Climate Wunderkind Greta Thunberg to Guest Edit Major BBC Radio Show

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 23: Greta Thunberg speaks at the United Nations (U.N.) wher
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

The taxpayer-funded BBC has announced that 16-year-old eco-warrior Greta Thunberg will be guest-editing the broadcaster’s flagship current affairs radio programme, the Today show.

The BBC traditionally allows high-profile individuals to guest edit during the Christmas period, and the Swedish teen climate change activist will be one of five awarded the honour this year.

With the episode set to be aired between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve on Radio 4, the BBC said that the child “will speak to the world’s leading climate change figures and hear from frontline activists” and has commissioned reports from the Antarctic and Zambia.

Thunberg has garnered gushing praise from celebrities during her environmental crusade. Leonardo DiCaprio applauded her as a “leader of our time” with feminist author Margaret Atwood calling her the “Joan of Arc of the environment” while Hollywood star Anne Hathaway labelled criticism of the girl’s climate alarmism as “textbook misogyny”.

After crisscrossing the United States to deliver excoriating messages on the environment earlier this year, the Nobel Peace Prize nominee found herself stranded in the Americas after the UN climate summit was moved from Chile to Spain. Refusing normal modes of transport, she finally made it to Madrid in time by hitching another ‘carbon-free’ boat ride across the Atlantic. It is likely she will make another headline-grabbing carbon-neutral trip from her native Sweden to the UK next month.

The public figure, who inspired children around the world to ditch school and join millions of people in the so-called ‘Youth Climate Strike’, called on Facebook last month to silence her critics and threatened to quit the social media platform otherwise.

The teen green prodigy, the daughter of an actor and an opera singer, has come under criticism for focusing her censure on Western countries but largely ignoring number-one polluter China, which accounts for 30 per cent of global emissions.

In perhaps her most notable performance, Thunberg claimed at the UN in September that the adults in the General Assembly had “stolen my dreams and my childhood” for failing to impose restrictive carbon emission targets.

“This is all wrong,” the teen said. “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?”

She continued: “You have stolen my dreams, 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?”

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