Thinking About Thunberg
I think most people will agree that the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg draws very polarising opinions from people. On the one hand she supports and speaks out for a very just, urgent cause but on the other hand she is arguably nothing but a puppet to the powers that control her and, at best, a media sensation with a limited lifespan.
A Worthy Voice or Simply a Figurehead?
To those who admire and applaud Thunberg, think about this. Essentially she’s a climate activist with no qualifications whatsoever on the subjects about which she speaks. Ordinarily there would be nothing wrong with this but the travesty is that she’s lauded as one of the top voices on climate change at the moment but she seemingly has no idea of how to execute her unrealistic demands.
Some argue that she doesn’t need qualifications in order to bring awareness to her cause and on some level this is valid, but in Thunberg’s case she is being allowed to sit on academic and political panels and ‘advise’ the world on how to very urgently change its ways with seemingly little or no forethought as to the implications of her advice. She evidently has little understanding of the world’s complex climate history otherwise she’d know just how unreasonable her demands are. How can you be a voice for social change yet only have a limited understanding of the implications of that change?
The 2021 WHO Media Briefing
Thunberg’s embarrassing and uncomfortable cameo in the WHO Media Briefing on COVID-19, Climate Change and Covid Vaccine Equity saw her speak via video link for only about a minute at a time while offering nothing new to her rhetoric for climate change mitigation. What she appears to repeat from pre-written scripts is a message that has been gathering momentum since the birth of the modern climate change movement in the 1970s and thus offers nothing new in the way of socioeconomic comment or contextual solutions to solve the causes she champions. While later fielding questions from journalists, she is unable to articulate her answers and instead slips uncomfortably back into her well rehearsed rhetoric of how we must all look after one another and do more to reduce our emissions. Again, nothing new and boring repetition at best.
Greta Thunberg on the COVID-19 Vaccination
On the subject of the COVID-19 pandemic and pharmaceuticals, of which she has no qualifications, Thunberg is asked by a journalist whether or not she would advocate a vaccine strike amongst the youth in wealthy countries in order to allow unprotected people in poorer countries access to the vaccine. The reasoning for this being that a vaccine strike by millions of children in wealthy countries who seemingly don’t, as of current research, need to take the vaccine would free up millions of doses for the poorer countries until these poorer governments have access to and are able to share vaccines with their citizens.
To this question, Thunberg again stutters into familiar rhetoric while being unable to adequately answer the question posed to her. What she does manage to say is that she “would not advocate for people to not take the vaccine”. It’s not clear from this statement whether or not she supports the proposal of a youth vaccine strike, again being unable to clearly articulate herself. If she does not support a youth vaccine strike, this potentially puts millions of people in poorer countries around the world at risk of greater suffering than if they had access to the vaccine.
On Jair Bolsonaro
The next question from a journalist asks Thunberg what message she would send the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, someone who supports the decimation and development of the Amazon rainforest, about climate change. Her reply immediately avoids the question by saying that we shouldn’t be concentrating on singling out individuals and goes on to state what many of us know, which is that Bolsonaro has failed to adequately address climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic in his tenure so far. Needless to say she comes nowhere close to answering the question and, yet again, repeats her familiar rehearsed script.
Donations of Surplus Vaccines
Asked about whether richer countries should donate surplus vaccines to the poorer countries, she fails yet again to answer this question and seems to contradict her earlier ambiguous statement of whether or not she supports a youth vaccine strike. She goes on to say that “we must prioritise looking after people in the most vulnerable risk groups no matter which countries they come from”. Well, if world leaders should be prioritising looking after people in the most vulnerable risk groups then surely a youth vaccine strike would make sense. This would free up all those vaccines that could be sent around the world to poorer countries less able to afford them and in which people are most vulnerable to disease and illness.
Support for Thunberg
Every single question put to Thunberg in the hour-long briefing sees her stuttering and reverting to pre-scripted text while she fails to adequately address anything asked of her. Far be this from a Greta Thunberg-bashing piece, she is a likeable individual and I wholeheartedly support her cause to give more attention to climate change action. I also support her rhetoric that not enough is being done by world leaders as a matter of urgency but I feel she is in over her head, regardless of the fact that she chooses to do this. Watching her try to field scientific questions about which she evidently has little real-world understanding and which require education and experience to answer, is quite frankly rather cringeworthy.
What Thunberg is trying to do for social change is admirable but is she the right person to be used as a global political icon and catalyst for that change? She and the world media have garnered attention and support from millions of her peers and other demographics around the globe which has quite rightly brought attention to an urgent issue, something unlikely to have happened in the absence of a figure with which the youth can identify, but Greta Thunberg is an activist and an influencer, not a politician and a climate scientist.
She is absolutely allowed a global voice, however formal political and academic press conferences are not the correct platform for that voice. She is an inspirational figure to be followed by people who support her cause, but to be held as some sort of social and political visionary is just absurd.
Thunberg claims to not enjoy the attention and adulation her cause brings her and says despite being uncomfortable in the limelight, she’s chosen this position because her drive to save the environment overpowers any other feelings. While this is commendable, surely being able to succinctly articulate the solutions to her cause is a prerequisite?
What she is able to say she says well, but failure offer real-world contextual solutions to the issues for which she campaigns surely makes her nothing but a figurehead. Is it then not irresponsible for the world to laud her as one of the definitive voices on climate change action as there are many other, more suitably qualified people who already campaign for this very cause.
Why Qualifications Are Important in Thunberg’s Position
The reason why Ms Thunberg needs qualifications to be one of the global voices for climate change is because at present she clearly has no concept of how her demands will affect the real world, socioeconomically speaking. If she really has considered all the implications of what she’s demanding then she’d know that her ultimate goal of net zero emissions is unrealistic given the industrialised world in which we currently live and the time-frame in which she expects results.
If she’s to be a spokesperson for climate change she should also know that calling for an immediate reduction in global emissions is unrealistic on the basis that climate warming carbon dioxide and other anthropogenic climate forcing emissions do not disappear from earth’s atmosphere in a matter of decades but will hang around for thousands of years while global temperatures continue to rise, and that’s if the world halted all emissions tomorrow. This call for an immediate reduction in global emissions is impractical at best considering roughly 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. Immediate action however is not unrealistic.
Assuming we all do what she’s requesting and down tools in the quest for zero emissions, what is supposed to happen to all the world’s existing industry and economy? What happens to the existing ‘dirty’ global industry? Are all the world’s mines, factories, construction sites and so on just left to rot and pollute the earth further while dozens of toxic chemicals leach into the earth? How does she think the world will make space for and generate a new ‘clean’ emissions-free industry? By using current industry to clear out the old, which means decades of escalated emissions while scrapping and recycling in order to achieve her goal.
I’m sure she knows very well that a warming climate increases human exposure to toxic chemicals, doesn’t she? Surely she’s thought about that, or maybe not. What happens to poorer countries that rely on outdated ‘dirty’ industry to keep their economies afloat and can’t afford to immediately adopt her zero emissions policies, what happens to people’s jobs, to global trade, to life as we know it in the transition period?
A zero emissions world can only be a reality with massive global cooperation to invent, construct and replace all the current ‘dirty’ industry with ‘clean’ machines, construction plants, factories, planes, boats, cars and so on. This would take decades of planning, getting global leaders to agree on numerous and highly complex policies and that’s before the construction of this new zero emissions world takes shape. The industrialised world right now can’t get a basic thing like equitable food distribution right, it’s not like global leaders haven’t had enough time to sort that out.
The Future for Thunberg
Thunberg’s seminal moment was in August 2018 when she protested alone outside the Swedish parliament, aged fifteen. Understandably, exposure was exactly what she was after. August 2021 will be three years of campaigning for Thunberg and sadly the world’s will to change is nowhere in sight. Change, when applied to something as complex as global socioeconomic issues, is a very gradual process — it’s in our human nature to be resistant to it. The next few decades will no doubt see great change in how the world treats the environment, this though will just simply not happen overnight.
Now eighteen, Thunberg is arguably still far too young to grasp the gravity of her situation. A qualified adult should be fulfilling her role, somebody who can deal with the emotional rollercoaster of world issues. Through no fault of her own at her age, she is not educated enough and has limited life experience on which to draw in order to articulate herself on such complex world matters.
Not believing that climate change is being treated with the urgency it deserves, Thunberg is also an activist that supports radicalism. Ironically, it’s this radicalism that will no doubt end up alienating the very political allies she is trying to attract.
What happens when the next big climate sensation comes along and the world realises Ms Thunberg is past her expiry date? How will she feel about missing out on her childhood in exchange for years of being subjected to heavy issues no child should have to deal with? She is a scared teenager, there’s nothing wrong with that but as someone with Aspergers her parents should never have allowed their child to be put in such a position, an urgent and overwhelming position which can only serve to exacerbate issues of anxiety and depression as the pressure for her to produce results mounts.
Nothing But a Public Relations Stunt
Solving the issue of exacerbated climate change is obviously far more complex than Thunberg realises in her contrived media appearances. For the most part, her rhetoric contains nothing but carefully scripted platitudes, edited by the very people who have a vested interest in selecting what the public is fed in the mainstream media.
This public relations stunt is an attractive cop-out for world leaders and government organisations to appear as if something is being done about the issues of climate change and world health. They are exactly the people Thunberg is calling out for their inaction but by giving a platform to an unqualified individual abdicates these organisations of a certain amount of responsibility. It is the world leaders and heads of these organisations who should be doing more to tackle climate change by offering up some actionable strategies, and then acting on these strategies, rather than relying on on-going press conferences and platitudes to make it appear as if something is being done.
I call this a public relations stunt because that’s what it seems, a political diversion tactic to draw attention away from the real issues that never receive the global exposure they deserve. Overpopulation and its demand on the earth’s natural resources is often seen to be the root cause of climate change but in fact it’s the world’s wealthiest portion of the population in the most developed countries that is a disproportionally large contributor to climate change, due to overconsumption. If people really stopped to think about the effects of curtailing the global population as a solution to climate change, the solution — while by no means simple — would be to address the issue of overconsumption in the world’s most developed and populous countries. One way to tackle this would be to start slowing and stabilising the population growth in these countries, thereby reducing the need for overconsumption. Of course, addressing this issue of overconsumption also means addressing the issue of global wealth distribution, which is not a simple task.
The solution seems simple in theory but of course in practice it’s hugely complicated and there is no quick fix. Greater access to education for everyone including in developing countries, stabilising the global population and reducing human demand on natural resources in highly developed countries would be a start. In the long term this would allow the environment to recover and will enable the planet to eventually return to a state of homeostasis. It’s always easier for the powers that be to appear to be doing something like supporting the latest environmental fad than to actually do something. Sorting out the issue of human-induced, exacerbated climate change by reducing the demand on earth’s natural resources conflicts with the financial interests of the world’s wealthiest corporations and changing this mindset is the first hurdle.
