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Wearing a bird feather headdress fashioned for going into battle, Txai Surui, a young Indigenous woman from the Brazilian Amazon, stood at the podium at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow on Monday delivering a message that met the moment's gravity.
"The Earth is speaking," Surui said. "She tells us that we have no more time."
At 24 and delivering an eloquent speech that could shame most politicians, Surui powerfully demonstrated the urgency and moral clarity so many young people bring to the climate crisis, recognizing as they do that the planet their children will inherit is in peril.
Equally powerful was the example set by those who were not at the summit. They include leaders from some of the most powerful countries in the world --" including the presidents of China, Russia, Mexico and Surui's native Brazil.
Yet Surui and other young activists such as Mexico's Xiye Bastida and Sweden's Greta Thunberg are far better climate change messengers than these absentee leaders. They represent the generation on whose shoulders it will soon fall to advocate for and eventually implement new policies and investments that delay, mitigate and adapt to climate change by the G-20 nations --" which contribute roughly 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Together they also represent a hopeful undercurrent of the world's climate response, which is making progress but at a pace scientists continue to warn is too slow to avert disaster. If the pace of that response is ever to increase, it will likely be as much due to these young people as to leaders now in office.
Even resolute calls for action by leaders at previous climate summits have been met back home with backsliding, temporizing and delay.
Biden's first statements in Glasgow trumpeted his reversal of the foolish decision by his predecessor to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate accords, which, for the first time, required every country to submit a plan for curbing emissions.
Scientists say that to avoid disaster, the world needs to slow global warming so that the average temperatures won't rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level by the end of the century. Before the Paris climate accord, temperatures were on track to rise 4 degrees. Clean energy, and even the shift from coal to natural gas made possible by the Texas-centered fracking boom, have helped put the world on pace to warm by just 3 degrees Celsius.
That's not good enough, but it's proof that public pressure and market demands have worked to bring about changes in nations such as the United States where government intervention has lagged.
It's an unfair burden --" to ask young people who were not responsible for imperiling our planet to lead the charge in saving it. But, given the denial and inertia among older generations, they're the best hope we've got.
* Guest editorial excerpt by The Houston Chronicle