In Greta Thunberg: A Year To Change the World, the Scandinavian teenager whom this documentary dubs as the planet’s “best known climate activist” spends twelve months traversing the globe looking for ways to address the impending climate catastrophe. The three-part series begins airing on PBS on Earth Day, April 22.
“For me, hope is what makes you feel a meaning and get up and fight. I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the science—before it’s too late.”
During her planetary pilgrimage of advocacy and education, Greta encounters scientists, academics, and noted conservationists, such as the ninety-four-year-old British filmmaker Sir David Attenborough.
To embark on her journey, Greta takes time off from high school, usually accompanied by her father, Svante Thunberg, to attend a sort of worldwide graduate school in twenty-first century environmental studies.
This three-part nonfiction film is a candid chronicle of Greta’s year-long “mission” to, as the film’s press release puts it, “save the world.” Greta’s odyssey takes her from Alberta to Lausanne, as well as Madrid, Davos, and Brussels, to address rallies, the World Economic Forum, and European Union conferences.
Sir David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg
Greta’s fact-finding expedition takes her to the Athabasca Glacier in Canada to learn about glacial melt; to Paradise, California, to ponder wildfires; and to the Swiss Alps to discover how ice melt causes alpine rock falls.
At Canada’s Jasper National Park, she learns how mountain pine beetles are devastating pristine forests because winters are no longer cold enough to kill the insidious insects. In Gdańsk, Poland, Greta meets with a climatologist to discuss the causes of extreme weather in Europe that trigger flash flooding and heatwaves.
During her visit to the Arctic Circle, Greta witnesses the threat to reindeer herds and the traditional lifestyle of the Sámi that is posed by global warming. Her time among Northern Europe’s Indigenous people prompts Greta to remark: “The climate crisis is unfair. The ones most vulnerable suffer the most.” Professor Mike Berners-Lee, an English carbon footprint researcher, contends on-screen: “Globally, only 1 percent of the population [creates] one half of the world’s emissions.”
Professor Michael Taylor of the University of Birmingham notes how “melting glaciers, sea ice, and polar ice sheets” cause sea level rise, threatening islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere —despite the ironic fact that Pacific and other islanders have contributed little to fossil fuel emissions.
Greta Thunberg: A Year To Change the World also investigates technological innovations that have the potential to help avert the eco-doomsday that Greta fears is nearing. At Yorkshire, she tours the United Kingdom’s biggest power station and learns about the plant’s carbon capture project to remove CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere. Near Zürich, the young environmentalist examines a Swiss plant built on a waste site to suck CO2 out of the air and also travels to check out an air capture installation at Iceland.
In Poland, where eighty percent of the country’s electricity is generated by coal, Greta meets with miners at a coal mine because, she says, “I want to see different perspectives.”
During her trip to Denmark, Greta observes “half of the surface grows food for livestock,” in a segment yielding some of the startling statistics and facts of which this documentary is chock-full.
According to narrator Paul McGann, 12 percent of all greenhouse emissions are caused by the 1.6 billion cattle raised worldwide, with one cow generating 145 gallons of methane gas daily. Katherine Willis, professor of biodiversity in Oxford’s zoology department, adds that it takes sixty kilograms of CO2 to produce one kilogram of beef.
Greta learns that the use of enriched feed could reduce by 40 percent this major contributor to climate change. A vegan herself, Greta notes that switching over to plant-based diets could also mitigate the climate crisis by simply reducing the number of livestock.
Other contributing factors to raising the world’s temperature, this film maintains, are the global fashion industry and food transportation, with jets generating carbon footprints 100 times greater than shipment by sea. Greta asserts that even if the experimental technology proves effective, it “alone can’t save us.” People in industrial countries “still need to change our behavior” of over-consumption.
At mass demonstrations and elite summits, Greta also calls for an end to investment in fossil fuel. After meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the activist muses aloud, , “that’s not possible within today’s system. . . . We need a system change.”
Greta Thunberg believes a sweeping transition to renewable energy, such as solar and wind, is the path to meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Absorbing all of the expertise garnered during her travels, Greta does what she laments is sorely lacking in much of the public discourse—to “connect the dots” regarding the climate emergency.
She eschews flying due to its high carbon footprint, in favor of vehicles (presumably electric), trains, and boats. She describes herself as a “small,” “shy,” and “weak” person with Asperger’s Syndrome. “I don’t like everyone surrounding me,” she says, which makes participating in marches and demonstrations especially challenging for someone on the autism spectrum.
Yet, over the course of the film, Greta grows into her role, coming of age as a leader “in the glare of the spotlight” as the narrator puts it. Her Friday “school strikes” in front of the Swedish parliament snowballed into an international movement.
As Greta’s year-long radical “sabbatical” nears an end, she and her father appear to have gotten COVID-19, but recovered. However, not even the virus, or death threats from hotheads, can silence her indomitable voice. “For me, hope is what makes you feel a meaning and get up and fight,” she says, “I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the science—before it’s too late.”
Greta Thunberg: A Year To Change the World paints an engaging picture of the committed, fearless eco-warrior as a true heroine for the ages—arguably the most extraordinary, admirable adolescent to take the world stage since Joan of Arc, that fabled fifteenth century peasant teenager who fought foreign domination of France and was canonized as a saint.
All three episodes of Greta Thunberg: A Year To Change the World premiere on PBS on April 22, (Earth Day) from 8-11 p.m. Encore broadcasts will air every Wednesday from April 28 to May 12.