Greta Thunberg Turns 19! Check Out Some of Her Biggest Accomplishments!

Greta Thunberg has been one of the most vocal climate change advocates in the past couple of years. Despite still being a child when she started her public campaign against climate change and other social issues around this problem. Greta turns 19 this Monday, and as she’s “coming of age” she is still pressing on championing this cause. 

Aside from giving then President Donald Trump dirty looks what has the still teen Greta Thunberg really accomplished in her short life so far? You may not remember that her rise to fame actually came from doing something that many students her age potentially dreamed of doing themselves, but never had the courage to do so! 

In 2018 the then 15 year old Greta Thunberg gained world fame by going on strike from school to protest against climate change. On August 20th of that year Thunberg made her first strike outside of Swedish parliament to call for more action against climate change. Her lonely picture went viral on social media, and soon after other students joined the cause. A few months after that, these kids were skipping school every Friday to protest climate change. This started a movement titled “Fridays for Future” in which kids literally staged walk outs from their school to protest against climate change. The movement gained millions of participants. How many of these were really with the cause, and not just trying to skip school? 

There’s no question that Greta Thunberg has provided a spark to the conversation about climate change throughout the world. In doing so, she’s received numerous awards. As well as being named Time Magazine’s person of the year in 2019. In large part due to the impact of her Fridays for Future movement. She’s also been nominated three times for a Nobel Peace Prize. 

The biggest criticism of Greta though has been that she’s been a bit more talk than action. Although she does travel to her climate change summits via a non emissions generating sailboat. In 2020 she started a non profit organization with 1 million euros that she got as prize money for winning the Right Livelihood Award. The award is essentially known as the poor man’s Nobel Peace Prize. 

As was mentioned before the main criticism of the now 19 year old Greta Thunberg has been that she’s failed to provide real solutions. Instead focusing her platform on criticizing what is currently being done to mitigate the effects of climate change. Thunberg did little to silence those critics when asked what her solutions would be to the climate crisis. With her being quoted as saying, “It is nothing to do with me”. In one of her latest appearances she criticized the agreements reached at the most recent climate summit in Scotland. Saying of the event, 

“COP26 is a failure and a PR exercise”

At 19 she still potentially has a long career ahead of her. Hopefully she’ll come up with tangible solutions for the climate crisis soon. From the looks of things she’ll continue to protest current measures against climate change that governments have in place.