crisis.

-Greta Thunberg has become an icon of climate activism

and has inspired countless others around the world.

-Alexandria Villaseñor was just 14 years old

when she heard Thunberg speak at the 2018 United Nations Climate

Conference in Poland.

-You are not mature enough to tell it like it 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.

-We have constantly been watching as world leaders

have failed to take climate action,

and so we really did need students to be able

to really say something to world leaders at that level.

And so seeing Greta really speak there and speak truth

to power was so inspirational, especially to other students,

to see how that she was a teenager like us.

And, so, what Greta's school strike did is --

it gave permission to students all around the world to go out

and make their voices heard, too, in their future.

And, so, I started my school strike for climate

in front of the United Nations headquarters

the last day of COP24, December 14th,

where I took my first form of activism.

We are at the United Nations headquarters

for my Week 46 climate strike.

So, there is going to be some students here later.

And it's going to be a very nice day.

-Alexandria is part of this wave of youth climate strikers

inspired by Greta Thunberg, who have been staging these,

for a long time, very, very lonely demonstrations, right?

Before it got trendy, before there were millions of people

joining the climate strikes,

there were just a handful of young people --

you know, 11, 13, 15.

And then it started to catch on.

-This is what democracy looks like.

-You get a sense of community,

and that's why I get the sense of community, too,

because everyone here is fighting for the same cause.

And it's something we do every single day, 24/7,

and, here, it's just, like, a tiny part of it.

-Amanda Cabrera is just 8 years old.

She's been taking part in the Friday school strike for weeks.

-What's the point of going to school

if there's not gonna be a need for it?

You're not gonna need your education

if we're not gonna have a world.

So what's the point of going to school?

And in 10 years, we might not have this world.

So then I feel like it's not fair,

because the planet gave us what we needed,

but we're not treating it

and giving it back the stuff that the planet needs.

So that's why I'm here.

-And, so, seeing how every single Friday,

more students would get involved

and it was a way for them to really make their voices heard

was something that shows how this movement has given a voice

to people that didn't think that they had one.

-Strike! -If we don't get it!

-Strike with us!

-The call to take action on climate change

goes back decades.

-For years now, there have been people around the world,

mostly in the global South, who have been speaking about

the fact that climate change is an existential crisis.

But when it came to climate activism,

a lot of it was very consumer-based like,

"Change your light bulbs, turn your lights off.

Recycling.

Here are the things that you can do as a consumer to act."

But it wasn't really kind of, like,

a fighting climate movement.

It wasn't a movement that was in the streets

in the way the climate movement today

is in the streets, confronting polluters.

It was pretty polite, to be honest.

-But for activists and scientists alike,

the time of being polite has run out.

-You know, we are seeing a huge shift

in people's understanding of the climate crisis,

that this isn't some far-off-in-the-distance issue

that we can, you know, worry about later,

that we are actually in it, we're living it,

and we are on this incredibly tight and unyielding deadline

to transform our economy to get off fossil fuels.

Another thing that changes the perception, I think,

is just the way scientists are now communicating with us.

-I'm delighted to open this presentation

to you of the IPCC's new special report

on global warming of 1.

5 degrees.

This is one of the most important reports ever produced

by the IPCC and certainly the most keenly awaited.

-Climate scientists issued a clear and dire warning in 2018

as part of their United Nations report.

-That report said, in very, very plain language,

that we need to cut global emissions in half in 12 years.

So, this is very plain language.

"Cut in half in 12 years,

change pretty much everything in your society."

-In hope and prayer, we find our --

-With governments failing to take action,

young activists got together and got organized.

-We're right here!

-For a lot of people in my generation,

I think we grew up not really believing

in our political and social institutions' ability

to solve our greatest problems.

So a group of us, about a dozen young people,

came together from across the climate-justice movement

and started to ask ourselves,

"What would it take to build a youth climate movement

that can go to scale, that could actually put forward

and popularize solutions to the climate crisis

that we're at the scale of the climate crisis?"

And, in doing so, Sunrise Movement was born.

-The Sunrise Movement has been active on the streets,

but they've also been active in the halls of Congress

as they lobby for a Green New Deal.

-I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each

and every single one of you for putting yourselves

and your bodies and everything on the line

to make sure that we save our planet,

our generation, and our future.

-The key thing to understand about the Green New Deal

is that it's not a narrow climate policy.

It is an action plan for the next economy,

which says, "We need to get off fossil fuels in a huge hurry.

This next decade is make or break."

-It was an action plan several members of Congress got behind.

-When we talk about a Green New Deal,

we are talking about jobs and justice.

-We are outlining the Green New Deal,

and in the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

we have the Green New Deal and we have Green New Deal projects.

-But it's only a first step.

-We need to write the first policy

associated with the Green New Deal.

Not the whole shebang, not a 10,000-page document

that takes everything that's in the resolution

and turns it into a bill, but just one piece of it.

I'm not sure exactly

what the first piece of legislation will look like,

but we are talking with members on the Hill.

But I think whatever it is,

we will face a huge amount of opposition

and we will need to build the movement's support

to ensure it passes.

-So, you have peril and you also have promise.

You have this framework of where we want to be,

instead of where we are right now.

And I think that's the real game changer,

because I think just terrifying people,

just declaring an emergency

is not gonna sustain the movement in the long run.

That fear has to be balanced with the hope

that we could actually win something

that is not just better than environmental apocalypse

but, for a lot of people, better than Tuesday.

-We have to build an army.

We have to build a movement of people,

build a movement of political allies.

We have to build an aligned force

of thousands of organizations

across the country that can meet that moment

and that can go toe-to-toe, head-to-head

with the wealthiest people on this planet

and maybe even win.

It's a tall task, but there's too much at stake to not try.

-Vote for climate action! Vote for climate action!

Vote for climate action!

Vote for climate action!