Greta’s cry for climate action at the United Nations (UN) climate summit has become a big talking point. In a speech that she read out of a paper, she exclaimed, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

Her words, directed at world leaders, are now famous. In its appropriate context, the words were meant to address the climate inaction by world leaders, despite the availability of what she believes to be the evidence for the impact of climate change. 

She believes that her generation’s right to existence has been “stolen” by the present leaders who refuse to reduce greenhouse emissions.

As a climate scientist who lives in a developing country surrounded by abject poverty, I was surprised by Greta’s jibe at the global efforts to achieve economic growth and her extraordinary claims of mass extinction.

I am sorry to have to let Greta and others know this: the right to achieve economic growth is a fundamental right of every sovereign nation. Just as Greta enjoys the fruits of fossil fuel-based economic growth in Europe, we in developing countries want to see our streets free of poverty. No international body or school kid can stop it, unless they use force or arm-twist by economic sanctions.

Coal provides the majority of the electricity (75 percent) for the 2.6 billion in India and China, and similar amounts for millions more in Japan, Poland, South Korea, Australia, Russia, the United States, and Brazil. It is also a significant source of electricity in other nations across the globe.

Oil and gas are the lifeline of the global transportation sector and various industrial processes. Natural gas has emerged as a key resource for meeting global energy demand, helping the world become less dependent on other energy sources. 

Most of the products we use on an everyday basis come from oil. Petroleum derivatives are used in making clothes, mobile phones, kitchen accessories, construction materials, the very placards and paints used by climate protesters, roads, tires, vehicles, yachts, boats, planes, and thousands of other products we use in our daily lives. 

So, will we dare to use the same fossil fuel energy sources used by Europe and North America to end poverty in our nations? Of course, we will. We will dare, because the life of those in India and China and billions elsewhere depends on the very energy source that Greta wants to destroy. 

As for climate, Greta claimed that “these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.” Well, if there is anyone who ought to be mature, it should be the scientists.

The very same scientists who support Greta and advise her admitted that there was a surprising and remarkable slowdown in warming during the first 14 years of the 21^st century.

And the United Nations reports she uses for her advocacy of climate doomsday depend solely on computer climate model forecasts that have failed to predict real-world temperatures even once in the past two decades. The scientists whom she believes anticipated neither the slowdown in warming nor the onset of other weather patterns before they actually occurred.

However, we should not be harsh with Greta. She has not yet been given a chance to grow up and read these things for herself at a university or college. Rather, she has been chosen and groomed to promote the doomsday agenda. 

Also, unlike her unforgiving attitude, we will choose to forgive her concentrated efforts to rob billions of their legitimate aspirations to come out of poverty. We forgive her because we truly believe that her knowledge about the complexity of climate science is still in its infancy and most of the words that she reads out or speaks are not hers.

But Greta should not mistake our forgiveness for passivity. We in developing countries will fight for our rights to use nature’s resources to pull ourselves out of poverty, just like every other developed nation did during the course of the past 100 years.

Photo by Loren Joseph on Unsplash.