Do you remember what it was like to have a 16 year old in the house? It was hard going, right? Remember all the comments about them being ’16, going on 30′? Remember how they always knew everything? I also remember my 16 year old being grounded for a month because he supposedly went to stay overnight at a friend’s place, and was picked up by the police at midnight for underage drinking and fighting in the street. The police did us all a favour, keeping the kids safe, including the 16 year old, although he didn’t see it that way at the time. He was outraged. I trust he sees things differently now.
16-year-olds think that they are bulletproof, and simply do not understand complex issues, so it is a complete joke that Fortune Magazine has named Greta Thunberg as the 6th greatest leader on the planet. She is a child. She has her views on climate issues, sure enough, but as the vast majority of adults have little idea about the complex nature of climate change or the best way to address the issues, how can a 16-year-old understand them?
She can’t, of course. It reaches a whole new level of absurdity, however, when a child is allowed to lecture British politicians about their inaction on climate change.
quote.Teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has delivered a scathing speech to British MPs, accusing them of failing to prevent the likely “end of our civilisation”.end quote.
The 16-year-old won headlines and inspired action around the world with her “school climate strike” outside Sweden’s Parliament last year.
And her visit to a packed room in Westminster on Tuesday coincided with a climate protest in the capital that has seen more than 1000 arrests and sparked fierce debate over its tactics and aims.
With the ongoing Brexit debacle, I suppose the British parliament could use a few people to tell them what to do, but I still don’t see how a 16-year-old can tell anyone how to do anything. The issues around climate change, even if you believe that it is real, are complex and need to strike a balance between minimising the effect on the economy, while leaving people’s way of life intact as far as possible.
Let’s face it… if you told the average teenager who wagged school on March 15th that they would have to forego their smartphones to reduce climate change, I think we know the response we would get. Most kids, like most adults, want politicians to solve the problems for them. They seem to have little or no idea of the effect the changes that they clamour for will have on their own everyday lives.
quote.Thunberg told the British MPs their failure to lower carbon emissions quickly enough, and their support for continued fossil fuel exploration and extraction were “beyond absurd”.
Stuff.
end quote.
The situation is definitely absurd, but not for the reasons Ms Thunberg avows. It is extremely unlikely that a 16-year-old has sufficient knowledge of environmental sciences, statistics, fluid mechanics or thermodynamics to be considered a leader in this complex field. It is even less likely when you consider that Ms Thunberg has been wagging school for one day a week for months in order to promote her climate activism, and has now encouraged other schoolchildren to do the same thing. (When we were at school, this would only happen once, and a series of detentions would make sure it never happened again.)
Instead, we pander to these juveniles, parroting about how it is ‘their future’, making them feel even more special than before, without considering for a moment that they are simply not mature enough to understand the complex issues at stake. The world seems to have turned on its head.
They are also not mature enough to understand that bringing the city of London to a standstill and causing the loss of millions of pounds in business revenue is not just a bit of a jape, but has a serious impact on government revenue from taxation, which is where the costs of measures to reduce climate change will be funded from.
Ms Thunberg also needs to get the message across to her fellow activists that their best course of action is not to disrupt people’s lives for a cause that may not actually exist, but to learn first and foremost to clean up after themselves. Many of them are so busy trying to save the planet, that they accidentally just discard their plastic water bottles and polystyrene coffee cups in the street, because, well… there is a planet to save after all.
Like the expression ‘Charity begins at home’, so does appropriate behaviour for a better planet. As often happens, this message seems to have been missed amidst the more noble cause of saving the earth from destruction. Find a photo of a turtle with a plastic straw up its nose and the world goes mad. Taking your own rubbish home and disposing of it properly, however, is simply too hard for a teenager… or an adult… to manage.
This leads me to the conclusion that Greta Thunberg is most certainly not the messiah…
… she’s a very naughty girl!
Thank you, Monty Python.
