It‘s funny whole parts of the establishment have spent so much time fighting against „mansplaining“, white men as authority figures, for cultural relativism, and critical post-something, that they must be really relieved to finally have found someone championing a cause that actual experts (not al gore) have talked about a long time.
Do we really need to diminish her message into identity politics? When I see she's doing that I think "I'm glad she's doing that, though I don't think it's going to convince those not otherwise convinced", not "Thank goodness, with her I finally have a leftist bingo".
I don’t care either way. I just hate that everything boils down to elaborate story telling. She had to travel by boat to the UN. All of this is highly theatrical. The facts have been known for a long time, just talking about it won’t change anything. Whatever she has to say is not new, interesting or particularly intelligent. It can’t be. She has to rely on experts and then packages their statements in digestible, made for TV, Twitter and Instagram form.
I honestly don't understand the point of this reasoning, and I'm forced to conclude (because it transpires in every word you say) that you are somehow massively jealous of the attention that is being given to her.
So what? I don't get it, is she supposed to produce original research else she can't speak at all?? Well no shit she is not saying anything not already published in peer-reviewed papers. She is selling it to an audience that did not care but may begin to care because of all the publicity, and crucially, to an audience that needs to be on this side for any meaningful change to get done. Not new? Not particularly intelligent? But what, is she speaking at a climatology symposium? No, she is speaking to a general audience, she is speaking to be heard in the news and by word-of-mouth.
I wouldn't say I'm jealous, just highly annoyed to whom the public is paying attention to. It's the same environmental activism theatrics that Greenpeace and WWF have been doing for all of their existence.
As a counterpoint take John Baez for example: He decided started beginning in 2010 to try to organise engineers, physicists and mathematicians around the global ecological crisis
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/this-weeks-f.... Was he interviewed or reported on by CNN? Of course not. How often has David MacKay (https://withouthotair.com) been given the chance to speak to the public?
> travel by boat to the UN. All of this is highly theatrical
The hate would have been full of claims of hypocrisy had she hopped on a Boeing or a trans-Atlantic liner (if there are still liner services). She says she probably won't be able to go, the someone offers a place on a racing yacht. If she'd stayed at home the message would no doubt be trying to spin up her not feeling the UN important enough...
Storytelling and theatrics are central to human progress and always have been. If the level of international collaboration needed to solve the climate crisis can be achieved, then it will be achieved in part by changing hearts and minds on an unprecedented scale, including through stories of iconic events and individuals, consumed by billions of people through social media. There is no point being cynical about this.
Totally fair, if the list of opinions rejected includes 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists, you're already rejecting the authority of those who have the ability, education, and training to speak to the problem, so a random girl nor internet user won't change one's mind.
Please don’t argue with imaginary people about issues you imagine they care about. It’s really a waste of all our time, and it’s the easiest argument to win since you control both sides.
There are plenty of actual people with present concerns you can talk to.
> finally have found someone championing a cause that actual experts (not al gore) have talked about a long time
Though i dont agree with the Identity politics direction, This comment has some great insight.
Look at who we listen to nowadays. People on IG and YT have more reach, more aggregate persuasive "voice" than experts do today. We listen to entrepreneurs, politicians, to actors and football players, but not the experts who have spent >10 years (often 20-40 yrs) intensely dedicated to mastering certain immensely difficult fields.
So the next time a little girl stands up on a podium, give it a listen and then ask yourself why she got your attention and the pleading of 1000s of diverse scientists couldnt...
Except she did not get our attention. She got that of the media (in a wide sense, including social media, etc.), that found it more newsworthy, hence pushed it onto the general public.
She is parroting ideas that the scientifically-inclined minds fed her. I am not sure if she understands everything she talked about (given her age). Using kids to sell ideas is "being used".
Per my understanding, climate-science is not yet settled, with varying and wide-ranging opinions among scientists. I certainly do not want politicians to take "urgent" actions based on incomplete data and evidence, since any such action is bound to have long-term problematic consqeuences to my wallet.
Greta is a smart kid, no denying that. However, I still believe she parrots a lot of information that she may not understand fully and is being used as a lobbying-tool to enact legislation. That, I have a problem with!
I can agree that what she says is used by others to promote their campaigns. Not her fault IMHO, though. I think she says reasonable things that are well researched, she doesn't talk about unsure thing; she mostly talks about the factual state of the world and demands answers and doesn't dictate solutions or what kind of action should be taken.
She is clearly a plant with handlers, institutional backing, and media favor. Children do not simply fall into the international spotlight, she is being heavily groomed, boosted, and prompted by public relations agents.
Climate activism is one of the more noble purposes for using children as mouthpieces, of course, it's not like she's a pawn of some nefarious shadow group, but for some of us it still leaves a bad taste. And being that she is a mouthpiece, it seems like a collective delusion that she's discussed like some kind of key actor.
Please don't forget that her school strike "fridays for future" sparked a whole movement of people her age (across europe) well before she got big in the media, a movement which since then produced many other people stepping in like "scientists for future" etc.
If you spark something like that and act like the symbol of the betrayed next generation, media support is the best thing you can wish for.
So rather than portraying this as something that is beeing done to her, I'd argue that she is entirely on board with the whole thing and more reflected about it than we give her credit for.
According to her Wikipedia a group called Fossil Free Dalsland contacted her first and suggested the school strike. Then another group called We Don't Have Time broadcast photographs to a wide online audience. Her strike was literally created by activist and media organizations, she is no more than a child spokesman for a viral marketing campaign.
Like I said, it is a collective delusion where you have to buy into every facet, including the messianic self-made image, or you hate little girls and the environment.
She got the attention of Aftonbladdet¹ because she protested on the first day of school after the holidays in front of the Swedish parliament, which is in itself something that any newspaper would have picked up – especially because it was in the midst of an pan-european heatwave which in many places resulted in the highest temperatures of the century.
So what do you suggest? Bright spotlights and a hard chair? A smoking interviewer with a deep voice who makes her regret she even dared to start thinking about the whole thing?
For me Greta Thunberg is mostly a moral figure. Somebody who convincingly claims they have a stake in the message they carry. This is the reason why I am not that much interested in her – I don't really need any convincing on that topic.
And because she is a moral figure, everything starts to make a lot more sense when you see the whole Pro- and Anti-Greta followership through a moralistic lense. The former ones are the ones who needed her push to stand up or who feel they have to defend her and the latter ones feel their own moral self image threatened because there comes a child who tells them they are not as good as a person as they thought they were. And when somebody tells you that, attacking their character is _always_ easier than changing your view of the world and your place in it. It is quite predictable in it's entirety, but that makes it fascinating in my eyes.
Exactly that moralistic viewpoint powers the nonsense I'm talking about. I think it's creepy that faceless actors are using a child to push a message, but she is a focal point for Good Morals.
The official narrative is that she is a precocious lone wolf climate crusader social prodigy, which is useful to the entrenched activists handling her because it saves them all the work of scientifically refuting climate deniers; now they can be simply painted as bullies. But because she is a moral icon, even pointing out the institutional backing behind her viral status is a form of heresy.
Tbh I think the truth is somewhere in between and much more complicated than it is usally painted especially in the anglosphere (which has turned extremely tribal in the UK and US over the past decade).
She apparently got her first contact with climate groups through a writing contest where she wrote on climate change/climate politics, so her motivation was prexisting. Whether they use her or she used them (or it was some kind of symbiosis or a cold blooded deal) would be hard to quantify objectively, especially if she has similar political goals than her, so I'd be careful with assumptions, especially if they make you sound like you go for an ad hominem attack. I remember myself als a 16 year old, I was definitly not unpolitical, quite the opposite and manipulating me into supporting something I didn't like would have been quite hard back then, maybe harder even harder than now.
Of course viewing her as a lone wolf is completely nuts and I am quite sure neither herself nor the people who started the school protests in her wake would subscribe to that notion (at least I heard it beeing discussed by some Fridays for Future kids in Germany). This is obviously a media narrative by journalists who got carried away. On the other hand claiming that she is "pushed around by faceless actors" is also a bit bland. Firstly if these actors weren't faceless but well known they wouldn't have to rely on somebody else to push messages out, secondly I'd argue that this symbolic action is far better than the alternative (something like flying drones over Heathrow Airport to get media attention), thirdly if "faceless actors" in the background worry you, there are much much better targets to attack (e.g. the UK prime minister, industry lobbyists in the US, etc.)
The topics she is speaking onare certainly not the ones that have a incredibly powerful lobby behind it (in terms on lobbying money spent), so if we speak of "creepy faceless actors" behind her, you can assume the actors on the opposite site are tenfold as creepy and faceless, certainly profit from discrediting the person and there is historical evidence that they exist, profit from it and use their influence.
All that aside. The future generations have a valid moral argument. We have known about global warming since half a century and did nothing – the opposite, in the wake of neoliberalism that followed the fall of the soviet union we made everything even more about profits than before. And now we are like that procrastinating kid that pushed homework away and tries to do it while the steps of the approaching teacher echo through the hallway: the only way to get out of this seems to break our own hand to be sent of to the nurse. From an outside perspective this is totally irrational behaviour unless there is proof that the reality looks different altogether. But there is no such proof, which is why the persons are attacked instead of their ideas. Not liking somebodies moral standpoint is a very weak defense when they stand for the wellbeing of many future generations and the survival of mankind.
I am experimenting with a strange thing - keeping two thoughts in my head at the same time. Maybe Greta is both honest and promoted by We Don't Have Time et al. Hm, head did not explode.
Edit: that was just a stupid thing to say. Sorry, you didn't claim she is dishonest.
> If she was a 45 year old accountant trying to take a stand on climate change I don't think she would be trotted out like this.
Because she inspired many other kids her age to start speaking up and do something. I can clearly remember when I was 16 and started to realize how bad the grown ups were actually at implementing all these things they thought me I should value. Starts with democracy and goes to environmentalism.
On a symbolic level she represents the generations who will get the blunt of it. The generations that will have to battle all of that mess the generations before them created.
I don't really see, why her decision to use that publicity should be any kind of valid critizism really, unless it is meant to be an ad hominem attack to avoid talking about the topic.
No, it's particularly striking that a high-school age girl has taken the initiative to start such large protests and raise awareness about the issue and about the fact that something needs to be done yesterday. More generally, we find young people protesting and taking action against irresponsible, greedy, amoral "45-year olds" (as you put it) that yield the power and use it to enrich themselves at the cost of a trashed planet for the next generation.
I think it's pretty obvious what the message here is: the (older) politicians and business men are incompetent or corrupt, the powerless youngsters are showing themselves to be infinitely more responsible. It's a striking image.
So the child that out of her own will started to strike for climate awareness is beeing used?
I didn’t follow every nook and crany of her story, but I didn’t see her promoting anything that a rational objective observer should also conclude.
What I did see, were a big amount of butthurt middle aged men who couldn’t handle what a girl telling them the truth does to their own self image. And instead of using this as a chance to groe as a person they start to rationalize their behaviour in ways which are uncompatible with the reality.
I remember there beeing school strikes in Germany inspired by her well before she was a topic in the national media landscape. The Germans school kids who followed her example saw it on social media mostly. Only once it was clear that that school striking swedish girl inspired a whole lot of others throughout Europe, the (German) media picked up. I remember thinking that is was a tiny bit late.
This wouldn't be extraordinary. Your claim however is. And you know the drill: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially when you use that claim in an ad hominem attack to silence someones arguments.
This spurns an interesting question: When is something of your own free will?
Disregard the subject matter for a moment, if you will, but if someone has been subtly indoctrinated enough (or a madman is fully convicted in his beliefs), are they truly their own?
In principle you are asking a good question here, but what fascinates me much more on this topic is just how allergic some people react given the idea that a 16 year old girl could question their morality.
Because this is what it always boils down to: figures like her act as a mirror and many people don't like what they see in it. And it is easier to attack the mirror than dealing with what it tells you.
I suspect most siding with her would stop once they actually need to carve into their own way of life. I've seen many environmentalist types care about the environment so long as it is not directly impacting theirs... It makes it easy to evangelize while being on the absolute upper crust of humanity.
Well, here's a different side of the coin - how many 16 year old suicide bombers are doing that of their own free will? Could a system of beliefs expected to lead to that end state be called 'indoctrination'?
Is the child that out of her own will started to make some porn movies been used?
I am not sure she have the ability or education to understand even half of the things she is saying, especially after she gave up school.
I didn't see any interview in which she demonstrated any thought process aside of activism.
I try to equivocate political activism and pornography. Both are quite acceptable when actor is adult and can spell consent. Bringing children to that area raises questions.
That's quite possibly the most overreaching analogy I've seen. Your entire argument is disingenuous and is meant to provoke an emotional response. It's also just wrong.
It's quite frustrating that even hackernews cannot have a reasonable conversation the moment Greta Thunberg is involved. Surely it's not so hard to avoid that at least the initial comments on a submission are ad hominem.
I've definitely noticed that there's something people find uniquely infuriating about an intelligent, well-spoken child that makes good points they disagree with. I think it's because suddenly all the usual excuses to dismiss arguments-- they're a paid shill, they're a political agent-- sound ridiculous, and the people don't know how to cope with the fact now that they have to argue for real and they're losing to a kid. It happened with Malala and it's definitely happening with Greta Thunberg too.
This phenomenon is strongly driven by political and us-vs-them psychology. Climate change denial has been tied to peoples' basic identities, which has been a huge factor in the US's inaction on climate change.
This was a conscious strategy by the same PR people that fought tobacco regulation. As documents come out from the oil companies from decades ago, journalists are documenting it. Season 1 of this podcast was extremely enlightening (haven't gotten to further seasons)
It's not purely Greta, it's becoming a common HN tendency on climate emergency related posts. Dozens and dozens of low effort comments, downvotes on every or every other comment, until it triggers some HN flamewar or spam flags and gets buried.
Which appears to have already happened in the short time I took to write this. It's gone from top of the front page, to nowhere on the first three pages.
I think Greta Thunberg makes a lot of people feel extremely uncomfortable and guilty about their extravagant lifestyles (I know I do!). She's uncompromising, and she doesn't go in for feel-good fairy tales about how we can save the planet if we all just do a little recycling.
Why do you think this place is above what happens on Reddit/Twitter? If anything, the concentration of groupthink and demographic is stronger here than anywhere else.
Politics is the decision making around how to divide and use our shared resources. Addressing climate change in a meaningful way requires rethinking our current approach. It's a fundamentally political issue.
I do not understand the hate she consistently gets specifically in the anglosphere. Even the reddit thread about her the other day was full of hate. I honestly don't understand, can someone explain?
Of course she's can't save the world alone, but she's generated a lot of attention for an important issue that a lot of people are ignoring. What's so terrible about that?
I really like her. She's got this highly logical, consequential way of thinking that I've only seen in much older, highly successful people before. All she's saying essentially boils down to: If A leads to B, and you don't like B, you can't support A. She's not a figurehead, she's way ahead of the adults around her.
Those who hate her either wish they could be as influential as her or hate the threats to their way of life that they believe will be the inevitable result of seriously addressing climate change.
> I honestly don't understand, can someone explain?
She's a woman, she's young, she's autistic.
She faces a triple-whammy of discrimination because of that.
She's also calmly reminding people that climate change is real and poses a risk of harm to the world, and she's actually doing something to stop that. For some reason climate change is absurdly polarised.
Well, maybe if the world listened to actual climate scientists, Nobel laureates, NASA and its satellite data, or even freaking Al Gore, we wouldn't have come to this.
But people didn't listen - or rather, enough people didn't listen, and now we have to listen to a young autistic teenager girl berating us for sitting idle while the world burns (metaphorically speaking), and IMHO we all deserve it, and you'd better get used to it, because that's not even the remotely worse part of the climate change.
Here's where you lose me. I don't see a world burning, and past predictions of coming apocalypse have proven false.
Yes, the world is warming. We're going back to the temperature of the world a few million years ago, still much cooler than it was during most of the history of life on Earth.
> If your argument is that returning to temperatures a few millions years ago is apocalypse, you've lost the ability to reason.
As humans did not live on Earth a few million years ago, insofar as human society is concerned, why would the fact that temperatures had previously occurred a few million years ago be even slightly inconsistent with them being apocalyptic?
Close relatives of humans have lived on Earth for much longer. Unless you have evidence otherwise, I'm betting they required similar climate conditions.
That they lived when the climate was significantly different and were replaced when it became more like current climate is evidence otherwise (it's not, in and of itself, conclusive evidence, but it is evidence.)
They also weren't trying to hold together an advanced technological society. Survival on the margins of existence may be possible long after society as we know it is in ruins.
Only if you make the significant (and I think unwarranted) assumption that the advantage the genus homo had over other apes was climate adaptation and not greater intelligence, standing upright, etc.
> Only if you make the significant (and I think unwarranted) assumption that homo sapiens' advantage over other apes was climate adaptation and not greater intelligence, standing upright, etc.
No, it's evidence both for the general conclusion and that specific point, it doesn't require that point as an assumption.
Evidence is any fact whose existence makes a conclusion more likely than it would be in the absence of that fact.
Given X could potentially cause Y, the fact that Y happened is not evidence of X.
In other words, the mere fact that something happened isn't evidence for a proposed (even plausible) cause. Proving the cause requires further evidence.
Close relatives of humans didn't have to sustain societies, and as animals living out in nature are much stronger and more resilient. Plus they could die in droves, and nobody would care (in fact, other apes, living further away wouldn't even know it).
So, if you mean we get to enjoy living in conditions fit for apes, then you might be on to something, but I wouldn't exactly rejoice about it...
If the NASA and IPCC graphs of global temperature, and rate of change don't convince you, nothing will.
Most predictions on climate heating are turning out to be far worse in actuality. Sea level rise is neatly tracking the IPCC's worst case prediction. Yet they're still putting out the middle ground , conservative case.
GP spelt out they were metaphorically speaking. I don't see them claiming to be one of the climate scientists etc.
Warming or burning, it's shaping up to ruin society as we know it. At least if we are going to believe the scientists and economists at the IPCC. They seem to be expecting at least two of the four horsemen. That seems pretty apocalyptic to me.
If that;s not enough to inspire action, what the hell is? New York knee deep in water?
Disagree. The effect to society the warming causes is apocalyptic (1 billion climate refugees). Pointing to rising sea level and temperature is the cause, the effect is our society being unrecognizable in a few short decades.
if a child has a fever its common language to call that "burning up".
This doesn't mean she incinerated it means the overall temperature of her body is increased beyond what it needs for a prolonged amount of time. Leave it like that and damage to organs will occur. Leave it too long and system failure will occur and the enough of the organs fail the entire body will die.
It works the earth as well. we're in the middle of a fever, leaving it like that will cause damage to organs. Leave it too long those organs (polar regions, tropical areas, ocean temps) will fail. These failures lead to chain reactions that equate to system failures. entire regions will become uninhabitable. Those on the extreme edge of survivable regions will have to leave to areas that can support them. Those that are use to living in "golden zones" are going to experience climate changes that turn those areas into very uncomfortable and potentially survivable conditions.
The language is accurate, its just not precise or pretty.
It’s the climate denial it’s that made her the face of climate advocacy, mostly because climate denialists are also ableist and sexist science-deniers.
Since when is she autistic? Autistic people don't get up on stage, go on live TV, speak eloquently and go on round the world sailing trips. I don't understand this recent push to dilute the word "autistic" into meaninglessness. What shall we call the poor people who sit on the floor flapping their hands because they're overwhelmed by the world around them?
She's also calmly reminding people that climate change is real
People don't need reminding. They heard nothing else for decades. It's not like it just slipped people's minds.
A hypocritical little girl (not a woman), with no experience of the world, is not going to suddenly get everyone to stop using cars or flying in airplanes. She isn't even willing to do that herself, as her stunt with the yaught that had to be sailed back home by people who flew to the destination showed.
For some reason climate change is absurdly polarised.
It's polarised because it's used as a stick to try and force hard left policies on the world, so anyone who isn't hard left will naturally be suspicious that the proposed remedies are all wrong and quite possibly the problem too.
This is especially true given the frequent unreliability of academics who claim to understand highly complex systems (e.g. economists), the failure of many previous predictions by climate scientists, and the near-violent hatred dished out to anyone who takes a skeptical position.
Recall that Thunberg argues for reducing carbon emissions by 50% in about 10 years. She offers no ideas for how to do that without causing a total collapse of global society that kills millions of people, the very thing that climate change activists claim they're trying to avoid. It is natural for people to consider that unhelpful at best, or self-promoting BS at worst. Why wouldn't people find her polarising?
In the end the only people who can really make a difference here are scientists and engineers. Thunberg is neither. She has literally nothing to contribute and should go back to school.
> She's a woman, she's young, she's autistic. She faces a triple-whammy of discrimination because of that.
...No she does not. In this context, one would argue that, on the contrary she benefits from these. Would she have had the same journey, had she been a 50 year old "regular" (non autistic) man?
No one would have cared.
What the... The point of this topic is basically that she's or should be irrelevant because of her age or her Asperger and now you say it's an advantage...
Sadly, that means that there's no means to convince them. If she'd done it in a rubber dingy and swam back across they would have rejected her on other grounds.
Commercial air travel pales in comparison to industrial CO2 output. It’s definitely something, but even if all air travel stopped it would barely make a dent.
People hate anyone else telling them what they should be doing, even if they are correct in doing so. The fact that it's a young girl is even more threatening for many adult men.
They are doing work that hopefully will result in manifold more benefit than boycotting a plane ride. If they don't fly they can't attend conferences, mobilise people, etc. What do you want them to do? Stop using computers and phones while they're at it?
It's the same reasoning of the classic "you defend socialism yet you buy products made under capitalism, oh my what a hypocrite".
I happen to have heard an interview with one of the sailors who was on the ship with her in the radio. He said that they took her there and they would have also done it with out her. He additionally added: Greta is not responsible for anything we do outside of taking her across the Atlantic.
The whole discussion is – frankly – quite ridiculous. Anybody who likes to lead it should really sit down, pause and really ask themselves what they are doing and why.
There is really only one compelling reason that comes to my mind why one would find the motivation to critizise environmentalists online for not beeing environmentalistic enough: their actions make you feel bad for some reason. You want the bad feeling to go away, so you find a explaination why they are bad. But it turns out the world still thinks they are good. Now you are in a bit of a problem. So you go online and try to change the world.
Only: it might be better for you and everybody around you if you instead went and tried to change yourself. This is of course much much harder, but lying to yourself about your own motivations has also it's costs..
> their actions make you feel bad for some reason.
Not at all. I already live a very spartan life and my carbon footprint is well below of most people who go around lecturing others on sustainable lifestyle. Eg, in the past 12 months, I have traveled zero miles on fossil fuels.
The class of professional globetrotting climate activists is so unbearable because they are among the worst polluters, yet spare no energy looking down on others for not doing enough.
Another thing: this isn't an issue where it is soley about personal carbon footprints. It is nice to do something on a personal level, but we are in deep fucking need of big political measures. Don't get me wrong, I cycle everywhere. I don't own a car, the wood that I own makes my carbon footprint negative – but that isn't going to save the planet, because only very few people are lucky enough to even be able considering adopting such a position.
So if we critizise people who professionally lobby for stricter climate measures, I fear we should show them how to do it better or remain silent. Armchair experts and all that jazz.
Yes, she did that. Her entourage of assistants weren't on the boat. They flew back and forth, several times. Therefore the whole endeavor had an undeniable net-positive carbon footprint.
I really don’t enjoy when this form of argument comes up, because it strikes me as both lazy and extremely unlikely that the speaker puts the same conditions on his own conduct.
I think you can both fly on planes and believe we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels dramatically. You can both believe that we should pay more tax to fund public services while not donating additional income to the government. You can work for Amazon while thinking they should pay their workers more. You can believe that the way the food industry treats animals is awful without being a vegan.
In my opinion, being a complete paragon of virtue is not a prerequisite of having an opinion on what would make the world a better place.
Ok, so just exactly who will these people listen to about the climate crisis? Because from where I'm sitting, no messenger is ever going to measure up to this exacting standard of personal purity.
We saw this 15 years ago with Al Gore, too. Who cares if he's right, he lives in a big house!
The guy is explaining to us poor fuckers how we should turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth, yet travels the world 24/7 between his private jet and his SUV?
Sure, sounds totally honest and convincing.
I don't think that's the case at all, the "hypocrisy" is just an excuse for their opposition to her message.
We all live in this system, and she's not advocating for living outside the system, she's advocating for changing it.
Nobody is advocating for everybody stopping flying tomorrow. We're advocating for developing technology so that within a few decades we can be carbon neutral.
Sure, sure. So trying to enforce it doesn't mean you'd argue for it? Sorry, that doesn't compute. It's fine to argue for it, btw. But claiming that "nobody does that"? Come on, that's nonsense.
She's attacking the number one birthright of every western citizen, to consume as much as they want in pursuit of luxury and comfort. How dare she suggest we should limit our personal consumption for a greater good?
When you throw in the fact that many (falsely) believe the science is wrong, you have a perfect storm.
You forget that she can be both a figurehead and a leader. That’s actually where the real problem is: as a ‘savior’ she anthropomorphises the climate crisis. Most people don’t know how to attack abstract ideas, but as soon as the idea gets a body, the party begins. IMHO, Thunberg could, in the long term, be a net negative to the climate discussion, because it allows for much stronger polarization.
For decades, anybody who reports on climate change, at least in the US, gets bombarded by hate mail. Given how much more effective Greta Thunberg is, I can imagine it only amplifies the hate.
I assume it's mostly just that women seem to make good targets for this kind of "2 minute hate" in communities that lean male in demographics. It also helps the "super-logical climate denier" vs "irrational hippie climate alarmist" thing that so many cling to even now. Everyone knows young females can't use logic, that's just science fact.
However, I like to think that there's at least some inkling that if a sufficient number of 16 years old are this uncompromising then anyone voting for climate denial today is just storing up problems for themselves in the future as these kids will be the ones paying for their retirement. And if they're paying for a needless climate emergency at the same time, sympathy is going to be in short supply.
It's a mixture of jealousy of all the attention she is getting, and simply not being able to take it that "a little 16 year old girl in pigtails is telling me what to do!" It only makes it even worse that she is absolutely right in almost anything she says, I imagine it makes it even more galling.
The thing is that people will react like that about anything regardless of her being right or wrong.
People don't like being talked down to.
That's a fact you have to take into account when you want to persuade them. If you ignore basic facts about human psychology, be prepared to suffer the consequences.
>I do not understand the hate she consistently gets specifically in the anglosphere.
I'm not sure about the hate. She is a young girl who is passionate about the climate. Great!
But because she is a young person, she is being used by activists as cover and a mouthpiece for their views, because you can't criticize a 16 year old for the reason you demonstrated - you get called out for being mean to a young person.
Also, 16 year olds are not a good resource for setting complicated geo-political policies. They just aren't. They have a very shallow and superficial understanding of the issues because they have no life, professional or academic experience .. which is why they make a good vessels for dishonest activists.
For example, if carbon emissions are as terrible as IPCC report makes them out to be, nuclear energy HAS to be on the table as the primary driver for decommissioning coal and natural gas plants. But she's against it because older dishonest activists are against it and she's parroting their views that we can cut emissions without nuclear.
>She's got this highly logical, consequential way of thinking that I've only seen in much older, highly successful people before.
She's 16. Don't project things you want to be true.
>What's so terrible about that?
Nothing. But she's also not saying anything new. Everyone sees the IPCC numbers.
I do not dislike Greta the person, I dislike the rethoric around her; At face value she is a young, smart and motivated person who asks us to just ‘listen to science’, and I have no problem with that.
The problem I have is that there is a plethora of very powerful people hiding behind her[1] when she says ‘listen to science’ it means ‘listen to those people’. But you cannot debate with what those people propose because you are only presented with Greta, and any critique is countered with ‘how dare you criticise a child’
[1] For example she is working with greenpeace who’s agenda on climate is IMHO completely removed from science
If you want to farm upvotes on social media, you gotta preach to the choir and make them feel good about themselves.
Engaging intellectually with the other side is inefficient. You can get more upvotes with less effort with humorous personal attacks against them.
For example: Donald Drumpf, amiright? Who the hell buys a gold-plated toilet? Tiny hands. Sad.
Dashing out a comment like that is far quicker than analysing the impact of subsidies and protectionist policies on the American manufacturing and agricultural industries - and easier for people to engage with to boot.
She's literally a child lecturing the grownups. It fits that "emperor has no clothes"/out of the mouths of babes trope.
The people who back her want to hold her up as someone wise beyond her years. The entire thing is primarily an appeal to emotion.
Greta is the face of the idea that there is a simple and obvious answer that could be readily implemented, if only us sinners would get up off our slothful, gluttonous sorry asses and Do The Right Thing.
Real and viable solutions tend to be more nuanced than that and allow for the complexity of the real world. But arguing against this essentially cute little tribble of a media sensation makes you "obviously stupid" plus a monstrous asshole who clearly kicks puppies as one of your hobbies.
That rankles people who recognize the attempt to win by manipulative social bullshit and thereby simply shut down substantive discussion of a genuine and serious problem that, no, is not going to be resolved by telling 7 billion people to Just Behave!
It doesn't help that the Pope blessed her work, basically. That just doubles down on all the high handed, moralizing preachy nonsense that swirls around her.
Notwithstanding the pre-existing culture war, using a child to lecture adults just seems like a terrible PR strategy, and to me explains most of the backlash she's getting.
I think her net effect will turn out to be negative for her cause.
People don't like being talked down to. Is it that hard to understand?
>She's literally a child lecturing the grownups. It fits that "emperor has no clothes"/out of the mouths of babes trope.
>The people who back her want to hold her up as someone wise beyond her years. The entire thing is primarily an appeal to emotion.
She's telling a story that directs a lot of attention to an important issue, no more, no less. It sounds to me as if you're criticizing her essentially for telling a compelling story. What standard are you holding her to? She's not a politician, CEO, engineer, etc. ...
>Greta is the face of the idea that there is a simple and obvious answer that could be readily implemented, if only us sinners would get up off our slothful, gluttonous sorry asses and Do The Right Thing.
Your choice of words, not anyone elses. The fact that this is what her words sound like to you does help answer my original question (where all the hate comes from) though (see atoav's sibling comment...).
The rest of your comment is basically saying that she makes a complex issue sound too simple. Maybe so, but claiming that something is "too complex" is often an excuse for not doing anything.
In fact, quite a lot could be achieved by measures that are relatively simple. A carbon tax would be a great example. If the publicity she's generated can speed up the introduction of such a tax, she'll have done more for our future than most of the experts she's apparently supposed to defer to.
I've personally paid very little attention to the entire thing. She lost me when she began gallivanting all over the place via plane or whatever to take full advantage of her opportunity to lecture adults on camera and get positive press for doing so. In my mind, her flying all over the world to protest climate policy is in the same category as Leo DiCaprio taking a jet to an award ceremony to recognize him for his environmental activism.
I've lived without a car for more than a decade. I walked cross country from Georgia to California and accepted rides while homeless. I took a train out of California to get back into housing elsewhere.
I'm an environmental studies major. I don't lecture rich people for taking planes to where they need to be. I also don't make plane trips myself for the express purpose of telling people "You rich assholes need to shrink your god-damned carbon footprint."
I abhor hypocrisy. There's not much I hate more than people going "Do as I say, not as I do."
I was just trying to take your question at face value and answer it in hopes of being helpful. Otherwise I would have stayed out of this ridiculous theater, which probably would have been the better choice because then I wouldn't be getting ragged on for trying to answer your question.
That's a huge amount of negative, and highly inaccurate, opinion of someone you claim to have paid very little attention to. Yet you've presented it backwards.
She has made a point of never travelling by air. All her journeys within Europe have been by rail. She went because as the schools strikes spread across Europe, she has been invited. She crossed the Atlantic to next week's UN summit, as a racing yacht which was going to make the journey anyway, offered her a place on board.
Governments around Europe and the EU parliament have again invited her to speak. So she has.
A. She's a child. She cannot possibly be engineering this without the aid and approval of many adults, starting with the cooperation and permission of her parents.
Pretending that a legal minor has this much agency is a lie on the face of it.
If she were having sex with all these adults, everyone would call that statutory rape (and worse). Everyone would decry "How can you blatantly use a child like that?!!!"
But her being used politically seems fine to most people.
B. The Pope should be tending his own flock and cleaning up his own mess. Him using a child like her to further his own political ends makes me go "Gee, I wonder why Arch Bishops and the like seem to think using children to meet their sexual needs is A-okay!".
The Pope owes her an apology in my mind.
I don't harp on this stuff in part because I'm not Catholic and I have a grudging respect for the work he has done to clean up the mess with the Catholic church, but I was a stay-at-home mom for a lot of years and I was very protective of my own special-needs sons. I have seen her described as autistic. Why are her parents allowing this? I don't get that.
C. The internet exists. Video exists. If she is so much more holier than thou, she could create a website (as her primary means to share her message) and she could do her testimony at these events she is invited to via video conferencing/prerecorded video.
When you want to be the face of a moral argument, it isn't enough to not be guilty of X. There needs to be no appearance of impropriety.
If you have to explain to people that gallivanting all over the world is somehow totes different here because it was by train and other vehicles that "were going there anyway," instead of saying "I refuse to complain about traffic while being traffic," then you are diluting your message.
Gandhi did a lot of things for which I think he deserves criticism, such as sleeping with naked girls to supposedly prove to himself he could resist temptation. But he succeeded in his goal because he walked the walk on things pertinent to his message concerning how to get economically free of England.
He wore very little and wove what little he wore. He didn't argue that other people should burn their British clothes, but he needed to dress appropriately for a world leader so he needed to be an exception.
I could probably find other things to say here, but I'm very much regretting saying anything at all. I've paid very little attention to the whole thing because the whole thing strikes me as bullshit theater using a child as its political puppet, so none of it sits well with me, not as a mother and not as an environmental studies major who has endeavored to live by my beliefs instead of lecturing the world to shrink its carbon footprint while I do otherwise.
I may never get much press. I get that. But I'm comfortable with the choices I am making for myself without trying to hold other people to a standard I can't be arsed to try to meet because, well, you know, my message is so important or something.
Yes, she's a child of 16. Whether her parents supported her early solo protest I do not know. Yet it seems to be clearly important to her, as it continued and grew. So her parents choose to support her - so what? I would sincerely hope that I would have fully supported my kids at that age, had there been an issue they felt quite as passionately for at 16.
She's clearly entitled to express an opinion, and old enough to form them. I had political and plenty of other opinions at 16, and I'm sure you did. You probably still feel the same on some. All political parties have youth branches that are freely permitted without global cries of indoctrination! Though some may verge into indoctrination. Climate's an issue that will clearly affect a youngster's future more than yours or mine - I'm past half way in my life, they have 60+ years ahead. My kids see the climate response in far starker terms than most adults, though they're a little older.
If she were mere puppet or pawn, I'm pretty sure the resentment, insincerity and unwillingness would be clear and bloody obvious.
Being young doesn't discount you from having a opinion, or wanting to change something. So is it discounting the opinion simply because she has proven somewhat successful? It certainly seems that way in many of the media attacks she's received - and brushed off. There was a coal or oil trade body that recently put out a wonderful statement something along the lines of seeing her as one of their biggest threats. Great reason to keep on doing what she is doing then, no? Doubly so if politicians are actually bloody listening.
That some sections of the media paint her as $deity and others as $anti-deity is absurd and wrong.
On mention of autistic, I'm at a loss. She's described as autistic as it's an accepted term for someone on the autism spectrum in Europe. My friend with an autistic child would, and has, called them autistic when the need arises. Why is that a problem? How would someone with autism be properly referred to in the US? How is it inappropriate? She's certainly freely mentioned it in interview in the past. Some sections of the media have tried to use it as a means of personal attack, but surely better to acknowledge her situation than try to hide it?
OK, so you think we should not travel at all if we have an opinion on fixing emissions. That rules out all of us. That seems far too convenient to one side of the argument though. I couldn't go to a demonstration without travelling. So sign an online petition instead or throw up another blog I guess. That doesn't get to influence decision makers though.
We all get to make trade-offs within the globalised system we have right now. Whilst agitating and striving to improve it with the least impact practicable on whatever issue we find important.
Why is that a problem? How would someone with autism be properly referred to in the US?
I think you have misunderstood my point.
Autism is socially impairing. People with autism have trouble dealing with social stuff. So she is probably less qualified than most 16 year olds to try to figure out how fame at a young age is likely to impact her.
Most people with autism get inculcated with social programming that I think is harmful. It's an attempt to get them to behave more normally, which is usually a fundamental violation of their personal boundaries.
It's a little like introverts being told that they are weird and need to socialize the same way that extroverts do, that there is something inherently bad and broken about wanting a lot of time alone.
If she were someone with a mental IQ of 70, would you be vociferously defending her right to express herself politically? Or would you be taking a side-eyes view at the whole thing and wondering how much of this was really their opinion and how much of this was someone with more power than them using them as a puppet?
If you have a "social IQ" of 70 and are dealing with an inherently highly social arena -- politics -- at a young age, isn't that something we should wonder at?
I worry at the harm being done to her for no real gain. There was a story on HN not that long ago about a girl who was brutally raped while still a child and wrote a book about it. She ultimately committed suicide while still a minor, which made the press because she asked for assisted suicide under the laws of her country and was denied it, then took her own life anyway.
I was raped as a child. I was also in gifted programs from an early age. I got my act together in part because I walked away from the limelight and had a very private life for a lot of years.
This kind of fame means you live in a fish bowl. The press is notorious for raking awkward adolescents over the coals for being fat, not dressing adequately well, etc. Such as the children of celebrities and the daughter of the Clintons. Growing up in the limelight can be very hard on someone with normal levels of social skills.
So my concern here is that she is essentially being abused and doesn't understand the social consequences well enough to realize it yet. That's my concern.
OK, so you think we should not travel at all if we have an opinion on fixing emissions.
No, this is absolutely not at all anything I think or said. It in no way fits with my statement that I don't lecture rich people for flying to where they need to fly.
Those are clarifications. I have zero interest in pursuing what looks to me like a fruitless and pointless argument.
> dealing with an inherently highly social arena -- politics -- at a young age, isn't that something we should wonder at?
Perhaps. Yet by being known for being direct, and somewhat asocial as seems to be the case with many with autism, she seems to have been uniquely able to cut through the bullshit. I can think of few others that so many politicians would have been willing to listen to, to anything like the same extent. Except other politicians and heads of state.
I well understand the concern about possible future consequences. Not sure how stridently I'd try and prevent her if she were my child though. That's the sort of thing that may have the kid packing and leaving if you try and stop it. Heck, all kids are in a fishbowl thanks to social, YT etc.
I've not heard of social programming - it doesn't seem to be among the support my mate with the autistic child received. It manages to sound rather dystopian.
Not sure how stridently I'd try and prevent her if she were my child though.
Again, from my end, it feels very, very much like you are putting words in my mouth. (That's not to imply it is on purpose.)
Protecting a child's right to choose is the exact opposite of stridently trying to prevent them from doing something. That's outright denying them a choice. It is wholly unrelated to anything I did as a parent and outright antithetical to it.
I've redacted multiple paragraphs from my draft. Suffice it to say I raised two special needs sons who likely qualify for a diagnosis on the autism spectrum and I have firsthand experience with trying to protect their right to choose when they were teenagers in the face of a world that doesn't really want to respect that for anyone at all, not even adults.
It's not easy to pull off, even without being at the center of this much public attention, which only magnifies the problem.
Point being, it's an almost impossible problem - I'd want to support them, but try and minimise harm. If that meant going along and trying to keep the worst of the media out of their face, so be it. I'd also want to make damn sure they knew what they were getting into. You know teenagers - trying to advise against something, or even giving pros and cons, can end up encouraging. Sometimes it feels like it guarantees it. :)
There's no chance Greta or her parents expected or could have predicted the extent to which it has escalated. Yet somehow she has been almost uniquely successful in having apparent influence on climate. There must have been discussions of whether she wants to keep going in the crazy escalation that sprang up, or whether it's getting out of control. Least I bloody hope so.
I just hope the world, and media, plays along when or if she decides to withdraw from a life in public, or has had enough, and the ending doesn't involve having to pick up the pieces. The world's media isn't very good at that bit.
My wild ass guess is that, even in Sweden, a 16 year old very publicly having sexual relations with many adults in obvious furtherance of the goals of the adults would be decried by a lot of people as sex trafficking.
I'm well aware there are very real problems with acting like 18 is some hard and fast cut-off between genuinely consenting sex and some kind of abuse based on inability to make such a decision. But this is not the equivalent of a 16 year old girl having a 20 year old boyfriend. There isn't just one single adult involved in this scenario with this 16 year old.
> I'm an environmental studies major. I don't lecture rich people for taking planes to where they need to be. I also don't make plane trips myself for the express purpose of telling people "You rich assholes need to shrink your god-damned carbon footprint."
Sounds like you're far, far less effective in your environmentalism than Ms. Thunberg. It must be pleasant that you have your personal purity and sense self-righteousness, but none of that that will help blunt the impact of the climate crisis.
I feel confident I'm making a real difference that can be measured in millions of dollars.
The fact that media isn't paying any attention to me and my accomplishments isn't evidence that I'm accomplishing nothing. It just makes me easy pickings for internet strangers to try to treat dismissively.
Easy. She is the perfect figure (young, a girl, autistic) with the perfect message (science based climate disaster destroying life for her generation) to induce a sense of guilt in typically middle aged men. You know – the kind that goes online and write about how environmentalists are not consequential enough and how they are really just hypocrites and not true environmentalists.
The mechanism is simple: What Greta does, feels to them like she is holding a mirror in front of their faces. They hate what they see. They cannot bring what they see together with their self-image. So instead of going to the bottom of their own feelings and exploring why that girl enrages them so much, they rationalize it: "she isn't a real environmentalist, because she didn't do X or Y propperly" etc.
The world however still thinks she is on the right side of history and then they realize that just rationalizing it to themselves won't cut it. So they open the browser, log in, ...
To their defense: most probably don't even realize it works that way. Many men are quite bad at understanding their own feelings because they never learned how to do it. But sadly lying to themselves will likely make it worse..
> She is the perfect figure (young, a girl, autistic) with the perfect message (science based climate disaster destroying life for her generation)
Al Gore was neither young, a girl, nor autistic, but he received a similar response. And still does, in fact, even after years out of the spotlight. Perhaps this has nothing to do with her and is simply disagreement over the issue.
Gore did have the same message. His predictions of imminent apocalypse were wrong, and many of us old enough to remember that are naturally skeptical about the latest batch of apocalyptic predictions.
And the venom? That exists on the fringes of any political issue, and advocates amplify the voices of a few loudmouthed fools to discredit any reasoned disagreement. The perception of widespread hate is manufactured.
> Al Gore was neither young, a girl, nor autistic, but he received a similar response.
These are merely multipliers, not in it self constituting the whole impact. What had more impact was the record drought throughout Europe that happend when she started her thing. Even the most critical people at that time realized that the weather was doing something that it usually didn't do.
I am not an American and Al Gore is not as widely perceived here as in the US I suppose (also because the whole climate thing is not such a polarizing issue over here).
> The perception of widespread hate is manufactured.
Is it really? I didn't see such strong reactions against a single person for a long time. Middle aged men setting posers of a 16 year old girl on fire on the street. I mean really – how is that normal?
> Middle aged men setting posers of a 16 year old girl on fire on the street.
I haven't heard about that (and can't find it). How many people were burning posters? If it was just a few, that's another example of the amplification I mentioned. A few crazy people are elevated as representative of the opposition.
The Washington Post ran a story like that. "Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is sailing to America amid a storm of online attacks"[1]. Their evidence for that "storm"? Three tweets.
Not sure where I saw it, but it was in East Germany most likely (AFD, etc).
But beyond that the amount of such voices I wittnessed in my feeds also isn't too small and I neither followed Greta Thunberg nor do I have many environmentalists in my feeds.
Literally every news article daring to mentioning her had 40-50+ "critical" voices with a perceived majority of men that could have been her father.
So all of what I say here is obviously very subjective and I am convinced that you are right, when you speak of a loud minority. What fascinated me is how middle aged men go and under their real name rant about a 16 year old girl and still feel like they are doing the right thing. And I don't mean trolls, I mean guys that really do think this is what they need to do.
Myself I didn't really deal with Greta Thunberg. I think it is nice that she creates attention for this important topic, espcially among audiences who wouldn't be reached by pure scientific publications, but personally I am not that interested in what she says, because her points are mostly moral and ethical and I agree with the general idea that we need to drastically change things even if it hurts.
Well the majority of the science was done by the middle aged men and woman you are now attacking in your comment. What does she have to add, that they have not been continuously stating for >40 years? The club of Rome report is almost 50 years old now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth).
Why should anyone listen to her and not actual scientists? Do people really need to be guilt tripped to believe something that is overwhelmingly supported by facts and has been publicly debated for >20 years?
>I do not understand the hate she consistently gets specifically in the anglosphere. Even the reddit thread about her the other day was full of hate. I honestly don't understand, can someone explain?
Many people tend to not respond well to pedantic know-it alls pointing their finger, even more so when it's some teenager lecturing the grown ups, even more so when their "grassroots" rise was manufactured by media/ad agency parents and their friends...
While climate sure needs attention, Greta is only a marionette. She only "became famous" to promote her mothers book [1] on climate change. Both the book and Greta are driven by a PR bureau [2]. And to be honest that's a disguisting way to use a child for self promotion.
It's a shame Greta Thunberg's advisors, assistants, helpers, etc all fly around getting supplies & setting up meetings. Instead of, you know, the more carbon-efficient method of traveling the ocean via maritime ships.
Great Thunberg's coterie of helpers have a larger carbon footprint than the majority of us.
But hey ... at least it's not as bad as Prince Harry, who said every action matters (when telling the plebeians to stop their commercial air travel habit), and then took 4 private flights over the next two weeks.
And to prepare her trip 5 professional sailors needed to take trans-atlantic flights to US, in order to bring her boat back to Europe (boat belongs to Monaco monarchs) - so her "carbon-neutral" trip actually generates 5 times more CO2 than if she simply bought a plane ticket.
Even if they'd kill themself to safe the environment there'd be people like you, complaining that you'd done it in a much more environmental friendly way.
Say a tiny bit more about you than it says about the topic at hand. Grow up.
Personal attacks will get you banned on Hacker News. I realize there are a lot of shitty comments on this topic, but there are also degrees of shittiness that matter.
Off topic, but I'm curious if all the backslash-escaped commas have something to do with an English article on a Finnish site...DB charset or similar, or unrelated?
Having not heard the speech, this was news to me, and extremely alarming:
> They do, however, include negative emission techniques on a huge planetary scale that is yet to be invented, and that many scientists fear will never be ready in time and will anyway be impossible to deliver at the scale assumed.”
Imagine somebody said "a meteor is going to hit the Earth in 11 years and end life as we know it unless we made massive changes to our way of life and invented new technologies to thwart it." I fully believe we as a species could collectively band together to stop it.
What's so horrible about climate change is it's not that the world ends in 11 years. It's that in 11 years we likely are doomed to watch our own extinction. On top of that, we're not even beginning to deal with the problem in a way that gives hope for the future. I can't think of a more existential crisis inducing reality.
> It's that in 11 years we likely are doomed to watch our own extinction.
This is precisely why I find Greta and her crowd insufferable. I don't think even the IPCC suggests we're going to watch our extinction. The report says we'll see somewhere around 5% global GDP reduction in 2100, in a world that's vastly wealthier than today. That's anything but extinction.
Not extinction. Only massive social upheaval, revolutions, war, famine, diseases and maybe even a pause for civilisation itself until things stabilise again.
I don't understand. Are you saying climate change could not lead to Global Thermonuclear War, as we liked to call it? Maybe I just have an active imagination.
In countries that the average HNer won't live in. Or visit. Nice things to worry about, but for most of us here it'll be a distant concern. And asking people to give up their quality of life for others they'll never meet will always be a hard sell.
> war, famine,
Ditto.
> diseases
This one might affect the first world, but I don't know of a strong link between 'global warming' and 'new diseases'. If anything, making the tropics less habitable should decrease contact between humans and exotic new disease carriers...
> and maybe even a pause for civilisation itself until things stabilise again.
I'm sorry, what? 5% penalty to global GDP by 2100 is not a 'pause for civilisation itself', or anything close. Unless you only meant to include the aforementioned "countries that HNers typically don't live in"?
For that matter, I'd say a "pause" is by far the least likely of "civilization continues as normal", "civilization pauses, but comes back" and "civilization dies, forever". "pause" just requires walking such a fine line between "bad enough to overwhelm all the systems designed to keep things running" and not "bad enough to make humanity unsustainable".
Poor non-HN people, we don't care about those at all? They can die?
If we get widespread war over resources, 5% penalty on anything is not going to suffice. A limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is going to cause corn crops to fail in the US. (Where average HN-ers live, if you care only about your own in-group.)
I didn't mean new diseases. I meant old diseases. If you have no electricity in a big city for an extended time, you will be in for a wild ride.
(The last point I don't care much about, it's not very important. But I think if civilisation died, it would have a huge amount of knowledge and technology for new generations to come to jumpstart from, compared to those generations who had to discover everything for themselves.)
I’m not sure what to think about her. She has caused a much needed discussion about climate change, but there’s a lot of not so climate friendly marketing tricks involved. Like when she went to NYC on a boat to avoid taking a plane. Of course it was a one way trip, so her and her dad, 2 sailors, and 2 other people, who BTW took a flight to NYC just to organize getting the boat back to Europe, are flying back.
And that’s what miss from her and her supporters: Reasonableness, and living in the “real world”.
The sailing was about more than just saving CO2, it was mainly a symbol (highlighting that air-traffic is not yet climate friendly and that something needs to be done about it, since feasible alternatives don't exist). I really don't get why people are so annoyed about this.
Because everyone knows already? Nobody asked Thunberg to "symbolically" demand tons of media attention on herself. People are reminded flying burns fuel every time they book a flight and are offered carbon credits, or in school, or whenever they read the newspaper, or really any one of dozens of different ways.
Remember - Thunberg has no solutions. Nor do any of the climate activists like her. Planes will not stop flying, power stations will not stop emitting short of a totalitarian government taking over the world and rolling the global economy back a couple hundred years: an act that would involve mass destruction and death on an unimaginable scale.
The only people who have solutions are scientists and engineers working on ways to power planes that don't involve burning fossil fuels, or make them more efficient. They won't work any faster because some random teenager sailed on a boat. Nor will people give up their vacations, miss out on an important business deal, or refuse to go see a dying loved one because Thunberg personally demands it. Her refusal to see this is a product of a desire for attention, not a helpful service to humanity.
I'll respect this girl when she goes and gets an engineering degree, gets a job at Airbus and works on an electric plane. Then she'll be able to say she really made a difference.
Greta is by now sort of a politician, so let me know if I mistook your position:
Remember - politicians have no solutions. Nor do any other politicians around them.
Unless they form a totalitarian world government and sends us to the 19th century, which would be double-plus-ungood.
The only people who have solutions are scientists and engineers working on ways to power planes that don't involve burning fossil fuels. These planes will magically be ready one day and the oil lobby will stay quiet and everything will be just fine, because science. Amen.Now keep your head down until directed otherwise.
She's not a politician as she's not standing in an election. If she was people could refuse to vote for her, as they usually do for Green politicians, and maybe that'd give her a reality check.
Yes that's my position, if we discard your pointless sarcasm. Obviously planes won't "magically" be ready - that's my entire point. It will take work, lots of work by lots of scientists and engineers. The best way to help them is become one of them.
The oil lobby as you put it is really the energy lobby and are one of the biggest investors in green energy. They are staying quiet, it's been a long time since I thought about firms like BP or Shell in relation to climate change. Additionally they have little actual power. They don't even have the power to set prices of their own product. The idea of Big Evil Oil Execs trying to destroy the world is a childish myth. Where is the titanic battle between the oil lobby and Tesla, for example? I don't see any evidence of such a battle. Tesla's big problem is their own spending levels, not being undermined by petrol companies.
Finally, yes Greta should keep her head down. Her net contribution so far has been negative. The solutions lie with science but she's been encouraging school children to go on "strike" i.e. refuse to take the maths and science lessons adults are giving them, the very lessons that would teach them how to contribute to the solutions.
As I said elsewhere: the IPCC report says we'll see somewhere around 5% global GDP reduction in 2100, in a world that's vastly wealthier than today. In my opinion, she uses dramatic, condemnatory rhetoric far beyond the conclusions of scientists.
I don't know why you are bringing up GDP numbers when the UN's conservative estimate for climate refugees is 1 billion people, but fine lets go there. The political problems we are seeing today, the threats to democracy and instability are due to a slow down in growth (most places still growing). If you were to stop that growth, or even contract the world economy, the effect on our societies, political systems, etc. would be catastrophic.
In short, everyone's economy is built on perpetual growth. If that growth stops or reverse, everything falls down. And you don't need to get to 2100 before civil society breaks down.
So either you think none of the above will happen (and do explain why) or you do and you still don't think it warrants immediate and drastic action. Which also requires an explanation.
> In the no policy baseline temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in global GDP loss of 2.6% (5-95% percentile range 0.5–8.2%), as compared with 0.3% (0.1–0.5%) by 2100 in the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5% (0.1–1.0%) in the 2°C scenario.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadSo what? I don't get it, is she supposed to produce original research else she can't speak at all?? Well no shit she is not saying anything not already published in peer-reviewed papers. She is selling it to an audience that did not care but may begin to care because of all the publicity, and crucially, to an audience that needs to be on this side for any meaningful change to get done. Not new? Not particularly intelligent? But what, is she speaking at a climatology symposium? No, she is speaking to a general audience, she is speaking to be heard in the news and by word-of-mouth.
Really, what do you actually want of her?
As a counterpoint take John Baez for example: He decided started beginning in 2010 to try to organise engineers, physicists and mathematicians around the global ecological crisis https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/this-weeks-f.... Was he interviewed or reported on by CNN? Of course not. How often has David MacKay (https://withouthotair.com) been given the chance to speak to the public?
The hate would have been full of claims of hypocrisy had she hopped on a Boeing or a trans-Atlantic liner (if there are still liner services). She says she probably won't be able to go, the someone offers a place on a racing yacht. If she'd stayed at home the message would no doubt be trying to spin up her not feeling the UN important enough...
Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't.
There are plenty of actual people with present concerns you can talk to.
Though i dont agree with the Identity politics direction, This comment has some great insight.
Look at who we listen to nowadays. People on IG and YT have more reach, more aggregate persuasive "voice" than experts do today. We listen to entrepreneurs, politicians, to actors and football players, but not the experts who have spent >10 years (often 20-40 yrs) intensely dedicated to mastering certain immensely difficult fields.
So the next time a little girl stands up on a podium, give it a listen and then ask yourself why she got your attention and the pleading of 1000s of diverse scientists couldnt...
Is this satire or am I missing something here?
Oh come on, this is blatant trolling. Be more subtle or you lose your target trollee audience.
Greta is a smart kid, no denying that. However, I still believe she parrots a lot of information that she may not understand fully and is being used as a lobbying-tool to enact legislation. That, I have a problem with!
Climate activism is one of the more noble purposes for using children as mouthpieces, of course, it's not like she's a pawn of some nefarious shadow group, but for some of us it still leaves a bad taste. And being that she is a mouthpiece, it seems like a collective delusion that she's discussed like some kind of key actor.
If you spark something like that and act like the symbol of the betrayed next generation, media support is the best thing you can wish for.
So rather than portraying this as something that is beeing done to her, I'd argue that she is entirely on board with the whole thing and more reflected about it than we give her credit for.
Like I said, it is a collective delusion where you have to buy into every facet, including the messianic self-made image, or you hate little girls and the environment.
Her own words on this are far more interesting: https://www.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/posts/recently-...
¹:https://www.aftonbladet.se/svenskahjaltar/a/G1AL4q/greta-15-...
So what do you suggest? Bright spotlights and a hard chair? A smoking interviewer with a deep voice who makes her regret she even dared to start thinking about the whole thing?
For me Greta Thunberg is mostly a moral figure. Somebody who convincingly claims they have a stake in the message they carry. This is the reason why I am not that much interested in her – I don't really need any convincing on that topic.
And because she is a moral figure, everything starts to make a lot more sense when you see the whole Pro- and Anti-Greta followership through a moralistic lense. The former ones are the ones who needed her push to stand up or who feel they have to defend her and the latter ones feel their own moral self image threatened because there comes a child who tells them they are not as good as a person as they thought they were. And when somebody tells you that, attacking their character is _always_ easier than changing your view of the world and your place in it. It is quite predictable in it's entirety, but that makes it fascinating in my eyes.
The official narrative is that she is a precocious lone wolf climate crusader social prodigy, which is useful to the entrenched activists handling her because it saves them all the work of scientifically refuting climate deniers; now they can be simply painted as bullies. But because she is a moral icon, even pointing out the institutional backing behind her viral status is a form of heresy.
She apparently got her first contact with climate groups through a writing contest where she wrote on climate change/climate politics, so her motivation was prexisting. Whether they use her or she used them (or it was some kind of symbiosis or a cold blooded deal) would be hard to quantify objectively, especially if she has similar political goals than her, so I'd be careful with assumptions, especially if they make you sound like you go for an ad hominem attack. I remember myself als a 16 year old, I was definitly not unpolitical, quite the opposite and manipulating me into supporting something I didn't like would have been quite hard back then, maybe harder even harder than now.
Of course viewing her as a lone wolf is completely nuts and I am quite sure neither herself nor the people who started the school protests in her wake would subscribe to that notion (at least I heard it beeing discussed by some Fridays for Future kids in Germany). This is obviously a media narrative by journalists who got carried away. On the other hand claiming that she is "pushed around by faceless actors" is also a bit bland. Firstly if these actors weren't faceless but well known they wouldn't have to rely on somebody else to push messages out, secondly I'd argue that this symbolic action is far better than the alternative (something like flying drones over Heathrow Airport to get media attention), thirdly if "faceless actors" in the background worry you, there are much much better targets to attack (e.g. the UK prime minister, industry lobbyists in the US, etc.)
The topics she is speaking onare certainly not the ones that have a incredibly powerful lobby behind it (in terms on lobbying money spent), so if we speak of "creepy faceless actors" behind her, you can assume the actors on the opposite site are tenfold as creepy and faceless, certainly profit from discrediting the person and there is historical evidence that they exist, profit from it and use their influence.
All that aside. The future generations have a valid moral argument. We have known about global warming since half a century and did nothing – the opposite, in the wake of neoliberalism that followed the fall of the soviet union we made everything even more about profits than before. And now we are like that procrastinating kid that pushed homework away and tries to do it while the steps of the approaching teacher echo through the hallway: the only way to get out of this seems to break our own hand to be sent of to the nurse. From an outside perspective this is totally irrational behaviour unless there is proof that the reality looks different altogether. But there is no such proof, which is why the persons are attacked instead of their ideas. Not liking somebodies moral standpoint is a very weak defense when they stand for the wellbeing of many future generations and the survival of mankind.
Edit: that was just a stupid thing to say. Sorry, you didn't claim she is dishonest.
If she was a 45 year old accountant trying to take a stand on climate change I don't think she would be trotted out like this.
I'm not shocked that someone from a younger generation is worried about the long term impacts of climate change and how it may change their future.
Because she inspired many other kids her age to start speaking up and do something. I can clearly remember when I was 16 and started to realize how bad the grown ups were actually at implementing all these things they thought me I should value. Starts with democracy and goes to environmentalism.
On a symbolic level she represents the generations who will get the blunt of it. The generations that will have to battle all of that mess the generations before them created.
I don't really see, why her decision to use that publicity should be any kind of valid critizism really, unless it is meant to be an ad hominem attack to avoid talking about the topic.
I think it's pretty obvious what the message here is: the (older) politicians and business men are incompetent or corrupt, the powerless youngsters are showing themselves to be infinitely more responsible. It's a striking image.
I didn’t follow every nook and crany of her story, but I didn’t see her promoting anything that a rational objective observer should also conclude.
What I did see, were a big amount of butthurt middle aged men who couldn’t handle what a girl telling them the truth does to their own self image. And instead of using this as a chance to groe as a person they start to rationalize their behaviour in ways which are uncompatible with the reality.
citation needed. the fact that this girl has been launched into stardom practically overnight is a sign that she's not "in charge".
Why?
This wouldn't be extraordinary. Your claim however is. And you know the drill: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially when you use that claim in an ad hominem attack to silence someones arguments.
Disregard the subject matter for a moment, if you will, but if someone has been subtly indoctrinated enough (or a madman is fully convicted in his beliefs), are they truly their own?
Because this is what it always boils down to: figures like her act as a mirror and many people don't like what they see in it. And it is easier to attack the mirror than dealing with what it tells you.
I suspect most siding with her would stop once they actually need to carve into their own way of life. I've seen many environmentalist types care about the environment so long as it is not directly impacting theirs... It makes it easy to evangelize while being on the absolute upper crust of humanity.
I am not sure she have the ability or education to understand even half of the things she is saying, especially after she gave up school. I didn't see any interview in which she demonstrated any thought process aside of activism.
This was a conscious strategy by the same PR people that fought tobacco regulation. As documents come out from the oil companies from decades ago, journalists are documenting it. Season 1 of this podcast was extremely enlightening (haven't gotten to further seasons)
https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled
Which appears to have already happened in the short time I took to write this. It's gone from top of the front page, to nowhere on the first three pages.
Why do you think this place is above what happens on Reddit/Twitter? If anything, the concentration of groupthink and demographic is stronger here than anywhere else.
I read it as the OP advising avoiding the political rabbit hole specifically because of the age, not in general.
Of course she's can't save the world alone, but she's generated a lot of attention for an important issue that a lot of people are ignoring. What's so terrible about that?
I really like her. She's got this highly logical, consequential way of thinking that I've only seen in much older, highly successful people before. All she's saying essentially boils down to: If A leads to B, and you don't like B, you can't support A. She's not a figurehead, she's way ahead of the adults around her.
She's a woman, she's young, she's autistic.
She faces a triple-whammy of discrimination because of that.
She's also calmly reminding people that climate change is real and poses a risk of harm to the world, and she's actually doing something to stop that. For some reason climate change is absurdly polarised.
Now any disagreement with the movement can be dismissed with allegations of discrimination instead of discussing the issue.
But people didn't listen - or rather, enough people didn't listen, and now we have to listen to a young autistic teenager girl berating us for sitting idle while the world burns (metaphorically speaking), and IMHO we all deserve it, and you'd better get used to it, because that's not even the remotely worse part of the climate change.
Here's where you lose me. I don't see a world burning, and past predictions of coming apocalypse have proven false.
Yes, the world is warming. We're going back to the temperature of the world a few million years ago, still much cooler than it was during most of the history of life on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
(My original response didn't belong either, so I edited it.)
As humans did not live on Earth a few million years ago, insofar as human society is concerned, why would the fact that temperatures had previously occurred a few million years ago be even slightly inconsistent with them being apocalyptic?
No, it's evidence both for the general conclusion and that specific point, it doesn't require that point as an assumption.
Evidence is any fact whose existence makes a conclusion more likely than it would be in the absence of that fact.
In other words, the mere fact that something happened isn't evidence for a proposed (even plausible) cause. Proving the cause requires further evidence.
So, if you mean we get to enjoy living in conditions fit for apes, then you might be on to something, but I wouldn't exactly rejoice about it...
If the NASA and IPCC graphs of global temperature, and rate of change don't convince you, nothing will.
Most predictions on climate heating are turning out to be far worse in actuality. Sea level rise is neatly tracking the IPCC's worst case prediction. Yet they're still putting out the middle ground , conservative case.
Apocalyptic language is not scientific. But when the facts don't inspire action, activists resort to hyperbole and distortion.
Warming or burning, it's shaping up to ruin society as we know it. At least if we are going to believe the scientists and economists at the IPCC. They seem to be expecting at least two of the four horsemen. That seems pretty apocalyptic to me.
If that;s not enough to inspire action, what the hell is? New York knee deep in water?
Disagree. The effect to society the warming causes is apocalyptic (1 billion climate refugees). Pointing to rising sea level and temperature is the cause, the effect is our society being unrecognizable in a few short decades.
It works the earth as well. we're in the middle of a fever, leaving it like that will cause damage to organs. Leave it too long those organs (polar regions, tropical areas, ocean temps) will fail. These failures lead to chain reactions that equate to system failures. entire regions will become uninhabitable. Those on the extreme edge of survivable regions will have to leave to areas that can support them. Those that are use to living in "golden zones" are going to experience climate changes that turn those areas into very uncomfortable and potentially survivable conditions.
The language is accurate, its just not precise or pretty.
If you disagree with the most overwhelming conclusion in the scientific community since gravity, your problems go way beyond simple discrimination.
She's also calmly reminding people that climate change is real
People don't need reminding. They heard nothing else for decades. It's not like it just slipped people's minds.
A hypocritical little girl (not a woman), with no experience of the world, is not going to suddenly get everyone to stop using cars or flying in airplanes. She isn't even willing to do that herself, as her stunt with the yaught that had to be sailed back home by people who flew to the destination showed.
For some reason climate change is absurdly polarised.
It's polarised because it's used as a stick to try and force hard left policies on the world, so anyone who isn't hard left will naturally be suspicious that the proposed remedies are all wrong and quite possibly the problem too.
This is especially true given the frequent unreliability of academics who claim to understand highly complex systems (e.g. economists), the failure of many previous predictions by climate scientists, and the near-violent hatred dished out to anyone who takes a skeptical position.
Recall that Thunberg argues for reducing carbon emissions by 50% in about 10 years. She offers no ideas for how to do that without causing a total collapse of global society that kills millions of people, the very thing that climate change activists claim they're trying to avoid. It is natural for people to consider that unhelpful at best, or self-promoting BS at worst. Why wouldn't people find her polarising?
In the end the only people who can really make a difference here are scientists and engineers. Thunberg is neither. She has literally nothing to contribute and should go back to school.
...No she does not. In this context, one would argue that, on the contrary she benefits from these. Would she have had the same journey, had she been a 50 year old "regular" (non autistic) man? No one would have cared.
You can't have both.
Scratch most environmentalist attention-seekers, and you'll find hypocrisy. Look at Prince Harry.
People just can't stand such hypocrisy.
It's the same reasoning of the classic "you defend socialism yet you buy products made under capitalism, oh my what a hypocrite".
Set a personal example.
I respect Ed Begley a lot for adopting a small carbon footprint lifestyle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Begley_Jr.#Environmental, house tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV3uedeCKj4
It's much more inspiring than just talking about it while polluting more than the average person.
I'm pretty sure the crew decided to fly back not because of her but because they wanted.
The whole discussion is – frankly – quite ridiculous. Anybody who likes to lead it should really sit down, pause and really ask themselves what they are doing and why.
There is really only one compelling reason that comes to my mind why one would find the motivation to critizise environmentalists online for not beeing environmentalistic enough: their actions make you feel bad for some reason. You want the bad feeling to go away, so you find a explaination why they are bad. But it turns out the world still thinks they are good. Now you are in a bit of a problem. So you go online and try to change the world.
Only: it might be better for you and everybody around you if you instead went and tried to change yourself. This is of course much much harder, but lying to yourself about your own motivations has also it's costs..
Not at all. I already live a very spartan life and my carbon footprint is well below of most people who go around lecturing others on sustainable lifestyle. Eg, in the past 12 months, I have traveled zero miles on fossil fuels.
The class of professional globetrotting climate activists is so unbearable because they are among the worst polluters, yet spare no energy looking down on others for not doing enough.
[citation needed]
Another thing: this isn't an issue where it is soley about personal carbon footprints. It is nice to do something on a personal level, but we are in deep fucking need of big political measures. Don't get me wrong, I cycle everywhere. I don't own a car, the wood that I own makes my carbon footprint negative – but that isn't going to save the planet, because only very few people are lucky enough to even be able considering adopting such a position.
So if we critizise people who professionally lobby for stricter climate measures, I fear we should show them how to do it better or remain silent. Armchair experts and all that jazz.
I think you can both fly on planes and believe we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels dramatically. You can both believe that we should pay more tax to fund public services while not donating additional income to the government. You can work for Amazon while thinking they should pay their workers more. You can believe that the way the food industry treats animals is awful without being a vegan.
In my opinion, being a complete paragon of virtue is not a prerequisite of having an opinion on what would make the world a better place.
We saw this 15 years ago with Al Gore, too. Who cares if he's right, he lives in a big house!
We all live in this system, and she's not advocating for living outside the system, she's advocating for changing it.
Nobody is advocating for everybody stopping flying tomorrow. We're advocating for developing technology so that within a few decades we can be carbon neutral.
Have you heard about flight shaming? Some aren't just advocating for it, they are trying to enforce it.
Sure, sure. So trying to enforce it doesn't mean you'd argue for it? Sorry, that doesn't compute. It's fine to argue for it, btw. But claiming that "nobody does that"? Come on, that's nonsense.
You should read the Green New Deal. Not tomorrow, no, but one goal is to make flying infinitesimally rare.
When you throw in the fact that many (falsely) believe the science is wrong, you have a perfect storm.
However, I like to think that there's at least some inkling that if a sufficient number of 16 years old are this uncompromising then anyone voting for climate denial today is just storing up problems for themselves in the future as these kids will be the ones paying for their retirement. And if they're paying for a needless climate emergency at the same time, sympathy is going to be in short supply.
People don't like being talked down to.
That's a fact you have to take into account when you want to persuade them. If you ignore basic facts about human psychology, be prepared to suffer the consequences.
I'm not sure about the hate. She is a young girl who is passionate about the climate. Great!
But because she is a young person, she is being used by activists as cover and a mouthpiece for their views, because you can't criticize a 16 year old for the reason you demonstrated - you get called out for being mean to a young person.
Also, 16 year olds are not a good resource for setting complicated geo-political policies. They just aren't. They have a very shallow and superficial understanding of the issues because they have no life, professional or academic experience .. which is why they make a good vessels for dishonest activists.
For example, if carbon emissions are as terrible as IPCC report makes them out to be, nuclear energy HAS to be on the table as the primary driver for decommissioning coal and natural gas plants. But she's against it because older dishonest activists are against it and she's parroting their views that we can cut emissions without nuclear.
>She's got this highly logical, consequential way of thinking that I've only seen in much older, highly successful people before.
She's 16. Don't project things you want to be true.
>What's so terrible about that?
Nothing. But she's also not saying anything new. Everyone sees the IPCC numbers.
The problem I have is that there is a plethora of very powerful people hiding behind her[1] when she says ‘listen to science’ it means ‘listen to those people’. But you cannot debate with what those people propose because you are only presented with Greta, and any critique is countered with ‘how dare you criticise a child’
[1] For example she is working with greenpeace who’s agenda on climate is IMHO completely removed from science
Engaging intellectually with the other side is inefficient. You can get more upvotes with less effort with humorous personal attacks against them.
For example: Donald Drumpf, amiright? Who the hell buys a gold-plated toilet? Tiny hands. Sad.
Dashing out a comment like that is far quicker than analysing the impact of subsidies and protectionist policies on the American manufacturing and agricultural industries - and easier for people to engage with to boot.
She's literally a child lecturing the grownups. It fits that "emperor has no clothes"/out of the mouths of babes trope.
The people who back her want to hold her up as someone wise beyond her years. The entire thing is primarily an appeal to emotion.
Greta is the face of the idea that there is a simple and obvious answer that could be readily implemented, if only us sinners would get up off our slothful, gluttonous sorry asses and Do The Right Thing.
Real and viable solutions tend to be more nuanced than that and allow for the complexity of the real world. But arguing against this essentially cute little tribble of a media sensation makes you "obviously stupid" plus a monstrous asshole who clearly kicks puppies as one of your hobbies.
That rankles people who recognize the attempt to win by manipulative social bullshit and thereby simply shut down substantive discussion of a genuine and serious problem that, no, is not going to be resolved by telling 7 billion people to Just Behave!
It doesn't help that the Pope blessed her work, basically. That just doubles down on all the high handed, moralizing preachy nonsense that swirls around her.
Notwithstanding the pre-existing culture war, using a child to lecture adults just seems like a terrible PR strategy, and to me explains most of the backlash she's getting.
I think her net effect will turn out to be negative for her cause.
People don't like being talked down to. Is it that hard to understand?
It's said people behind her are coming voters.
> People don't like being talked down to. Is it that hard to understand?
Have you heard how she is being talked down to?
It will be remembered view smearing is all they had when confronted with that.
It was an opportunity to get things moving, to get people behind a project and they turned it down (again).
>The people who back her want to hold her up as someone wise beyond her years. The entire thing is primarily an appeal to emotion.
She's telling a story that directs a lot of attention to an important issue, no more, no less. It sounds to me as if you're criticizing her essentially for telling a compelling story. What standard are you holding her to? She's not a politician, CEO, engineer, etc. ...
>Greta is the face of the idea that there is a simple and obvious answer that could be readily implemented, if only us sinners would get up off our slothful, gluttonous sorry asses and Do The Right Thing.
Your choice of words, not anyone elses. The fact that this is what her words sound like to you does help answer my original question (where all the hate comes from) though (see atoav's sibling comment...).
The rest of your comment is basically saying that she makes a complex issue sound too simple. Maybe so, but claiming that something is "too complex" is often an excuse for not doing anything.
In fact, quite a lot could be achieved by measures that are relatively simple. A carbon tax would be a great example. If the publicity she's generated can speed up the introduction of such a tax, she'll have done more for our future than most of the experts she's apparently supposed to defer to.
I've lived without a car for more than a decade. I walked cross country from Georgia to California and accepted rides while homeless. I took a train out of California to get back into housing elsewhere.
I'm an environmental studies major. I don't lecture rich people for taking planes to where they need to be. I also don't make plane trips myself for the express purpose of telling people "You rich assholes need to shrink your god-damned carbon footprint."
I abhor hypocrisy. There's not much I hate more than people going "Do as I say, not as I do."
I was just trying to take your question at face value and answer it in hopes of being helpful. Otherwise I would have stayed out of this ridiculous theater, which probably would have been the better choice because then I wouldn't be getting ragged on for trying to answer your question.
She has made a point of never travelling by air. All her journeys within Europe have been by rail. She went because as the schools strikes spread across Europe, she has been invited. She crossed the Atlantic to next week's UN summit, as a racing yacht which was going to make the journey anyway, offered her a place on board.
Governments around Europe and the EU parliament have again invited her to speak. So she has.
So what to do, tell them all to piss off?
Pretending that a legal minor has this much agency is a lie on the face of it.
If she were having sex with all these adults, everyone would call that statutory rape (and worse). Everyone would decry "How can you blatantly use a child like that?!!!"
But her being used politically seems fine to most people.
B. The Pope should be tending his own flock and cleaning up his own mess. Him using a child like her to further his own political ends makes me go "Gee, I wonder why Arch Bishops and the like seem to think using children to meet their sexual needs is A-okay!".
The Pope owes her an apology in my mind.
I don't harp on this stuff in part because I'm not Catholic and I have a grudging respect for the work he has done to clean up the mess with the Catholic church, but I was a stay-at-home mom for a lot of years and I was very protective of my own special-needs sons. I have seen her described as autistic. Why are her parents allowing this? I don't get that.
C. The internet exists. Video exists. If she is so much more holier than thou, she could create a website (as her primary means to share her message) and she could do her testimony at these events she is invited to via video conferencing/prerecorded video.
When you want to be the face of a moral argument, it isn't enough to not be guilty of X. There needs to be no appearance of impropriety.
If you have to explain to people that gallivanting all over the world is somehow totes different here because it was by train and other vehicles that "were going there anyway," instead of saying "I refuse to complain about traffic while being traffic," then you are diluting your message.
Gandhi did a lot of things for which I think he deserves criticism, such as sleeping with naked girls to supposedly prove to himself he could resist temptation. But he succeeded in his goal because he walked the walk on things pertinent to his message concerning how to get economically free of England.
He wore very little and wove what little he wore. He didn't argue that other people should burn their British clothes, but he needed to dress appropriately for a world leader so he needed to be an exception.
I could probably find other things to say here, but I'm very much regretting saying anything at all. I've paid very little attention to the whole thing because the whole thing strikes me as bullshit theater using a child as its political puppet, so none of it sits well with me, not as a mother and not as an environmental studies major who has endeavored to live by my beliefs instead of lecturing the world to shrink its carbon footprint while I do otherwise.
I may never get much press. I get that. But I'm comfortable with the choices I am making for myself without trying to hold other people to a standard I can't be arsed to try to meet because, well, you know, my message is so important or something.
She's clearly entitled to express an opinion, and old enough to form them. I had political and plenty of other opinions at 16, and I'm sure you did. You probably still feel the same on some. All political parties have youth branches that are freely permitted without global cries of indoctrination! Though some may verge into indoctrination. Climate's an issue that will clearly affect a youngster's future more than yours or mine - I'm past half way in my life, they have 60+ years ahead. My kids see the climate response in far starker terms than most adults, though they're a little older.
If she were mere puppet or pawn, I'm pretty sure the resentment, insincerity and unwillingness would be clear and bloody obvious.
Being young doesn't discount you from having a opinion, or wanting to change something. So is it discounting the opinion simply because she has proven somewhat successful? It certainly seems that way in many of the media attacks she's received - and brushed off. There was a coal or oil trade body that recently put out a wonderful statement something along the lines of seeing her as one of their biggest threats. Great reason to keep on doing what she is doing then, no? Doubly so if politicians are actually bloody listening.
That some sections of the media paint her as $deity and others as $anti-deity is absurd and wrong.
On mention of autistic, I'm at a loss. She's described as autistic as it's an accepted term for someone on the autism spectrum in Europe. My friend with an autistic child would, and has, called them autistic when the need arises. Why is that a problem? How would someone with autism be properly referred to in the US? How is it inappropriate? She's certainly freely mentioned it in interview in the past. Some sections of the media have tried to use it as a means of personal attack, but surely better to acknowledge her situation than try to hide it?
OK, so you think we should not travel at all if we have an opinion on fixing emissions. That rules out all of us. That seems far too convenient to one side of the argument though. I couldn't go to a demonstration without travelling. So sign an online petition instead or throw up another blog I guess. That doesn't get to influence decision makers though.
We all get to make trade-offs within the globalised system we have right now. Whilst agitating and striving to improve it with the least impact practicable on whatever issue we find important.
I think you have misunderstood my point.
Autism is socially impairing. People with autism have trouble dealing with social stuff. So she is probably less qualified than most 16 year olds to try to figure out how fame at a young age is likely to impact her.
Most people with autism get inculcated with social programming that I think is harmful. It's an attempt to get them to behave more normally, which is usually a fundamental violation of their personal boundaries.
It's a little like introverts being told that they are weird and need to socialize the same way that extroverts do, that there is something inherently bad and broken about wanting a lot of time alone.
If she were someone with a mental IQ of 70, would you be vociferously defending her right to express herself politically? Or would you be taking a side-eyes view at the whole thing and wondering how much of this was really their opinion and how much of this was someone with more power than them using them as a puppet?
If you have a "social IQ" of 70 and are dealing with an inherently highly social arena -- politics -- at a young age, isn't that something we should wonder at?
I worry at the harm being done to her for no real gain. There was a story on HN not that long ago about a girl who was brutally raped while still a child and wrote a book about it. She ultimately committed suicide while still a minor, which made the press because she asked for assisted suicide under the laws of her country and was denied it, then took her own life anyway.
I was raped as a child. I was also in gifted programs from an early age. I got my act together in part because I walked away from the limelight and had a very private life for a lot of years.
This kind of fame means you live in a fish bowl. The press is notorious for raking awkward adolescents over the coals for being fat, not dressing adequately well, etc. Such as the children of celebrities and the daughter of the Clintons. Growing up in the limelight can be very hard on someone with normal levels of social skills.
So my concern here is that she is essentially being abused and doesn't understand the social consequences well enough to realize it yet. That's my concern.
OK, so you think we should not travel at all if we have an opinion on fixing emissions.
No, this is absolutely not at all anything I think or said. It in no way fits with my statement that I don't lecture rich people for flying to where they need to fly.
Those are clarifications. I have zero interest in pursuing what looks to me like a fruitless and pointless argument.
You have a good day.
Perhaps. Yet by being known for being direct, and somewhat asocial as seems to be the case with many with autism, she seems to have been uniquely able to cut through the bullshit. I can think of few others that so many politicians would have been willing to listen to, to anything like the same extent. Except other politicians and heads of state.
I well understand the concern about possible future consequences. Not sure how stridently I'd try and prevent her if she were my child though. That's the sort of thing that may have the kid packing and leaving if you try and stop it. Heck, all kids are in a fishbowl thanks to social, YT etc.
I've not heard of social programming - it doesn't seem to be among the support my mate with the autistic child received. It manages to sound rather dystopian.
Again, from my end, it feels very, very much like you are putting words in my mouth. (That's not to imply it is on purpose.)
Protecting a child's right to choose is the exact opposite of stridently trying to prevent them from doing something. That's outright denying them a choice. It is wholly unrelated to anything I did as a parent and outright antithetical to it.
I've redacted multiple paragraphs from my draft. Suffice it to say I raised two special needs sons who likely qualify for a diagnosis on the autism spectrum and I have firsthand experience with trying to protect their right to choose when they were teenagers in the face of a world that doesn't really want to respect that for anyone at all, not even adults.
It's not easy to pull off, even without being at the center of this much public attention, which only magnifies the problem.
Point being, it's an almost impossible problem - I'd want to support them, but try and minimise harm. If that meant going along and trying to keep the worst of the media out of their face, so be it. I'd also want to make damn sure they knew what they were getting into. You know teenagers - trying to advise against something, or even giving pros and cons, can end up encouraging. Sometimes it feels like it guarantees it. :)
There's no chance Greta or her parents expected or could have predicted the extent to which it has escalated. Yet somehow she has been almost uniquely successful in having apparent influence on climate. There must have been discussions of whether she wants to keep going in the crazy escalation that sprang up, or whether it's getting out of control. Least I bloody hope so.
I just hope the world, and media, plays along when or if she decides to withdraw from a life in public, or has had enough, and the ending doesn't involve having to pick up the pieces. The world's media isn't very good at that bit.
Peace. :)
Mhm, maybe, but not in native Sweden.
I'm well aware there are very real problems with acting like 18 is some hard and fast cut-off between genuinely consenting sex and some kind of abuse based on inability to make such a decision. But this is not the equivalent of a 16 year old girl having a 20 year old boyfriend. There isn't just one single adult involved in this scenario with this 16 year old.
Sounds like you're far, far less effective in your environmentalism than Ms. Thunberg. It must be pleasant that you have your personal purity and sense self-righteousness, but none of that that will help blunt the impact of the climate crisis.
The fact that media isn't paying any attention to me and my accomplishments isn't evidence that I'm accomplishing nothing. It just makes me easy pickings for internet strangers to try to treat dismissively.
The mechanism is simple: What Greta does, feels to them like she is holding a mirror in front of their faces. They hate what they see. They cannot bring what they see together with their self-image. So instead of going to the bottom of their own feelings and exploring why that girl enrages them so much, they rationalize it: "she isn't a real environmentalist, because she didn't do X or Y propperly" etc.
The world however still thinks she is on the right side of history and then they realize that just rationalizing it to themselves won't cut it. So they open the browser, log in, ...
To their defense: most probably don't even realize it works that way. Many men are quite bad at understanding their own feelings because they never learned how to do it. But sadly lying to themselves will likely make it worse..
Al Gore was neither young, a girl, nor autistic, but he received a similar response. And still does, in fact, even after years out of the spotlight. Perhaps this has nothing to do with her and is simply disagreement over the issue.
Gore did have the same message. His predictions of imminent apocalypse were wrong, and many of us old enough to remember that are naturally skeptical about the latest batch of apocalyptic predictions.
And the venom? That exists on the fringes of any political issue, and advocates amplify the voices of a few loudmouthed fools to discredit any reasoned disagreement. The perception of widespread hate is manufactured.
These are merely multipliers, not in it self constituting the whole impact. What had more impact was the record drought throughout Europe that happend when she started her thing. Even the most critical people at that time realized that the weather was doing something that it usually didn't do.
I am not an American and Al Gore is not as widely perceived here as in the US I suppose (also because the whole climate thing is not such a polarizing issue over here).
> The perception of widespread hate is manufactured.
Is it really? I didn't see such strong reactions against a single person for a long time. Middle aged men setting posers of a 16 year old girl on fire on the street. I mean really – how is that normal?
I haven't heard about that (and can't find it). How many people were burning posters? If it was just a few, that's another example of the amplification I mentioned. A few crazy people are elevated as representative of the opposition.
The Washington Post ran a story like that. "Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is sailing to America amid a storm of online attacks"[1]. Their evidence for that "storm"? Three tweets.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/15/swedish-clim...
But beyond that the amount of such voices I wittnessed in my feeds also isn't too small and I neither followed Greta Thunberg nor do I have many environmentalists in my feeds.
Literally every news article daring to mentioning her had 40-50+ "critical" voices with a perceived majority of men that could have been her father.
So all of what I say here is obviously very subjective and I am convinced that you are right, when you speak of a loud minority. What fascinated me is how middle aged men go and under their real name rant about a 16 year old girl and still feel like they are doing the right thing. And I don't mean trolls, I mean guys that really do think this is what they need to do.
Myself I didn't really deal with Greta Thunberg. I think it is nice that she creates attention for this important topic, espcially among audiences who wouldn't be reached by pure scientific publications, but personally I am not that interested in what she says, because her points are mostly moral and ethical and I agree with the general idea that we need to drastically change things even if it hurts.
Many people tend to not respond well to pedantic know-it alls pointing their finger, even more so when it's some teenager lecturing the grown ups, even more so when their "grassroots" rise was manufactured by media/ad agency parents and their friends...
[1] https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789177951117/scener-ur-hjartat/ [2] https://uvell.se/2019/04/25/iles-pr-byran-bakom-greta-thunbe...
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/ed6ma7/the-daily-show-with-tre...
Great Thunberg's coterie of helpers have a larger carbon footprint than the majority of us.
But hey ... at least it's not as bad as Prince Harry, who said every action matters (when telling the plebeians to stop their commercial air travel habit), and then took 4 private flights over the next two weeks.
Gotta love Gulfstream environmentalists.
Even if they'd kill themself to safe the environment there'd be people like you, complaining that you'd done it in a much more environmental friendly way.
Say a tiny bit more about you than it says about the topic at hand. Grow up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> They do, however, include negative emission techniques on a huge planetary scale that is yet to be invented, and that many scientists fear will never be ready in time and will anyway be impossible to deliver at the scale assumed.”
Imagine somebody said "a meteor is going to hit the Earth in 11 years and end life as we know it unless we made massive changes to our way of life and invented new technologies to thwart it." I fully believe we as a species could collectively band together to stop it.
What's so horrible about climate change is it's not that the world ends in 11 years. It's that in 11 years we likely are doomed to watch our own extinction. On top of that, we're not even beginning to deal with the problem in a way that gives hope for the future. I can't think of a more existential crisis inducing reality.
This is precisely why I find Greta and her crowd insufferable. I don't think even the IPCC suggests we're going to watch our extinction. The report says we'll see somewhere around 5% global GDP reduction in 2100, in a world that's vastly wealthier than today. That's anything but extinction.
In countries that the average HNer won't live in. Or visit. Nice things to worry about, but for most of us here it'll be a distant concern. And asking people to give up their quality of life for others they'll never meet will always be a hard sell.
> war, famine,
Ditto.
> diseases
This one might affect the first world, but I don't know of a strong link between 'global warming' and 'new diseases'. If anything, making the tropics less habitable should decrease contact between humans and exotic new disease carriers...
> and maybe even a pause for civilisation itself until things stabilise again.
I'm sorry, what? 5% penalty to global GDP by 2100 is not a 'pause for civilisation itself', or anything close. Unless you only meant to include the aforementioned "countries that HNers typically don't live in"?
For that matter, I'd say a "pause" is by far the least likely of "civilization continues as normal", "civilization pauses, but comes back" and "civilization dies, forever". "pause" just requires walking such a fine line between "bad enough to overwhelm all the systems designed to keep things running" and not "bad enough to make humanity unsustainable".
Poor non-HN people, we don't care about those at all? They can die?
If we get widespread war over resources, 5% penalty on anything is not going to suffice. A limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is going to cause corn crops to fail in the US. (Where average HN-ers live, if you care only about your own in-group.)
I didn't mean new diseases. I meant old diseases. If you have no electricity in a big city for an extended time, you will be in for a wild ride.
(The last point I don't care much about, it's not very important. But I think if civilisation died, it would have a huge amount of knowledge and technology for new generations to come to jumpstart from, compared to those generations who had to discover everything for themselves.)
And that’s what miss from her and her supporters: Reasonableness, and living in the “real world”.
She demands that people fly less, and people don’t like hypocrisy, so they’re annoyed.
Remember - Thunberg has no solutions. Nor do any of the climate activists like her. Planes will not stop flying, power stations will not stop emitting short of a totalitarian government taking over the world and rolling the global economy back a couple hundred years: an act that would involve mass destruction and death on an unimaginable scale.
The only people who have solutions are scientists and engineers working on ways to power planes that don't involve burning fossil fuels, or make them more efficient. They won't work any faster because some random teenager sailed on a boat. Nor will people give up their vacations, miss out on an important business deal, or refuse to go see a dying loved one because Thunberg personally demands it. Her refusal to see this is a product of a desire for attention, not a helpful service to humanity.
I'll respect this girl when she goes and gets an engineering degree, gets a job at Airbus and works on an electric plane. Then she'll be able to say she really made a difference.
Remember - politicians have no solutions. Nor do any other politicians around them.
Unless they form a totalitarian world government and sends us to the 19th century, which would be double-plus-ungood.
The only people who have solutions are scientists and engineers working on ways to power planes that don't involve burning fossil fuels. These planes will magically be ready one day and the oil lobby will stay quiet and everything will be just fine, because science. Amen. Now keep your head down until directed otherwise.
Yes that's my position, if we discard your pointless sarcasm. Obviously planes won't "magically" be ready - that's my entire point. It will take work, lots of work by lots of scientists and engineers. The best way to help them is become one of them.
The oil lobby as you put it is really the energy lobby and are one of the biggest investors in green energy. They are staying quiet, it's been a long time since I thought about firms like BP or Shell in relation to climate change. Additionally they have little actual power. They don't even have the power to set prices of their own product. The idea of Big Evil Oil Execs trying to destroy the world is a childish myth. Where is the titanic battle between the oil lobby and Tesla, for example? I don't see any evidence of such a battle. Tesla's big problem is their own spending levels, not being undermined by petrol companies.
Finally, yes Greta should keep her head down. Her net contribution so far has been negative. The solutions lie with science but she's been encouraging school children to go on "strike" i.e. refuse to take the maths and science lessons adults are giving them, the very lessons that would teach them how to contribute to the solutions.
do you mean projections made by climate scientists that have, so far, been far too conservative in nature?
In short, everyone's economy is built on perpetual growth. If that growth stops or reverse, everything falls down. And you don't need to get to 2100 before civil society breaks down.
So either you think none of the above will happen (and do explain why) or you do and you still don't think it warrants immediate and drastic action. Which also requires an explanation.
https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_chapter3.pdf