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Photo by Harold Carmichael/Sudbury Star/Postmedia

Lynch: What do you say to the people of my generation who you feel haven’t done enough or anything at all?

Mathur: You need to listen to the IPCC, the Paris Agreement, the Nobel Prize economist. They’re experts. You say climate change is not real when people are saying that it’s real, people that have studied this and know all about it.

Lynch: You’re 11 years old. Most kids who are 11 years old should be having fun and not worrying about what’s going on around them. Why do you feel this is important for you to do?

Mathur: Because our lives are at risk and I’m just going to say that striking is somewhat fun. It’s fun to interact with people and have them tell their stories to me, how they got affected by climate change.

No laughs in this version of kids saying the darndest — aside, perhaps, from the observation that going on strike is somewhat fun.

Young Sophia Mathur is of course following the trail-blazing Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish wunderkind who has been elevated by the media to become one of the world’s leading intellectuals on various global issues, from climate change to inequality and other high-fashion ideas circulating within the green left. After addressing the World Economic Forum, the EU Parliament and other august organizations over the past year, Greta is in New York where she led a student strike on Friday and held centre stage at the United Nations Climate Action Summit on Monday.

I don't understand why we're not doing anything

Like Sophia from Sudbury, Greta became absorbed by climate change when she was very young. At the age of eight, the story goes, she became terrified after viewing videos at school depicting starving polar bears and plastic in the oceans. Her anxiety was so great that she convinced her parents to join her in a crusade to ban fossil fuels.