Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, has been selected as TIME’s 2019 ‘Person of the Year’, making her the youngest person ever bestowed with their honor.
Writes TIME: “While the franchise has a long record of recognizing the power of young people, the editors have never before selected a teenager. Before 2019, the previous individual to hold the record for youngest Person of the Year was the first Person of the Year in TIME’s history: 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh, selected as most influential man of 1927. … Her message is one the Boomers would have recognized in the 1960s: Our elders have sold us out. The system isn’t working. The time to act is now. Perhaps even more drastically than it did in 1966, the world is changing, and the young are the ones who see what’s happening. And in 2019, as millions of people across the planet joined her, history was made by the vision of one young person in particular.”
ABC News reports: “In a speech peppered with scientific facts about global warming, the Swedish 16-year-old told negotiators Wednesday at the U.N.’s climate talks in Madrid that they have to stop looking for loopholes for their countries’ actions and face up to the ambition that is needed to protect the world from a global warming disaster. ‘The real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative PR,’ said Thunberg, who later Wednesday was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year .”
