Greta Thunberg 'Our house is on fire': Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate

Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.

According to the IPCC , we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

And please note that those numbers do not include... tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas released from the thawing Arctic permafrost.

Phil McDuff Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?

Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg....The need to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes precedence even against a backdrop of fires, floods and hurricanes.

Today’s children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents... Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the “pro free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. This conspiracism of the elite, these claims that genuine mass movement can’t possibly really exist and must be in some way being guided by agents provocateurs...This is reality v the vested interests of the powerful. Any meaningful policy has to upset the established power base and the political donor class.

• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy