The 1975 distributed a new call to action on Wednesday through musical means. The British band released a track entitled "The 1975"- one which has appeared on each of the group's albums, every time in an updated form- and gave listeners a paralyzing reality check.
The track features climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who narrates a realistic look at the grave state of the climate change crisis.
Thunberg's speech encourages listeners to acknowledge the grim truth that the situation is not under control, and we have yet to find a solution. "To do your best is no longer good enough," Thunberg states.
For The 1975, using music as a means of pushing for change has come to be an expected, well-received, and effective way of raising awareness. Previous tracks, such as "Loving Someone", have also boasted similarly necessary societal wake-up calls, and the band's appropriately outspoken lead singer Matty Healy has repeatedly emphasized the importance of using your voice.
So, two factual is this new climate-focused version of instrumental track "The 1975"? Frighteningly so. The motive speech delivered by Greta Thunberg calls the main solution to climate change "so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases". The greenhouse effect is defined as "warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space," and global warming is attributed to human expansion of these emissions. Unresponsive to temperature changes, greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere and ultimately "force" climate change.
So, yeah, we do need to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.
"Either we stop a 1.5 degree of warming, or we don't," Thunberg says. Between 2030 and 2052, global warming is, in fact, likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, or we don't," the speech goes on. A meeting was held on March 28, 2019, at which General Assembly President María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador warned that "We are the last generation that can prevent irreparable damage to our planet." We have only about eleven years left to fix this. That's it.
Climate change is a bigger problem than you might want to believe.
It is a bigger problem than any of us want to believe.
But we need to believe it.
