Pirate's Cove

Is it any wonder that the youts are having lots of mental issues when they are treated to a constant litany of doom and gloom?

Greta Thunberg: ‘The World Is Getting More Grim by the Day’

There is genuinely no precedent in the modern history of geopolitics for the climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Four and a half years ago, she began “striking” outside of Swedish parliament — a single teenager with a single sign. She was 15. In just a few months, she had made her mark at the United Nations climate conference in Poland: “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is,” she told the assembled diplomats and negotiators, “even that burden you leave to us children.” (snip)

In early February I spoke with Thunberg, who was in Sweden, over Zoom, about why she believes it is now a trickier time to be a climate activist than when she began, why it’s no longer sufficient to listen to the scientists, the necessity of systems change and whether she still believes in the basic goodness of people. The conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and length. (snip)

What’s changed, if anything, since then?

(St. Greta) It seems like the world is getting more and more grim every day. The concentration of CO? is now higher in the atmosphere and causing more and more extreme weather.

But there are also positive things that have changed. We have more people now who are mobilized and who are in the climate movement, in the fight for the climate and social justice.

So I guess that’s a good thing. But we have to be able to zoom out and see that we are still moving in the wrong direction. The things that people said back then that they were going to do, they still haven’t done, which proves, or which shows us, that it was just empty promises and really not taking it seriously, unfortunately.

Oh, good, the kids are mobilized. What are they doing in their own lives? What are they giving up in their 1st World lives to help out the folks in the 3rd world shitholes developing nations, since the mostly 1st World white kids think that blacks and browns cannot get ahead on their own (their beliefs do seem rather racist, eh?)?

Four or five years ago, you were really emphasizing that we need to listen to the scientists. Is that still sufficient?

No, of course not. In the beginning — well, “in the beginning” — people have been campaigning about this for decades. But when I began, I said we need to listen to the scientists because people were still treating the climate crisis as something debatable. And now — at least in the discourse — we’ve kind of settled that. It is a crisis. Even scientists and even heads of state are saying that this is an emergency.

See, we do not need to listen to the scientists because it is not a science.

In the book, you wrote: “We still need to answer some fundamental questions. What is it exactly we want to solve in the first place? What is our goal?” How would you answer those questions now?

Right now it seems like the people in power just don’t want to solve the climate crisis. They want to find “solutions,” whether they’re good or not, that enable us to continue now as we have been, that allow them to continue staying in power and to satisfy their greed. That’s not what I think that we should be striving for. I think that we need to make sure that no one’s well-being is at the expense of someone else. But that’s not what our current people in power seem to want.

Hmm, Modern Socialism. Go figure.