I don’t like Greta Thunberg. Unlike the adults who gave her a standing ovation at the United Nations after she had berated them for ruining her future. Unlike the gathering of 35 000 people in Bristol, including many very young children.
It’s offensive when the parents of a very privileged Scandinavian teenager encourage her to boycott school to promote climate-change hysteria, allowing her to become an idol for the radical left whose actual agenda is to reverse globalisation and destroy capitalism. I am of the school of parenting which believes children should be seen and not heard.
Whatever she knows or thinks she knows about climate change – one of the most vexing and complex scientific issues of the day – she is wrong on much and the facts don’t enter into her debate much.
She loves emoting on how the adults in the world are doing nothing to forestall a climate catastrophe. She feeds the fear catastrophists have been subjecting children to.
Huge industry
Climate change has been on the agenda for over 20 years. There are businesses, NGOs, United Nations departments and so on, whose only business is climate change. It is a huge industry globally.
Greta lives in one of the most prosperous countries on earth, with the highest standards of living ever in the history of the world, in a country which can provide heating to its population during the brutal Scandinavian winters without burning fossil fuels and damaging the atmosphere.
Her health, education and prospects are superb. And yet we are expected to take her intemperate tongue-lashing and smile while doing so.
This is what she said at the United Nations and has repeated since:
My message is that we’ll be watching you.
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [global temperature rise] and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice.
No expert
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson, a retired adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College, says that with all due respect to Greta, she is no ‘expert‘ on ‘the complicated science, politics, and economics of climate change.
But, oh, how emotionally affecting is the sight of this petite teenager standing alone on stage – she seems so fragile, so vulnerable, that we must help her! And it is more than a little ironic that a ‘peace’ prize might go to someone representing an agenda of waging economic warfare against both the poor people of the world, whose escape from poverty depends on access to affordable energy, and the American middle class who are expected to pay tens of trillions of dollars to pay for a Green New Deal.
How dare she think she’s hard done by! Her absence from school is self-imposed; it’s not the fault of climate change. She repeatedly claims that ‘people are dying’. She doesn’t say which people, from which country and how climate change has led to their deaths.
Naomi Seibt is a German university student who is the counter to Greta. She describes herself as a ‘climate realist’. Seibt says that the only way to address climate change is through science and facts.
The European Union (EU) made a mistake it shouldn’t make again: it invited Greta to the unveiling of its first proposed climate change law which aims to have the 27-member EU reach 0% net carbon emissions by 2050.
‘Empty words’
And Greta’s response? She dismissed the law as ‘empty words’, accusing the EU of ‘pretending’ to be a leader on climate change.
‘When your house is on fire, you don’t wait a few more years to start putting it out. And yet this is what the Commission is proposing today,’ she told the European Parliament’s environment committee.
She said the law, which would give the EU Commission more powers to set tougher carbon reduction goals, did not go far enough. The law is an admission that the EU was ‘giving up’ on the Paris agreement.
‘This climate law is surrender. Nature doesn’t bargain, and you cannot make deals with physics,’ the activist said.
She said its Green Deal package of measures would give the world ‘much less than a 50% chance’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C.
Then, to add insult to injury, at the end of proceedings Greta refused to shake the hand of European Parliament President David Maria Sassoli. Ladies and gentlemen of the EU, it’s time to stop the absurd political correctness.
Another teenager
While she travels the world being rude to her hosts, she brings to mind another teenager who literally nearly died for her convictions – Malala Yousafzai.
Malala wrote a blog at 12 for BBC Urdu about her life during the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley. Following a New York Times documentary about her, she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
At the age of 15, she was shot by a Taliban gunman for her activism over education for girls. After her recovery, she became a prominent activist for the right to education, co-founding a non-profit organisation to promote her activism.
Malala became the youngest Nobel laureate as co-recipient in 2014, at the age of 17. She wrote a book, and became the youngest person to address the Canadian Parliament.
She has read a PPE at Oxford. Her public appearances have always displayed a young woman of clarity, thoughtfulness and purpose in a well-mannered and considerate style.
The contrast couldn’t be starker. Malala reminds us that Greta has shown no regard for developing countries which need growth in the desperate hope of achieving a quality of life that is a fraction of Greta’s.
The Corona virus is achieving all the things Greta wishes for in terms of reducing carbon emissions, and global growth is tanking too. Ironically, her objectives are being met.
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