Now she is speaking to the whole world

“Can you hear me?” Greta Thunberg asks the 150 members and advisers in the U.K. Houses of Parliament. She taps the microphone as if to check if it’s on, but the gesture is meant as a rebuke; she’s asking if they’re listening. She asks again later in her speech. “Did you hear what I just said? Is my English O.K.? Is my microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.”

There is laughter, but it’s unclear if it’s amused or awkward. Thunberg is not smiling. She’s here to talk climate; a catastrophe is looming, her generation will bear it, and she knows whom to blame. “You did not act in time,” she declares.

16 year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was earlier this year included in the magazine Time Magazine list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Swedish now adorns the cover of the next issue of the magazine, entitled “The teenager who strikes for the planet”.

In a longer article, TIME magazine in the new issue describes her journey, since last year she climbed climate alone in Stockholm, to be the front figure for a global movement and hailed by several world leaders. “I almost never used to talk in the lessons with my classmates. But now I speak to the whole world, ”says Greta Thunberg to Time.

In the text she also describes her great message: “I believe that once we start to behave like we are in the midst of existential crisis, then we can avoid a climate collapse. But the possibility of doing so does not last long. We must start today ”, says Greta Thunberg to the magazine, which followed her and her father Svante Thunberg during a train journey from London to Stockholm.