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Hello, I'm Margaret Atwood, bringing you a special podcast of my guest-edited edition of today.

I'm concerned about the environment, so one of the things I wanted to look at was how we affect change.

Naturally, I was keen to speak to the young climate activist, Greta Tunberg. Here is the discussion

Greta and I had, chaired by the today presenter, Michelle Hussein. So growing up with a biologist, my father was

a forest entomologist. So dinner table conversation when I was a teenager was likely to be,

there won't be anything left but rats and dandelions. So they were well aware of extinctions

then. So I, of course, was a teenager, so I was more interested in nail polish, but some of it did absorb.

What do you think, Greta, listening to that?

Because I guess for your generation, there is that sense of looking back at previous generations

and thinking, with some notable exceptions, clearly not enough was done on global warming and climate change. No, it's not that

people weren't saying it. It's that the politicians were not listening to it. Of course,

that's true. Many people have been fighting for decades, just repeating the same message,

but it just hasn't been resonating. It hasn't had any effect. I hope that

we will, or if we have already passed that tipping point where it's inevitable, this will happen

because we are too many people that it's impossible to ignore it. What about net zero pledges? Because since we last spoke to us on

the program, Greta, last Christmas, there have been more of them, notably from China, which is

pledging to do that by by 2060. Presumably as we get closer to the next climate talks, those kinds of

pledges will build up. What is your view of them?

Well, they would be very nice if they actually meant something.

We can't just keep talking about future hypothetical, vague, distant dates and pledges.

We need to do things now and also net zero. I mean, that is a very

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