Perhaps because a pampered juvenile monomaniac from a temperate, prosperous, and safe first world country is not the best spokesperson to deal with a highly complex and controversial issue. Saint Greta’s only “lived experience” of climate change is from hearing about it in books, articles, and documentaries. Just by existing in Sweden, her “carbon footprint” is likely to be considerably larger than most others of her age.
Greta is autistic, and it is characteristic of autistic people to become obsessed with certain topics, and have difficulty “reading the room”, hence her tendency to speak as if climate change is somehow a personal affront, and the most serious problem in the world. I don’t condemn Greta for feeling and acting the way she does, but those who have enabled her to be a literal “poster child” for global warming have a lot to answer for.
“How dare you create a civilization that has allowed me to be well fed, dressed, housed, and educated?! I should be in school!”
My considered opinion is that climate change, in terms of warmer average temperatures, is undeniable, and based upon my own fairly extensive reading on the topic, it does seem likely to me that human activity is responsible for some of it. I fully support long term planning to both adapt to warmer temperatures, and to reduce our dependence upon carbon based fuels, however, these are projects that will take place over decades, and governments are having a hard time selling their citizens on the idea that certain expensive sacrifices may need to be made, so the last thing we need is for people to get the idea that anthropogenic climate change is some sort of chimera, whose existence is only of hallucinatory concern to an overwrought Swedish girl, and other hysterics, like the “Just Stop Oil” movement in the UK.
People like Greta simply don’t know enough to be credible proponents of action against our dependence on fossil fuels; indeed, I suspect that the proportion of people who do find her to be credible is very small, and if I were a Machiavellian operative for the fossil fuel lobby, I would actively encourage Greta, and others like her, as a means of discrediting the idea that switching to carbon free forms of energy is a priority. What achievable solutions has Greta offered to very real issues, such as the fact that people in wealthy countries are not going to change their lifestyles to the extent that would be necessary to have an affect on the climate, and the fact that poorer countries will continue to aspire to live Western lifestyles, and won’t listen to rich Westerners who tell them they shouldn’t drive cars, or use air conditioning.
Greta is part of a class of people termed “virtue signalers”; privileged people who expect their views on certain issues to be taken seriously, whilst doing nothing substantial to seriously address these issues: King Charles III of the UK is another such individual; he claims to be concerned about the environment, yet his lavish lifestyle makes his carbon footprint many times larger than most of his subjects. I wish the media would pay less attention to such people; they are not credible proponents of their cause.
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