Let Greta Thunberg fans trade places with people in low-carbon countries?

28 thoughts on “Let Greta Thunberg fans trade places with people in low-carbon countries?”

1. Greta should take a trip to West Virginia and hang out with some people who can’t work in the coal industry any longer, and instead collect cans and bottles on the side of the road to clean up the environment. They use the proceeds from the cans to buy opioids and meth, which kill them, taking care of two problems at once. She can talk to their children, though, and meet some kids whose childhoods have really been stolen from them. I know! They should learn to code!

   Maybe she can hock the Eames and contribute to a food bank. She’ll feel good about herself. Self-esteem is what matters most when you’re saving the world from carbon dioxide.

   https://www.mountaineerfoodbank.org/

   “MFB provides food and other household items to over 450 feeding programs in 48 counties in West Virginia. These programs include food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, senior programs, Veterans Table programs, mobile pantry programs, school food pantry and backpack programs.”

   • In fact, she can start the exchange program in Morgantown, at WVU. I’m sure she’ll be welcome, and she can bring along some folks like Michael Moore, because he’ll help the environment and help keep the NRA out so people in West Virginia can’t buy any more guns, which they don’t need to kill themselves with. If Morgantown Municipal Airport manages to add 1,000 feet to its runway in the next ten years, hopefully they’ll be able to fly in some really large planes and get that exchange program to Sweden really trucking along.

     “The City of Morgantown welcomes all people regardless of race, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, color ancestry, age, abilities, blindness, economic or family status, or life situation. The city strives to be an inclusive community for its residents and visitors. The City of Morgantown asks everyone to act with a helpful intent, to respond to each other with civility, and to treat the environment with respect.”

     They can begin by pushing the University to get rid of this guy, who has dared to talk about the potential positive aspects of climate change for West Virginia as recently as August 27, 2019. He must GO!

     https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2019/08/27/the-positive-implications-of-climate-change-wvu-researcher-sees-agricultural-food-availability-and-economic-possibilities

     He’s studied the undisputable changing patterns in West Virginia’s climate. And, believe it or not, there is at least one silver lining stemming from changing climate, he insists: The growing season is getting longer.

     “Our future climates in West Virginia are likely to be more conducive to agricultural production,” said Hubbart, a professor of hydrology and water quality in the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design. “We should plan for that now.”

     I would bet that Morgantown is a fairly wealthy city for West Virginia, given that it’s the home of WVU:

     “The median income for a household in the city was $20,649, and the median income for a family was $44,622. Males had a median income of $33,268 versus $24,944 for females. [They can work on gender pay equality while they’re there!] The per capita income for the city was $14,459. About 15.0% of families and 38.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 23.3% of those under age 18 and 8.3% of those age 65 or over.”

   • Yes, and the asbestos mines too.

2. Moving to a low carbon economy does not require that we all to go back to living in huts. This is false.

   With solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear, we can generate the energy needed.

   The Palo Verde nuclear plant, near Phoenix, has safely generated 3.3 GW of energy for the last 30 years, for example.

   Iowa is getting > 30% of their electric power from wind power.

   France gets 90% of their electric power from a combination of nuclear (71%) and renewable sources.

   It’s time we stopped acting like reducing our carbon footprint is an impossible feat. Rich countries can afford it, now.

   • I’d like to ask you: What do you estimate as the timeline for boosting the fraction of energy generated by nuclear plants in the United States? Things don’t look very good:

     “Experts see continuing challenges that will make it very difficult for the nuclear power industry to expand beyond a small handful of reactor projects that “government agencies decide to subsidize by forcing taxpayers to assume the risk for the reactors and mandating that ratepayers pay for construction in advance”.[63]”

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States

   • “France gets 90% of their electric power from a combination of nuclear (71%) and renewable sources.”

     France is coming apart at the seams, in case you haven’t noticed. They had 800,000+ people marching in the streets yesterday,

   • I will answer for G C: Never! A country that can’t build a subway tunnel or a high-speed rail line without bankrupting itself is not going to be able to build and operate a new nuclear power plant. Maybe you’ll see some in China.

3. Saint Greta is back, and she is more mad! This is the main issue with most current climate change solutions, they forget that going to renewables will not support current industrial society and the western standard of living. We would be going back to the hunter and gather society. Turning off industrial society would also turn off industrial agriculture and greatly reduce crop yields, reducing the population. The planet will not support entire current population at the current technology level, energy level and resource consumption. We need sources of energy with high EROI. At the current overall EROI, for the human species to survive, the majority of the human population level has to live at the energy level of hunters and gathers so that the minority can live at a high energy level. The “trading places” show would run out of high energy consumption people very quickly, there are not enough high energy consumption people available to trade with the low energy consumption people. The current ratio is probably 1:10.

   Alex, coal has too low energy concentration, the current coal in West Virginia, is not high quality, in addition we need to save the high quality coal for iron production. Having the coal works retrain to build nuclear power plants would be a lot more beneficial and more healthy for the coal industry.

   The only solution to climate change and keeping the planet (and Capitalism, exponential growth) going is to build more nuclear power plants (replacing low energy density sources like coal) and build a space mirror at the L1 point between the sun and the earth.

   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4550401/

   Saint Greta is against nuclear power and has not mentioned space mirrors, so all talk and no solutions. This is not usually given that the IPCC is all talk and no solutions.

   The human species is nothing more than a virus based on DNA. Our goal is exponential growth (capitalism is perfect for forcing society into exponential growth), use up all resources and energy available and then die.

   • “The human species is nothing more than a virus based on DNA.” – Morrissey

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf6Xwb03jTE

     Wow, and I thought I was a bummer! Come, Armageddon, Come! Look I don’t think coal is viable long term either, my post was meant to highlight the very real fact, though, that talking about saving the planet has a lot more consequences than the rosy ones, particularly when you take people’s livelihoods and ability to survive without having anything to replace them with. Really, I invite you: take a trip to West Virginia. See for yourself.

     Philg knows we can’t do fusion, at least not with magnetic confinement and probably not with inertial confinement either. I used to think optimistically about that but not any longer. We could do nuclear in larger quantities if we bought the reactors from the Chinese, which I think is likely. Hey, we buy our subway trains from them.

   • “capitalism is perfect for forcing society into exponential growth” – That’s not true here in the United States, where we now have a birthrate that is below the replacement rate, and the more educated and socioeconomically well-off people are, the fewer children they usually have. Now, it’s true, they are given to waste (transfer?) a lot of money on things like the most expensive per-capita new elementary school in the country, but they don’t have a lot of kids. Lincoln is not teeming with children, houses overflowing with tots and parents who can’t afford to clothe and feed them. And believe me, those people are capitalists! They’re invested.

     If you believe people who want open borders, what we need is more immigrants to grow the economy, because out capitalist society can’t hack it. In all the places I look at in the world — China, India, and elsewhere, it seems to me that they have enormous populations that until recently were very poor.

   • Alex, Thorium based fission reactors could be the solution while we get fusion up and running. Thorium does have some challenges, but should be a lot easier than fusion.

     The problem with West Virginia, is that either the people are not able to adjust to the economy or the economy is not flexible enough to adjust to them. A good example of this was when the economy in Russia collapsed in the 1990s the people created their own economy, that provided the basics of food, shelter and social interaction. The problem with the US economy is that once you are removed from it, you are not allowed to create your own economy (the IRS will hunt you down and have you shot if you try to do this) and your social connections will be removed, this will eventually lead to drug abuse and death (the opioids crisis). Anybody can be turned into an opioid addict, by removing all their social connections to society. The US has one of the most controlled economies in the world, that is designed to keep a certain part of the population in great wealth and power and the rest in their place. Economic mobility is strictly controlled, you would not want those in West Virginia thinking they have a future, this would be bad for business and the oligarchy.

     The most serious consequences of climate action in the wrong direction would be something that reduces the ability to feed the population. If this happens, you have a hungry population and access to weapons. If you are hungry and you have a gun and you see a person with a basket of potatoes, you will naturally shot the person with potatoes, now expand this to today’s society with nuclear weapons. Climate change will not cause the extinction of human society, the wars for resources and food will finish off the human species much faster than climate change.

   • India is still a complete mess, except for a small part of the population. From my travels to China (about once a year for the last 8 years), here is what I observed. China was poor because its economic and society system, in the 60s and 70s was not able to take advantage of its resources, energy and people. With the changes in the 80s, with controlled investment and controlled capitalism it was better able to take advantage of its resources, energy and people. By being more efficient it was able to expand exponentially. There are side effects the air and water pollution being some of the major ones. To expand more, China needs external resources, this is why it is investing heavily into Africa, other parts of Asia and Canada.

     Money is not the limit to capitalism, more money can be created by the central banks it is resources. Debt is an result of the current economic system, you cannot have capitalism, if all the debt around the world would be paid, the current economic system would stop. The secret to winning in capitalism is to make sure that others have debt and have to pay you according to the exponential function.

     The main limits to exponential economic growth and population growth are energy and resource limits, if you run out of an important resource or energy, then no amount of economic stimulus or money will help, the economy will decline, the limits will be due to laws of physics and not economics.

     Here is a good blog post on “Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist”
     https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

   • @Pavel, you wrote:

     “The US has one of the most controlled economies in the world, that is designed to keep a certain part of the population in great wealth and power and the rest in their place. Economic mobility is strictly controlled, you would not want those in West Virginia thinking they have a future, this would be bad for business and the oligarchy.”

     Let’s look at that for just a second with two of the biggest tech. companies in the world, Google and Apple. As I recall, Larry P. and Sergey B. were grad. students at Stanford whose greatest prior achievement before Google was trying to develop a system to order pizzas using internet faxes (which didn’t work because pizza joints couldn’t be bothered to check their fax orders). IIRC they were given $5,000 by their professor to incorporate Google once he saw how good their ideas were, but they ran the first iterations of their world-beating search engine and refined their ideas using servers under a desk in a lab in Stanford. I remember reading one of Brin’s their first papers: “Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data” which was thick with set-theoretic math:

     http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/dic.html
     http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/
     http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~mib/

     “The existing methods for deriving the rules consist of two steps:
     1. Find the large itemsets for a given .
     2. Construct rules which exceed the confidence threshold from the large itemsets in step 1. For example, if ABC is a large itemset we might check the confidence of AB -> C, AC -> B and BC -> A. In this paper we address both of these tasks, step 1 from a performance perspective by devising a new algorithm, and step 2 from a semantic perspective by developing conviction, an alternative to confidence.”

     [“INFINITY Men don’t give birth” was one of their conviction implication rules! They weren’t woke when they started Google!]

     My point is that although they were supported by research grants and their professor gave them $5 grand (it may have been a bit more, but it was in that range), Google had very humble beginnings and essentially anyone with the math background and the insight (and the help of the coauthors) could probably have invented the conviction implication model they used. Now, it’s true, Sergey Brin was unusually talented (his father was a U. of MD math professor who wanted out of the Communist Soviet Union because they didn’t want him and his wife working on certain things like rockets because he was a Jewish Refusenik.)

     “The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey’s paternal grandmother.[8] In 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Mikhail Brin announced that it was time for the family to emigrate.[8] They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father was “promptly fired”. For related reasons, his mother had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, afraid their request would be denied as it was for many refuseniks. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.[8]”

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

     My point here is that the idea that the birth of Google was “controlled” is farcical.

     How about Apple? Remember the original Apple computers? In my opinion, Apple’s eventual success with that kludgy, home brew idea of a machine wasn’t due to the genius of Steve Jobs “borrowing” the idea for the GUI from Xerox PARC for the Macintosh, it was Wozniak’s ability to cobble together a working personal computer *combined* with their insight to sell the Apple II to SCHOOLS:

     “Its price was within the reach of many middle-class families, and a partnership with MECC helped make the Apple II popular in schools.[62] By the end of 1980 Apple had already sold over 100,000 Apple IIs.”

     Getting the original Apple II computers into elementary and secondary schools in the United States was one of the most prescient things they did. After that, tens and hundreds of thousands of children in the US had learned their first programming on an APPLE. I did (and then a Radio Shack TRS-80 Mod I with 4K of RAM and a cassette tape drive.) My point here is that if people had looked at the original Apple computer, could *anyone* have predicted today’s trillion-dollar company and the iPhone?

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I

     Of course, the story of both behemoths is long, complicated and enthralling, but both these companies started with almost laughable original ideas. If Brin’s family wasn’t given an exit visa by the Commies, he and Larry wouldn’t have met, the pizza ordering by internet fax idea would probably have been done by someone at Caltech, and the conviction/implication for “Men do not give birth” might not have been INFINITY. It sure isn’t now!

     To circle back around: The American capito-socialistic system certainly had no prior knowledge of Wozniak, Brin, Page, or anything they did (unless someone was really into the Home Brew Computer Club in Palo Alto, or similarly situated.) It wasn’t really very controlled – at least not *at the beginning*. In fact, the story of both companies is a lot more chaotic than it was controlled. Miraculous is another way to put it:

     “Cassette storage may have been inexpensive, but it was also slow and unreliable. The Apple II’s lack of a disk drive was “a glaring weakness” in what was otherwise intended to be a polished, professional product. Recognizing that the II needed a disk drive to be taken seriously, Apple set out to develop a disk drive and a DOS to run it. Wozniak spent the 1977 Christmas holidays designing a disk controller that reduced the number of chips used by a factor of 10 compared to existing controllers. Still lacking a DOS, and with Wozniak inexperienced in operating system design, Jobs approached Shepardson Microsystems with the project. On April 10, 1978 Apple signed a contract for $13,000 with Sheperdson to develop the DOS.[61]”

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series#Advertising,_marketing,_and_packaging

     Once they made their first billion, though…

   • If human life is reduced to being just a virus based on DNA that will inevitably destroy itself, if that’s where we wind up after the Enlightenment, you really don’t want to live through what will happen next and neither do I. That’s about the most nihilistic, reductionist view of human life that I can imagine. Seriously – let’s preempt the end of the world now. Cyanide works.

     I have to wonder if Jeff Bezos doesn’t really believe this?

   • That is the core of the problem, society has not been able to move beyond DNA, the 100s of millions of years of evolution that got us to this point. As a society we still have primitive short term thinking, we need to think as a species, beyond ourselves as greedy individuals, and beyond our own lifespans (100 years, 1000 years and etc). But unfortunately our current economic system rewards short term greedy individualistic sociopath behaviour. People like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, succeed by being born into the right family, at the right place at the right time and taking advantage of opportunities much more than hard work and intelligence. If they did not have the opportunities, hard work and intelligence would not get them to their current economic position. The percentage of people that start at poverty level and succeed in moving up is very small.

     Personally, I think people like Sergei Korolev were way more successful than Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. What Korolev managed to do with the limited resources and society structure available was truly amazing.

     To be better as a society we have to start thinking beyond our DNA. The main limits to society are not money and economics, it is the current energy and resource level available at the current technological level. If the energy and resource level is not increasing exponentially, no amount of money will create exponential growth. Current economic thinking is complete horse manure.

     The basic needs for society to grow are food, shelter and human connections. We need to provide these, within the limits of our resources and energy. We also need to make sure that individuals in society are not disenfranchised from society.

     A good goal for society would be to plan to become Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale, this should ensure our survival in the 1000s of years. We cannot predict break through in technology, but we can estimate growth using current energy consumption and resource consumption to see how long society can last, right now it looks like we have a couple of 100 years (if climate change does not wipe us out sooner), and then we go back to a hunter and gather society at best, because of the available energy and resource level at the time. We have to start now, making changes to have society last 1000 years, if we have a technology breakthrough (i.e. controlled nuclear fusion), we can adjust the estimates at the time, but hoping that the invisible hand of economics will solve resource and energy limits is foolish.

     The other major mistake that economics makes, is thinking that if we put more money into innovation we will magically get new discoveries. Most of societies innovations and major technological breakthroughs were discovered between 1870 and 1970. Since then we have had good incremental growth, but no major breakthroughs. We have already discovered the easy stuff, now we move onto problems that may take generations to figure out. The current venture capitalist model, with its 2 to 5 year exit plan will fail at innovation that requires decades or centuries of R&D.

     The final problem for society will be to solve entropy, this will require at least being on a Type III Kardashev civilization, but first we have to make it to Type I.

     Human society is at a major point, we can decide to move beyond our DNA and continue the Enlightenment into an interstellar society that can last millions (or longer) of years, or we follow our current primitive greedy thinking and go extinct. Although going extinct would solve Fermi’s paradox.

   • Just a note to users “Pavel” is a foreign national who is trying to meddle in our election. He has admitted this to me in the past. This may or may not be a crime depending on who you ask. His comments should be taken as seriously as Putin himself.

   • @Toucan Sam: It’s not lost on me and hasn’t been from the first words he wrote. At least he’s civil! I see Philip’s blog has finally gotten some of the attention it deserves!

     @Philg: You have a fan in Russia!

     @Vladimir: thank you for the link to the article about the sunshades at the L1 point, that’s some heavy shit, man – and I mean that in a good way. I also applaud your dedication to explaining yourself lucidly.

     “In terms of human engineering projects, the mass and scale of the sunshades will also be similar to current terrestrial civil engineering projects such as the Chinese Three Gorges Dam [20], and require a mass production of coated thin material equivalent to the current world decadal production of aluminium foil. Nevertheless, scholarly work has yet to identify a scientific showstopper for its implementation [36].”

     That’s an awful lot of aluminium foil, but the theoretical work and analysis of the problem in that paper is fascinating. There are some awfully smart people in the world, hopefully we won’t have to find out what it’s like to run out of resources and go extinct.

   • @Pavel:

     I tend to support the idea of a renaissance in nuclear power. It’s crazy that we’re not doing it. What’s really scandalous is that people are being coerced into believing that life will become impossible or necessarily catastrophic without drastic reductions in people’s quality of life. We shouldn’t be content to live in this world that way.

   • @Pavel: St. Greta has solutions, but they’re not anywhere near the level of some of the ones you touch on, and frankly they’re regressive and very coercive, needlessly punitive and fatalistic. Finally, it has always been apparent to me that humanity will inevitably transform itself into an interplanetary and eventually, interstellar species. In the meantime we should be doing as much as possible to lift people out of poverty, promote sensible population management (which we can easily do using existing contraceptive technology) and most importantly, preserve the value of the individual as primary. It’s simplistic, but I’m a big believer in our Declaration of Independence. You should be too:

     “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

   • @Pavel: And I’ll take the bait, maybe you actually do know Putin, or can get a message to him. Mine would be simple:

     Let’s work together to make the world a less tragic place. The suffering is needless. My father played a small part at one time in his life helping to implement technologies dedicated to ensuring our mutually assured destruction. To this moment he regrets the situation had developed to the point that humanity relied on the threat of mutual annihilation to muddle through its continued existence. But that was where we were: grappling with each other in an insane dance with death. All things can be better if we want them to be. It’s not a zero sum game, we are not prisoners, our future is not a Hobson’s choice, and we are not intrinsically evil. Let’s cut it out and make the world grand.

   • It looks like Toucan Sam has caught up to me again! I will have to run fast, before he can foil my US election meddling plans! And I have been mistaken for a Russian!!! LOL 🙂 🙂 🙂

     Currently, I live in Canada, and I am a Canadian citizen, but I was born in Prague, Czech Republic. I would be very careful with Russia and Putin. I was not alive at the point when Russia visited Prague using tanks in 1968, but my parents tell me that this was a very scary time.

     https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/19/prague-1968-snapshots-day-freedom-died

     To understand Russia takes a deep understanding of its history and culture, it can be very welcoming, but extremely brutal at the same time. Russia also has very little history of democracy and it will take a very long time for Russia to change. Perestroika, may have changed the government at the time, but it did not change the culture. It was very foolish of the West to think that Russia suddenly became a democracy with Perestroika. It is very important for world peace for Russia and the US to have a good relationship, the US has to be extremely careful and strong, but not paranoid or naive.

     Perestroika did give a chance for Eastern European countries with history of democracy, like the Czech Republic, to establish democracies again, Czechoslovakia was a democracy from 1918 until 1938 and then established again in 1989.

     On the Declaration of Independence, Tomas Masaryk, founded Czechoslovakia in 1918 on the same principles as the US. Kind of interesting that Canada’s Declaration of Independence did not happen really happen until 1982, and we still have people in Canada worshipping the Queen in 2019. On the “value of the individual as primary” from my understanding, is the rights of society should not take precedence over the basic rights of the individual. This is extremely important, modern democracy can not function without this.

     Sunshades at the L1 point is probably the only way to really reverse the effects of Climate Change without side effects, there are some other Geo-engineering possibilities, but they all involve putting more stuff into the atmosphere which could have unforeseen consequences. The other advantage is that building a Sunshade at L1 would give us the technology to build a sun reflector at the L2 Mars point, starting the process of terraforming Mars. This is why SpaceX has to get their BFR working and Blue Origin the New Glen Rocket working, although it would be also good if somebody could restart the NERVA project form the 1960’s. The construction of the sunshade could potentially start in the 2030s.

     https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910017902.pdf

     Saint Greta’s solutions (and most other environmentalists), if implemented would mean starvation, population reduction, and going back to a hunter and gather society. We as a society must move to a higher energy level, this should have the benefit of moving everyone out of poverty, otherwise we go extinct and everything that we have accomplished so far, will have been for nothing.

     On the Kardashev Scale, here is a good video

4. “(capitalism is perfect for forcing society into exponential growth)”
   All the other kinds of economies do a great job at keeping population growth down by killing or starving people.

5. “No one has explained to Greta that the modern world is complex and different and … people in Africa or in many Asian countries want to live at the same wealth level as in Sweden.”

   I wonder how President Putin knows that Greta is not aware of this phenomenon. Somehow should tell him that it’s the poor countries of the planet who will be least able to deal with rising sea levels, crop failures and so forth. Untold millions of such people face the likelihood of an even lower standard of living and some people think that the price of chairs is a relevant issue.

6. A musician friend tells me those guitars on the wall cost more than the chairs.

7. I’d call it the “Putin-Greenspun Circlejerk”, a hypothetical scenario without basis in reality.

8. How is it not ridiculous that she needs to defend what her parents own?

   • Seriously? It’s not ridiculous – it’s essential. In Greta’s world, everyone should constantly be on alert and defensive about everything, literally, to save the world before any more of her childhood is stolen from her. Greta advocates that everyone be scrutinized regarding not just what they own, but how they travel, what they eat, how they attend school, vote, and every other aspect of their lives, including what they think and how they think. Everything is political and it all matters to her in the vanguard of the newly radical climate crisis movement. There won’t be anything left untouched:

     https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/climate-change-greta-thunberg.html

     “Kids her age have not seen much of life. Her worldview might be unrealistic, her priorities out of balance. But in our time, and in her cause, that seems to be a plus. People have had enough of balance and perspective. They want single-minded devotion to the task at hand.”

     So fanaticism is the new normal. No balance and perspective.

     And it all goes to hell from there:

     https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/climate-crisis-ethical-consumption-greta-thunberg-environment

9. Ridiculous is the rank hypocrisy this child of privelege so ostensibly displays by lecturing poor that they need to get poorer so that she can enjoy her life as a cult spokesman. Her handlers are totally tone-deaf, and this photo is just one example.

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