The first time you see Greta Thunberg in the flesh you’re struck by just how tiny she is.

The world’s best-known teenage climate activist was surrounded – engulfed, almost – by a sea of adults and children as she took part in a protest across the street from the United Nations headquarters in New York on Friday.  One of the signs held up by a supporter read “Make America Greta Again – Listen to The Science”. It was the start of a busy weekend for the 16-year-old Swede: after her first appearance at a climate protest in the US since crossing the Atlantic in a “zero-carbon” yacht, she met with UN General Assembly president María Fernanda Espinosa. According to The Guardian, Thunberg and two local teenage activists were invited inside the UN building and “given a tour – including a preview of the General Assembly podium, at which Thunberg will speak during this month’s climate action summit, and had a meeting with Espinosa, where they spoke about the summit, global heating, forest fires around the world, the Amazon fire and single-use plastics.”

The gathering was part of Fridays for Future, which has grown out of the school strikes for climate movement that Thunberg launched and which has become a global phenomenon over the past year. In May, for example, almost one and a half million students in more than 100 countries stopped school to take part in a protest. The next big strike event will take place on Sept 20. Needless to say, as the movement around her has grown, Thunberg’s distinctive high profile has attracted her share of critics, denigrators and just straight-up haters. But she responded, simply: “When [they] go after your looks and differences, you know you’re winning.”

Her defiance and apparent vulnerability has drawn comparisons this weekend with one of New York’s most recent icons, the ‘Fearless Girl’ sculpture by Kristen Visbal, which for International Womens’ Day two years ago originally faced down the charging bull of capitalism in lower Manhattan, before finding a new home outside the Stock Exchange. And that’s probably an appropriate image when you consider the enormity of the task Thunberg has chosen – challenging the established economic order.

But as she’s raising awareness, she’s also raising the issue of exactly what sort of practical world climate activists want, once the immediate action they demand has been taken (although that first step, they would argue, is the most important one right now). Christopher Caldwell wrote in the New York Times this month that “It is… hard to say what a real, non-utopian low-carbon politics would look like, once the public got involved in legislating and regulating.

“Contrary to the assumptions of many of Ms. Thunberg’s admirers, it might resemble contemporary populist agendas more than the world imagined by the United Nations’ modelers and the governance experts of Davos. Protectionism could be in: If you establish a system of carbon pricing, countries that don’t practice it are “dumping,” and their imports must be excluded. Immigration could be out: It is difficult to see how any kind of long-term mass immigration is consistent with a desire to lower Europe’s carbon output.

“And that is before we even broach the question of what kind of civilization we want, and at what level of technological complexity. On a planet of eight billion people, it is not just destination weddings that require considerable expenditure of energy. So does food. So does clean drinking water. So does communication.”

With the Trump administration in the process of steadily rolling back a series of environmental regulations it’s appropriate that Thunberg arrived in the US in the run-up to this Labor Day weekend – the 125th anniversary of the holiday – when her solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues require nothing less than transforming the very nature of how mankind works, innovates and creates wealth. To get an idea of the scale of possible solutions that might be required, the recent ‘Green New Deal’ proposal put forward by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – which calls for decarbonizing transportation and power generation, the two largest sources of emissions in the US, by 2030 – is estimated to cost upwards of $16 trillion.

As Greta Thunberg has demonstrated, though, ripples of action and inspiration can start at a local, even personal level. When veteran environmental campaigner Jonathan Porritt spoke in Belfast recently, he praised Thunberg’s efforts in raising awareness and highlighted the power of “hyper-connected” young people in mobilizing for change. If Friday in New York was any indication, the movement has even further to go. After her appearance at the UN later this month, Thunberg plans to travel to Chile for the Santiago Climate Change Conference in December.

It was appropriate that Friday’s gathering in New York took place at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, named for Thunberg’s fellow Swede and the second Secretary-General of the UN, who died in a plane crash in 1961. Embedded in the sidewalk is one of his quotes that’s particularly apposite for passionate activists, regardless of their cause:

Extremes

Meanwhile, the latest manifestation of what has become our  “normal” climate extremes, Hurricane Dorian, has strengthened and this weekend began pounding the Bahamas with wind gusts up to a remarkable 200 mph, before heading for landfall somewhere in the US between Florida and the Carolinas (not, as President Trump seemed to think, Alabama). Around a million people are under evacuation orders.

The Washington Post reports that Dorian “has risen to the top of the charts among the most powerful tropical systems ever observed in the Atlantic Ocean” and that 2019 is the fourth straight year with a Category 5 in the Atlantic, the longest such streak on record.

What’s about to happen, though, is no joke..