Time’s Person of the Year: Climate Activist, Greta Thunberg

Teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg has been named the 2019 TIME Person of the Year, becoming the youngest figure to get the honor in its 92-year history.

The 16-year-old Swede is a prominent face in the fight to save the environment from the effects of climate change.

The magazine revealed its choice on the TODAY show.

Last year, TIME editors selected “The Guardians and the War on Truth,” a group of four journalists and one news organization whose work landed them in jail, or cost them their lives.

According to TODAY,

Thunberg, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in March, has been the catalyst in a host of student-led strikes involving more than a million students across the world in the last two years after she began spending her school days protesting climate change outside the Swedish parliament.
She drew worldwide notice for her fiery speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September after she sailed from England to New York in a solar-powered boat for the conference instead of flying because it’s harmful to the environment.

She said during her speech,

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying.

“Entire ecosystems are collapsing. 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!”