Will fear save the planet?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2019

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg made a passionate speech at the UN this week, accusing world leaders of failing to act on climate change. She told them: "You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you." It’s hard to remember that a year ago we had not heard the name Greta Thunberg, that she was just a lone teenager staging her solo climate strike outside the Swedish parliament on Fridays. Now she’s having the camera trained on her to gauge her reaction as Donald Trump walks by and her speeches are being broadcast around the world. What Greta says is scary, but that’s the point. In this episode we speak to David Wallace Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth. David, like Greta, has spent a lot of time going through climate studies and talking to the scientists who’ve measured where we’re heading. In this episode he tells us how much our future remains in our hands. Presenter: Matthew Price Producer: Duncan Barber Mixed by Nicolas Raufast Editor: John Shields

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Hello, I'm Matthew Price. This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:11.0	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today we ask one big story.
0:22.0	Today will fear save the planet.
0:27.0	People are suffering.
0:31.0	People are dying.
0:34.0	Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
0:38.0	We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
0:47.6	How dare you?
0:48.8	Isn't it hard to remember that just a year ago we had not heard the name Greta Tunberg.
0:57.3	She was just a lone Swedish teenager staging her solo climate strike outside Parliament on Fridays.
1:05.0	Now one of you, one of our listeners I talked to him yesterday, a guy called
1:09.6	Joey Scarff was with her in the early days before the millions were marching around the world and he
1:15.6	emailed us after our previous episode on Greta. Joey is a 24-year-old he's from Yorkshire and in January when he was working as a no-parent
1:24.8	in Stockholm he used to join Greta on her climate strike. I was living with a Swedish
1:29.5	family and I was a bit helping with their kids, that's why I had the free time on Fridays to visit the climate strikes.
1:36.7	So you heard about them while you were there?
1:38.7	Yeah so I took the train into Stockholm and on a normal Friday there would have been about 50 people and
1:46.9	over the day maybe around 150 would come but at any one time probably just 50 people there.
1:53.0	When I met Greta I learned about her struggle with the media attention.
1:58.0	Her Asperger's means that she prefers to speak only when necessary. And we would stand at a strike and there would be
	...

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