No, Don’t Listen to Greta Thunberg

[Muda69]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/greta-thunberg-climate-activist-united-nations/

Quote

Greta Thunberg needs to get a grip.

The celebrity teen climate activist addressed the United Nations and excoriated the assembled worthies: “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty parties can’t be found at Turtle Bay. A 16-year-old from Sweden, Thunberg thundered, “I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean,” which would have been easy enough to achieve, beginning with not taking two weeks to sail across the Atlantic last month in a jet-travel-eschewing publicity stunt.

Greta Thunberg is the leading edge of a youth movement against climate change — including a global “climate strike” last week — that is being promoted and celebrated by adults who find it useful for their own purposes.

Kids are powerful pawns. The catchphrase “for the children” has a seductive political appeal, while kids offer their adult supporters a handy two-step. The same people who say, “The world must heed this 16-year-old girl” will turn around and say to anyone who pushes back, “How dare you criticize a 16-year-old girl?” (I can feel the tweets filling up my mentions right now.)

There’s a reason that we don’t look to teenagers for guidance on fraught issues of public policy. With very rare exceptions — think, say, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who was a child prodigy — kids have nothing interesting to say to us. They just repeat back what they’ve been told by adults, with less nuance and maturity.

Much of the climate advocacy of young people boils down to the plaint that all parents know well: “I want it, and I want it now.” As one headline on a National Geographic story put it, “Kids’ world climate strikes demand that warming stop, fast.”

Behind the foot-stomping is the idea that a long-running global phenomenon could be quickly stopped, if only adults cared as much as the kids did. This fails to account for such recalcitrant factors as costs and complexity, but when do children ever think of those? (And who can blame them? They’re children.)

Instead, the youthful climate activists claim they’ve been sold out by their elders. Greta Thunberg put it with her usual accusatory starkness at the U.N.: “You are failing us, but young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”

This is laughable. By no global measure of social and economic well-being have we failed kids. According to HumanProgress.org, the global poverty rate fell from 28 percent in 1999 to 11 percent in 2013. Life expectancy increased from 63.2 years to 71.9 years from 1981 to 2015. The completion rate for primary school increased from 80 percent in 1981 to 90 percent in 2015. The same benign trends hold for hunger, child labor, literacy, and so on.

If climate change proves a significant challenge, today’s youth will have more resources and technology to grapple with it than any other generation in the history of mankind.

Of course, the adults they listen to don’t tell them any of this. Instead, they feed the kids a diet of apocalyptic warnings that children repeat back as if they were urgent insights. One speaker at the youth climate rally in Washington, D.C., last week said that we have just 18 months — yes, only until the beginning of 2021 — to forestall irreversible environmental harms.

According to National Geographic, “more than a few teens who began as fervent activists have dropped out, citing depression, anxiety, and other fears that the world’s leaders will not act in time to prevent their lives — and the lives of their children — from being irretrievably altered by climate change.”

This is nuts, and it’s the adult enablers who are ultimately responsible. As for the kids, they’ll be all right. One day, they will grow up, even in a warming world.

You bet it is nuts, and frankly borders on child abuse.

 

[Howe]

 

[TheStatGuy]

4 hours ago, TrojanDad said:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/how-greta-thunbergs-rise-could-backfire-on-environmentalists.html

But while personalizing a movement, especially with the innocent face of a child, is usually PR gold, Greta’s ascendancy to the forefront of environmental activism could end up being a major negative to the movement – and the environment. 

Just how inspiring or even persuasive you find Greta’s speeches and overall activism likely depends on where you stand on the political spectrum. There are plenty of politicians and regular voters claiming to be inspired by her words and passion. There are also lots of observers expressing general alarm at what they see as an indoctrinated child being coerced by adults to make their political arguments with her youth as a shield from any criticism.

Her story signals a clear change in environmental movement tactics, and just how much more divisive and ineffective that change is likely to be.  Greta, and the adults guiding her, are seeking to shift almost all the focus from personal responsibility to governments and big corporations to enact environmental reform. Their argument is that individual people can’t do much to save the world from climate change disaster when energy companies and governments focused mostly on economic growth don’t care enough to make the big changes.

The adult version of that argument emerged earlier this month when Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren basically mocked personal conservation efforts. Warren told a climate town hall audience and later tweeted that the fossil fuel industry wants the public to discuss issues like plastic straws, lightbulbs, and cheeseburgers so they can continue to get away with producing most of the emissions blamed for climate change.

The funny thing about all of this is the free market is already doing these things based on the same capitalist incentives Greta and so many other activists are blaming for environmental disaster. Natural gas is cheaper and produces 50% fewer emissions than coal, nuclear power has been modernized and made much safer in recent decades while producing no emissions. For-profit entities like a company called Carbon Engineering are working on machines that literally suck carbon emissions out of the atmosphere.

Each of these innovations has enjoyed some level of government support here and there, but raw capitalistic profit motives are the primary driver. Warren and those like her are failing to see that millions more Americans who use their consumer spending powers to reduce their carbon footprint will send corporate America chasing after those dollars in a much faster and more effective way than government fiat.

It’s not just die-hard capitalists or environmental skeptics who are pushing back on this focus away from personal responsibility. In a remarkable interview on PBS last week, author Jonathan Safran Foer spoke out against Warren’s comments and pointed out that those who say they believe in the dire effects of climate change would do more than protest if they really believed it. That point is the premise of Foer’s new book, “We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast.”

Based on all the politically partisan slogans and signs we saw at the climate protests over the past few days, are we sure the top motivation is the environment and not politics? If the activists protesting right now could get the most serious climate change threats eliminated, but without politically defeating President Trump and Republicans and/or putting the big oil companies out of business in the process, would they still be interested in the cause?

Yes. They would be because even if they eliminated the threats.. As long as Trump and R's are in power ... He and those in that party are still a threat to it. 

We as civilians can do some to help stop but as long as moderate dems along with Republican's continue to take $$ from big corps...nothing will stop it fully. Its why we need people in power that don't take money from those types of corps. 

 

 

 

 

[TheStatGuy]

5 hours ago, Howe said:

 

I listened to 39 seconds of that. Its 39 seconds of my life ill never get back. 

Go back to your flock old sheep. 

[Impartial_Observer]

19 hours ago, Ultimate Warrior said:

Yes. They would be because even if they eliminated the threats.. As long as Trump and R's are in power ... He and those in that party are still a threat to it. 

We as civilians can do some to help stop but as long as moderate dems along with Republican's continue to take $$ from big corps...nothing will stop it fully. Its why we need people in power that don't take money from those types of corps. 

 

 

 

 

You really need to get out of Winamac once in a while. 

[swordfish]

On 9/24/2019 at 5:49 PM, Ultimate Warrior said:

Yes. They would be because even if they eliminated the threats.. As long as Trump and R's are in power ... He and those in that party are still a threat to it. 

We as civilians can do some to help stop but as long as moderate dems along with Republican's continue to take $$ from big corps...nothing will stop it fully. Its why we need people in power that don't take money from those types of corps. 

 

 

 

 

Do you have any logical idea how the ice that once covered Indiana melted, retreated and helped form the Great Lakes before mankind came around?

[Impartial_Observer]

2 hours ago, swordfish said:

Do you have any logical idea how the ice that once covered Indiana melted, retreated and helped form the Great Lakes before mankind came around?

Republicans?

[gonzoron]

4 hours ago, swordfish said:

Do you have any logical idea how the ice that once covered Indiana melted, retreated and helped form the Great Lakes before mankind came around?

The same thing that made Honky Tonk Angels?

[gonzoron]

On 9/26/2019 at 4:10 PM, swordfish said:

Do you have any logical idea how the ice that once covered Indiana melted, retreated and helped form the Great Lakes before mankind came around?

@Muda69 thinks God did it. 

[Muda69]

36 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

@Muda69 thinks God did it. 

No, I don't.