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Arturo Calanche

Professor P. Mirchandani

ENC 1101

May 31, 2022

Rhetorical Analysis: Greta Thunberg’s “How dare you?” Speech

In a time when young people are taking a stand to demand action against global problems

like climate change, Greta Thunberg has been among the familiar names for many people. After

all, she is the one who gave that famous passionate speech at the United Nations Climate Action

Summit, held in New York on September 23, 2019. Here, Thunberg calls on the audience to take

global warming more seriously, by bringing the youth to the table; but her angry tone had many

viewers questioning her arguments. This essay will analyze her monologue, her rhetoric, and the

impact she wanted to make. However, before getting straight into the speech, it would be

convenient to talk about her background first.

Thunberg is an environmental campaigner born in Sweden in 2003. Her father was an

actor, and her mother was an opera singer. She was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a

child. She would be first learning about climate change at age 8, and within a few years decided

to go vegan and never travel by plane. She became known for starting the School Strike for

Climate movement in August 2018 by protesting in front of the Swedish parliament; quickly she

gained momentum and more and more students around the world would skip school to demand

action against global warming (Britannica, 2022).

After reaching a global scale, she went on to speak at global conferences to challenge

world leaders to act rightfully, as seen especially at the UN Summit.

Before starting to take apart the speech and find its purpose, it is essential to analyze the

audience first, since the purpose is related to it. Whom is she talking to? Whom does she intend

to listen to her message? She does not strictly refer to the audience by a title or a name or single

anyone out, but she starts her reproach with phrases like this: “Yet you all come to us young

people for hope. How dare you!”; and “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your

empty words.” She scolds her audience by claiming that they look away in the face of the

growing issues and tell civilians that they understand the urgency and are doing enough while the

necessary measures and solutions are nowhere to be seen.

With those terms, the message would be aimed at anyone who is involved in the process

of making or regulating laws and policies, such as politicians, in general. However, according to

the setting, Thunberg’s specific target audience is the world leaders and the officials of the UN,

who were attending the conference.

Thunberg also got to become the voice of the younger generation at the summit. The

sight of a teenager speaking up in front of very powerful adults had never been at all common.

Due to this, her age and the generational gap between her and the leaders were her main

constraints in this rhetorical situation. Some members of the audience could disregard her

message simply because she was still a kid or because of the disconnect in ideas and priorities,

which she talks about in her text. In this limitation lies one of the exigencies of her address. It

emphasizes the importance of increasing the representation of young people in the conversations

on climate change since they will sooner rather than later become the ones who must deal with it.

Other constraints include the short time she had to deliver her speech as well as her Asperger’s

syndrome, which she would use to her advantage as she showed good attention to detail.
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The other exigency here is where everything in Thunberg’s speech stems from. And that

is the lack of real action and responsibility on the part of the governments, politicians, and the

largest corporations to combat climate change. On that front, the purpose of the teenager’s

lecture is to pressure them to act. For starters, she begins her discourse in the first couple

paragraphs of it by accusing the world leaders of willfully doing nothing significant to tackle the

problem of climate change while people are dying and ecosystems are breaking down, and she

expresses her moral indignation and shames them for only focusing on their dreams and

economic growth instead. She also claims they just do not understand the problem and talks

about the reasons why what they promise to do is not enough to prevent a crisis. This way, her

text was intended to be a wake-up call for the world leaders to correct their approaches.

There is an especially unique way in which Thunberg delivers the message, using a

mixture of rhetorical strategies to convince her audience. The speaker uses ethos to demonstrate

her expertise in her speech by providing scientific data that she investigated herself, coupled with

numbers and technical terms. She also makes it clear that she is there to speak for the youth, with

lines such as: “Yet you all come to us young people for hope” to emphasize how, since

politicians want to rely on people like her, they should listen to her. As a teenager, Thunberg

means well for future generations and understands the urgency of the problem more than most

adults. This is as well supported by her presence at the conference and her history as an activist,

and the fact that she had already garnered the world’s attention for a year.

The method of persuasion which Thunberg uses the most is pathos. Throughout her

monologue, we can see appeals to the emotions of the audience in different forms, all with a

passionately angry tone. She begins by saying that she should have not been at that conference

but rather in school (on the other side of the Atlantic) to bring a feeling of guilt to the audience,
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conveying the message that the people of power are doing their job so lousily that some teenager

—who is supposed to not even know how to be independent—must come and save them. She

also uses anaphora very characteristically, as she utters the words “How dare you!” several times

in an aggressive tone that indicates moral resentment, to make the audience feel ashamed of

themselves.

Thunberg also calls upon the social truths of global warming. As she mentions that

people are suffering and the world is on the brink of mass extinction, she aims to bring attention

to its disastrous effects as another technique to make her public more inclined to act rightfully

and quickly.

She uses logos as well to reason with the audience. She mentions the science behind the

exigence and shares data and numbers as she explains the problem that the audience does not

understand to the fullest, and how what the leaders are doing and vowing to accomplish is simply

not enough.

For example, she explains that even if the governments fulfill their current promise of

cutting the world’s carbon emissions in half in 10 years, there will still be only a 50% chance

that by that time, the average global temperature will not have increased to 1.5 °C over pre-

industrial levels, a crucial threshold that, if passed, is expected to increase occurrences of

heatwaves and extreme temperatures, and other changes which will not be reversible, according

to IPCC (2020). Those odds, she says, are not acceptable because eventually, the world will be

relying on the younger generations sucking humongous amounts of CO2 out of the air with

technologies that are not accessible.

Thunberg claims that if they want a chance of 67% to stay below the threshold, which she

says are the best odds given by the IPCC, the world only had a budget of 420 gigatons of carbon
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dioxide left to emit for the next decade at the beginning of 2018; however, from early 2018 to

late 2019, they already have used up one-sixth of that budget. So, if the leaders keep trying to

tackle climate change using their usual strategies, they will not manage to solve the problem and

the world is most likely to enter a crisis that even the next generation of leaders and technology

will not be able to deal with.

Thunberg’s speech has received a wide array of reactions from people around the world.

As expected,
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Works Cited

 National Public Radio. (2019, September 23). Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech at

The U.N. Climate Action Summit. Retrieved

from https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-

the-u-n-climate-action-summit.

 IPCC. (2020). Impacts of 1.5°C of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Chapter3_Low_Res.pdf

 Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Greta Thunberg". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1

Jan. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Greta-Thunberg