Wednesday, August 14, 2019

The voice of Western millennial entitlement


I happened to hear a BBC interview with the Swedish teenage enviro-wunderkind and media darling Greta Thunberg about her forthcoming trip to the United Nations Climate Summit in New York. (In case you haven’t heard, she’ll be crossing the Atlantic on a racing yacht so as to avoid leaving a carbon footprint.)

After discussing the privations of sailing on a yacht that doesn’t have a toilet (oh, the sacrifices this selfless girl is willing to make for the cause), the fawning interviewer asked what action Thunberg would be seeking at the UN.

The answer was revealing. “Our job is to demand the solutions, not provide the solutions,” Thunberg replied.

There you have it, really: the voice of privileged Western millennial entitlement. Don’t bore me with the practical realities that politicians have to grapple with. Don’t waste my time talking about the likely economic consequences of abandoning fossil fuels for unreliable renewable energy sources, or the downstream social impacts. Not my problem. Just fix it.

4 comments:

David McLoughlin said...

The unhappiest girl in the world.

Alarming the hell out of schoolkids across the planet, thanks to their teachers indoctrinating them with her messages of doom.

It's the millennial cult to beat them all. Every problem on the planet is caused by us, and the solution is to wipe us from the planet's very surface.

It is well more than past time that this cult be reined into reality.

We are not a blight on this planet. The very fact we know (from the developments in astronomy over the past century) that our planet is one unremarkable planet circling a minor star on the outer arm of a galaxy of billions of stars, in a universe of billions of such galaxies, shows the kind of species we are.

I think we are a special kind of species. No other species on this planet has invented telescopes, or aircraft, or computers, or can fly to the moon, or mousetraps, or can even feed seven billion people and raise almost all of them from poverty and disease in the space of just a century.

We should not be ashamed of what we have achieved as a species. We should be proud of it. Loudly. And be happy we have solved or can solve whatever problem is thrown our way, including those that make sad Greta the unhappiest girl in the world.

What worries me is that the woke green millennial death cultists who want to wipe us off the planet are at root unhappy because we are so clever. And they are the ones with the megaphones shouting down all contrary views despite the evidence to support us.

MarkJ said...

I'm concerned "they" only use science when it supports their argument or world view. You either believe in Science or you don't - you cant pick and choose. And to those who would seek to have us remove our reliance on fossil fuels - please lead by example and show is how it is done. Perhaps then we would follow your example instead of your dogma.

David McLoughlin said...

This article on the left-wing Australian academic website The Conversation positively extols Greta and her ilk, and canvasses how they can be weaponised/mobilised to enforce their Climate Cult on the rest of us:

https://theconversation.com/can-environmental-populism-save-the-planet-120768

Andy Espersen said...

In reply to David's first entry (above) - no, Greta Thunberg is not "the unhappiest girl in the world". And neither are the "green millennial death cultists" unhappy. Nothing is more pleasing to a living human being than to fight for a cause he/she really believes in. So what, if clever psychologists label Thunberg as being on the autistic spectrum? If anything, this proves that she is endowed with a complex, genetic gift which is very basic to homo sapiens sapiens - which is probably of crucial importance to humankind's survival.

She has every right to act as she feels she must act. And the rest of us have every right to hear her opinions and disagree with her.