If they believed what they claim to believe, they’d do a lot more about it. She’s right—how dare they?
By Barton Swaim
The Wall Street Journal
October 4, 2019
How to think about Greta Thunberg ? She is the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist known for her articulate fulminations on climate change. At last month’s United Nations General Assembly, she scolded delegates. “I shouldn’t be up here,” she said, her expression contorted with rage. “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 fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
It’s true that political causes discredit themselves by allowing children to make arguments they don’t understand. But ridiculing a child, however cynical her promoters, is dishonorable. I vividly recall the vicious mockery from supposedly responsible adults when Caitlin Upton mangled an answer about geography in the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant. The spectacle of grown men ridiculing a well-meaning 18-year-old girl wasn’t an appealing one.
Commentators who sympathize with Ms. Thunberg’s views are perceptibly conflicted about whether they should champion her activism or wish she’d go away. You sense the uncertainty in center-left punditry about her. She gets praise for her bold preaching on climate change, which the right can’t criticize without appearing boorish—great. But a political movement spoken for by a teenager can’t be taken altogether seriously.
Yet Ms. Thunberg has a lesser-noted claim on our attention—not her expertise or her degree of alarm, but her insight into the global climate-change movement itself. She is aware—and has the bad manners to say so—that the vast majority of wealthy transnationals who intone rote demands that governments “take action” on climate change don’t actually believe what they’re saying.
At the U.N., Ms. Thunberg wasn’t speaking to rubes and oilmen and climate “deniers.” She was speaking to the swarms of diplomatic elite who had earlier disembarked from jumbo jets and descended on Midtown Manhattan’s bars, restaurants and five-star hotels and clogged its streets with phalanxes of giant sport-utility vehicles. Ms. Thunberg appears to suspect—rightly—that these people don’t think we’re headed for doomsday. They enjoy the moral uplift afforded by their fashionable views; otherwise they’re along for the ride.
Young children don’t see hypocrisy for what it is. They have faith in adults. When Ms. Thunberg was younger and she heard European politicians and leaders of nongovernmental organizations insisting that the world would experience cataclysmic environmental degradation unless governments imposed dramatic changes, she believed them. She couldn’t have understood that when the leaders she admired spoke of taking “dramatic” and “immediate” action to combat climate change, all they had in mind was the incremental transfer of political power to unaccountable regulatory agencies and transnational organizations in faraway capitals.
According to her family’s 2018 book, “Scenes From the Heart,” young Greta persuaded her parents to forgo air travel (despite her mother’s dependence on it for her career as an opera singer) and to become vegans. She cut classes to engage in protests outside the Swedish Parliament. But most “climate leaders,” she would discover, weren’t prepared to make significant changes to their life aims for the sake of preserving life on Earth. For them, it was enough to toss their empty water bottles into the recycling bin and maybe buy a Tesla.
They could argue with impeccable logic that there’s no point in making major changes to your lifestyle, since real progress requires that developed and developing nations all agree to huge decreases in carbon emissions. That, as everybody at the U.N. must know even if they pretend not to, will never happen: No national government can be expected to cripple its economy on the dubious promise that other nations will cripple theirs. So our climate leaders are happily reduced to making piecemeal demands for more regulatory powers—most of which will have no appreciable effect on global climate.
Ms. Thunberg grasps that if today’s climate leaders believed what they claim to believe, they would use their power to impose drastic reductions to greenhouse emissions, whatever other nations might do. They would also, if their convictions were genuine, engage in terrible and revolutionary deeds for the salvation of humanity: intimidation, brutality, sabotage. Instead they are content to trumpet the right opinions and otherwise persist in their ordinary habits of consumption as though none of it really mattered. Greta Thunberg has a point. How dare they?
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