The Tweeter-in-Chief versus The Wise Conscience of Youth. It’s come to that. With all the world looking on, young people in the millions went on a global strike in hopes of goading their elders into taking seriously what science has been revealing about climate change for decades. And all President Trump could think to do was to take it upon himself to mock the spokesperson of the movement, 16-year old Greta Thunberg, who gave an impassioned speech before the United Nation’s Climate Summit last month. In a sardonically dismissive tweet, the President called Thunberg “a very happy young girl.”
Thunberg had told the UN General Assembly, sometimes in tears and with her voice trembling with emotion, “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams. 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 fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
While the President and his people claim climate change is a malicious hoax foisted off on the rest of us by lousy Chinese commies, Thunberg and the world’s children know better. They know that they will be the ones to bear the calamities and tragedies caused directly by the climate change deniers of the present who do everything in their power to cripple any attempt to slow down the violent weather ahead. Greta Thunberg and her peers see “rescuing the planet” not as a quixotic political joke and slogan, but as a deeply personal duty, one they owe to themselves and to their progeny. If only the “adults” who mock them, and the billions of bystanders who do nothing, felt the same way!
Thunberg sees the catastrophe that lies before us from the same perspective as the authors of the 2014 book “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future,” by Harvard and MIT historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. In an essay in “Daedalus,” a publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the authors write about constructing “an imaginary future,” in which historians from 2393 in the Second People’s Republic of China try to understand how the collapse of Western civilization (1540 to 2073) came about.”
The “… dilemma being addressed is how we – the children of the Enlightenment – failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold,” the author’s write. “Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover,
the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind – even though involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian … recounts the events of the Period of Penumbra (1988 –2073) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2074).”
Greta Thunberg, and the children on strike to keep the worst of climate change from tearing us apart, understand that we really are living in a Second Dark Age right now. And the dunderheaded leaders of this Dark Age include most corporate CEOs, Donald Trump and many other world leaders who send ambassadors to the United Nations. The imaginary Chinese historian of 2393 would see Greta and the children’s climate change crusade as potentially a saving grace. But from our perspective, we have no idea if the children’s strike will have the kind of trend altering impact we so desperately need.
But that doesn’t mean we should disparage them as merely a flash in the pan, an immature tantrum by politically unsavvy kids, in much the same way we did with the politically disorganized Occupy Movement in 2011 and on. Occupy was right about the “free” market, in the same way Greta Thunberg is right about the “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” There is no way to merely “invest” our way out of calamity. Any sensible person knows the market moves too slowly, too chaotically, and too unpredictably for it to realistically “rescue”anything. It’s so obvious that it’s absurd to even have to write a sentence like that. The market is not about doing anything, it’s about gambling on other “people” doing something profitable, not necessarily intelligent or useful or humane.
In New Mexico, the youth crusade was called by one group “Fight for Our Lives.” New Mexico In Depth reported that the student strike was the beginning of a “week of climate action events, including a service project to clean up the Rio Grande Bosque and a fracking reality tour in the greater Chaco Canyon area.”
Are there so called grown-ups in New Mexico who believe as Greta Thunberg and her peers do? There must be many, many artists, environmentalists, and older people who feel their urgency. I count myself among them.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image of Greta Thunberg by Anders Hellberg)
I too count myself among them. Thank you once again, V. B., for drawing the comparisons we need to see reality as it is.
V.B., you are correct in saying “free market” neoliberalism is not going to get us out of this critically dangerous situation the human race finds itself in. We need a complete change in values that move us away from unbridled growth and profit–the hallmarks of the capitalist system–towards a system of sharing, non-materialism, and sustainable growth. And scientists need to start speaking out much more forcefully. Now.
My eyes popped out upon reading the sign in the photo which says “if climate was a bank it would be saved”. I am part of the Alliance for Local Economic Security. We currently trying to get the word out to the
New Mexico environmental community about creating a PUBLIC BANK for
New Mexico. Public Banking was mentioned in The New Green Deal as a possible vehicle for funding this massive effort.
The public bank effort in NM started some years ago. The idea was to address
rising income inequality as well as to protect our tax dollars which currently
sit in private banks..in NM..mostly Wells Fargo.
The changes that are necessary just to maintain some semblance of only the currently progressing damage need to come from the top down from massive worldwide government efforts. I don’t see that happening for reasons of politics, corporate greed and military confrontations. Consider that the amount of plastic in the oceans already outweighs the fish in the ocean. Earth is angry.