Greta Thunberg, the Swedish 16-year-old who inspired a massive youth movement to combat climate change, teamed up with British rock band The 1975 to produce a song calling attention to a climate “emergency.”
The four-minute single, called “The 1975,” was released Wednesday as a rallying call for action on the climate crisis.
“We are right now in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis,” Thunberg says over piano music. “We need to call it what it is. An emergency.”{mosads}
“We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed. All political movements in their present form have failed,” she continues. “But homo sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this.”
Music-focused online magazine Pitchfork noted that much of the song’s rhetoric comes from Thunberg’s 2018 speech to attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Thunberg says combating climate change is the “greatest and most complete challenge” humans have ever faced but said the main solution is “so simple that even a small child can understand it.”
“We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases and either we do that, or we don’t know,” she continues. “You say nothing in lie is black or white. But that is a lie, a very dangerous lie. Either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming or we don’t.”
She says there “are no grey areas where it comes to survival.”
The teenager ends with a call for grass-roots actions through rebellion.
“Today we use about 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground,” she says. “So we can no longer save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.”
“So everyone out there, it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel,” she concludes as the music suddenly cuts out.
The song will appear on the The 1975’s upcoming album, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” that does not currently have a release date.
Thunberg said money raised from the track will go Extinction Rebellion, a nonprofit group.
The unveiling of the track comes days after the Swedish teenager was awarded the first Freedom Prize awarded by France’s Normandy region.
She said she will donate the prize money from the award, 25,000 euros, to four groups working for climate justice.
Thunberg, the founder of Youth Strike for Climate, began advocating for climate change policy last year by walking out of school to protest weekly outside the Swedish Parliament.
She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this year and is releasing a book for charity in 2019.