Greta Thunberg brings much needed logic and truth to bear overall!
Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine, November 28, 2022
On September 28, 2021, at the Youth4Climate conference, held in Milan, Greta Thunberg took the stage. Sitting near her was the city’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, wearing a mask. Thunberg, who is five feet tall, could barely be seen over the lectern. She had removed her mask and was smiling.
“Climate change is not only a threat, it is above all an opportunity to create a healthier, greener, and cleaner planet which will bene!t all of us,” she began. “We must seize this opportunity—we can achieve a win-win in both ecological conservation and high-quality development. . . . We need to walk the talk; if we do this together, we can do this.
“When I say ‘climate change,’ what do you think of ?” she went on. “I think of jobs — green jobs.” This received a round of applause.
“We must find a smooth transition towards a low-carbon economy,” Thunberg said. “There is no Planet B. There is no Planet Blah—blah, blah, blah; blah, blah, blah.” Her listeners, including Sala, started to realize that they’d been had. The applause died down.
“Build Back Better—blah, blah, blah,” Thunberg continued. “Green economy—blah, blah, blah. “Net zero by 2050—blah, blah, blah.
“Net zero—blah, blah, blah. “Climate neutral—blah, blah, blah.
“This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words — words that sound great, but so far have led to no action,” Thunberg said. “Of course we need constructive dialogue, but they’ve now had thirty years of blah, blah, blah, and where has that led us?”
Five countries are responsible for over half of all historical CO2 emissions, namely United States, China, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom. About a hundred and ninety countries are responsible for the other half.
It was thirty years ago that the world’s “so-called leaders” gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the so-called Earth Summit. Everyone agreed that radical change was needed. To avert disaster, global CO2 emissions, which were then running at around twenty-two billion metric tons a year, would have to be reduced, eventually almost to zero. How this would happen, no one really knew.
Still, the goal of preventing “dangerous” warming was enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which President George H. W. Bush cheerfully signed. “Some find the challenges ahead overwhelming,” Bush said. “I believe that their pessimism is unfounded.”
A follow-up “conference of the parties,” or COP, took place in Kyoto in 1997. By then, annual global emissions had risen to twenty-four billion tons. After much back-and-forth, it was agreed that something had to be done. This Kyoto Protocol, an addendum to the Framework Convention, laid out specific emissions-reduction targets for countries to meet.
“I am both determined and optimistic that we can succeed,” Vice President Al Gore told the diplomats gathered in Japan.
After Kyoto, global emissions kept on rising, only faster. By 2009, they’d climbed to thirty-two billion tons a year. That fall, President Barack Obama “flew to Copenhagen for yet another conference of the parties — COP-15. “I believe that we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of this common threat,” he declared.
By 2015, emissions had increased to thirty-five billion tons a year. At that year’s COP No. 21 — held in Paris, it was decided that, at last, really and truly, it was time to get serious. “The decisions you make here will reverberate down through the ages,” the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, told the delegates. Nevertheless, emissions continued to rise. In the past thirty years, humans have added as much CO2 to the atmosphere as they did in the previous thirty thousand.
At some point during all the “blah, blah, blah”-ing — it’s hard to say when, exactly — climate change ceased to be a prospective problem and became a clear and present one. Since Rio, the Arctic ice cap has shrunk by two-fifths. Greenland has shed some four trillion metric tons of ice, and mountain glaciers have lost six trillion tons. Heat waves are now hotter, droughts deeper, and storms more intense. In some parts of the world, the wildfire season never ends.
One conclusion to draw from this pattern is that the world isn’t going to avoid “dangerous” warming. Global leaders will continue to gather at COPs — this year’s, in Sharm el-Sheikh, just concluded — and to speak loftily about “net zero” and “a low-carbon economy.” But nothing will change, and, as a result, everything will change. There will be large-scale crop failures. The Greenland ice sheet will start to collapse — it may already be collapsing — and, owing to sea-level rise in some places and desertifcation in others, large swaths of the globe will become uninhabitable.
This conclusion is not, however, the one that Thunberg chose to draw when she spoke at the Youth4Climate conference. “Right now we are still very much speeding in the wrong direction,” she told the crowd in Milan. “But, of course, we can still turn this around — it is entirely possible.
“The leaders like to say, ‘We can do this,’ ” Greta went on. “They obviously don’t mean it, but we do — we can do this. I’m absolutely convinced that we can.” Or, as Thunberg herself might put it, Blah, blah, blah.
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Greta Thunberg ends year with one of the greatest tweets in history | Rebecca Solnit, The UK Guardian, December 31, 2022
On 27 December, former kickboxer, professional misogynist and online entrepreneur Andrew Tate, 36, sent a boastfully hostile tweet to climate activist Greta Thunberg, 19, about his sports car collection. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote. He was probably hoping to enhance his status by mocking her climate commitment. Instead, she burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words.
Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping gas into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their “enormous emissions”, had unsolicited dick pic energy. Thunberg seemed aware of that when she replied: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”
Her reply gained traction to quickly become one of the top 10 tweets of all time; as I write, it’s been liked 3.5 million times and shared directly 650,000 or so, and the interchange became the topic of countless news stories around the world, from India to Australia.
There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.
“Men resist green behavior as unmanly” is the headline for a 2017 story on the phenomenon. Machismo and climate denial, as well as alliance with the fossil fuel industry, is a package deal for the right, from the “rolling coal” trucks whose plumes of dark smoke are meant as a sneer at climate causes to Republicans in the US who have long opposed nearly all climate action (and are major recipients of oil money).
Thunberg’s takedown clearly stung Tate, who 10 hours later tweeted out a pompous video in which he tried to reassert his masculinity and status by blathering on in a dressing gown, with a cigar and a pizza box as props. Not long after that, he and his brother Tristan Tate were arrested by Romanian authorities in connection with appalling allegations of sex trafficking. Tate is a troll and a creep; he’s also alleged to be a pimp and rapist. Tate denies all wrongdoing.
Tate is part of a huge network of far-right men online and he’d been banned from most social media platforms. Elon Musk’s Twitter let him back on not long before the tweet that was heard around the world.
He was hoping to promote himself with his sneer at Thunberg; he managed to raise his visibility just in time to make news of his arrest and the charges international news. By at least one account, his Romanian-brand pizza box in his video helped cue Romanian police to his location. Had he not harassed Thunberg, the news of his arrest and the charges would not have been major news. He went looking for attention; he got it.
Thunberg drily tweeted the morning of the 30th: “this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes,” mocking her own earnest public image. So far it has 2.6 million likes. Beyond the entertainment value of what transpired over the past few days is a serious reminder of the intersection between machismo, misogyny, hostility to climate action and climate science, and the dank underworld of rightwing characters like Tate recruiting white boys and young men to their views.
>>> Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses.
SOURCE ~ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/31/greta-thunberg-andrew-tate-tweet
Greta Thunberg Warns Davos Elite Will Throw Humanity ‘Under the Bus’ for Profits
From Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, January 19, 2023
“As long as they can get away with it, they will continue to invest in fossil fuels,” the Swedish climate activist said. “We need to build and create a critical mass of people who demand change, who demand justice.”
Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg took aim at those profiting off of the climate emergency Thursday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual summit in Davos, Switzerland.
The Fridays for Future leader has previously attracted global attention for delivering impassioned speeches at earlier summits, urging the Davos elite to “act as if you loved your children above all else” and calling on policymakers to stop “basing your ‘pledges’ on the cheating tactics that got us into this mess in the first place” and start to “implement annual binding carbon budgets.”
Early into a panel discussion Thursday with fellow climate activists and an international energy expert, Thunberg said that “we are right now in Davos, where basically the people are who are mostly fueling the destruction of the planet, the people who are at the very core of the climate crisis, the people who are investing in fossil fuels… somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems when they have proven time and time again that they are not prioritizing that.”
“The changes that we need are not very likely to come from the inside, rather I believe they will come from the bottom up.”
“They are prioritizing self greed, corporate greed, and short-term economic profits above people and above planet,” she charged. “We seem to be listening to them rather than the people who are actually affected by the climate crisis, the people who are living on the frontlines, and that kind of tells us the situation, how absurd this is.”
“The people who we really should be listening to are not here,” she said of the yearly meeting that brings people from around the world to the Swiss resort town. “Instead, we are bombarded with messages from people who are basically the people who are causing this crisis.”
After the moderator asked Thunberg— who was detained at a protest against coal mining in Germany earlier this week— why she is talking “outside” the summit rather than with high-profile figures “inside” as she has before, she said that “there are already activists doing that, and I think that if there should be activists inside speaking to these people, it should be those on the frontlines and not privileged people like me who are not experiencing the firsthand consequences of the climate crisis.”
“I think that right now, the changes that we need are not very likely to come from the inside, rather I believe they will come from the bottom up,” the 20-year-old added. “Without massive public pressure from the outside—at least, in my experience—these people are going to go as far as they possibly can.”
“As long as they can get away with it, they will continue to invest in fossil fuels, they will continue to throw people under the bus for their own gain,” she stressed. “We need to build and create a critical mass of people who demand change, who demand justice.”
Thunberg— who twice has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for climate activism that has included global school strikes— said that “we know that the changes we are advocating for are not going to happen overnight, and that is why we have to stay strong during a longer period of time” and grow the movement of people demanding an end to the fossil fuel era.
“The people standing up and raising their voices against all that is happening— that’s the hope right now. The hope comes from the people,” Thunberg concluded— a sentiment echoed by the other young climate activists on the panel, Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, Luisa Neubauer of Germany, and Helena Gualinga of an Indigenous community in Ecuador. They were joined by Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, which has also highlighted the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Thunberg, Nakate, Neubauer, and Gualinga are also spearheading a “cease-and-desist” letter demanding that fossil fuel CEOs attending the summit in Davos “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need.” As of press time, it had been signed by over 921,000 people.
The activists aren’t the only ones taking aim at the fossil fuel industry and their corporate and political allies in Davos this week. As Common Dreamsreported, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres also did so in a speech Wednesday.
“This insanity belongs in science fiction, yet we know the ecosystem meltdown is cold, hard scientific fact,” he said of continuing to burn fossil fuels despite the catastrophic consequences. “We must act together to close the emissions gap. To phase out coal and supercharge the renewable revolution. To end the addiction to fossil fuels. And to stop our self-defeating war on nature.”
SOURCE: https://www.commondreams.org/news/davos-greta-thunberg