Climate kids mere pawns in a bid to undermine capitalism
Greta Thunberg gives a speech in Hamburg, Germany. Picture: AFP
“You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden, you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.”
These are the words of Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old Swedish student who last year, according to CNN, “shamed” negotiators at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland.
Having failed to sway her Polish audience, she attended this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, making the 65-hour round trip from Stockholm by train. There she spoke alongside Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of what is now known as UN Climate Change, to a rapt audience of business leaders.
When it comes to protesting, Greta’s no stranger. Before last year’s Swedish elections, she protested outside Stockholm’s parliament, during school hours, every day for three weeks.
She also led a march of thousands of Belgian students who, for eight consecutive weeks, skipped school to express their anger over global warming.
Last month, the radical New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined this juvenile groupthink by introducing the Green New Deal, a non-binding resolution that, among many other extreme steps, would eliminate almost all fossil fuels in the US in just 10 years. It would require every building in the US — including every home — to be retrofitted for energy efficiency.
Students rejoiced. Veteran Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein was bailed up in her office by teenagers demanding she support the Green New Deal. She objected, saying “there’s no way to pay for it”. “But we’re the people who voted for you, you’re supposed to listen to us,” one student exclaimed. “You didn’t vote for me,” Feinstein told the 16-year-old.
Now a British group called Youth Strike 4 Climate is attracting protesting students from more than 60 cities and towns across Britain. It has spawned an Australian clone, School Strike 4 Climate Australia.
The local version has an expensive website, featuring children as young as six. It begs: “We are school kids temporarily sacrificing our education in order to save our futures from dangerous climate change.”
More than 500 academics, consumed by the approaching catastrophe, have now signed an open letter of support, warning you don’t need to be a professor to understand that by continuing to burn climate-cooking coal we are ruining any chance today’s children have for a safe future.
Children have become the latest weapon in the arsenal of anti-Western activists, designed to keep pressure on wayward politicians in advanced economies whose enthusiasm for Paris emissions reduction commitments is visibly waning.
Consistent with Vladimir Lenin’s communist teachings, these global-warming zealots need “that generation of young people who begin to reach political maturity in the midst of a disciplined and desperate struggle against the bourgeoisie”.
Their goal is not to save the world from ecological calamity but, as Figueres confirms, to destroy capitalism.
The chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and UN Climate Change official Ottmar Edenhofer echoes these sentiments. He says: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute, de facto, the world’s wealth.”
Students are too idealistic to see they are being manipulated. They have been so brainwashed that they accept uncritically the world’s most urgent issue is “lack of action on climate change”.
They even reject as being praiseworthy Australia’s per capita renewables deployment rate, which, an Australian National University study reports, is four to five times faster than in the EU, the US, Japan and China.
It follows then that they have little concern for the damaging practical consequences of an ever increasing dependence on renewable energy, which has pushed up real Australian electricity prices by 76 per cent in a decade.
Nor compassion for those poor households with big families.
A KPMG study found “there is barely $3 a week difference between per-capita spending in the lowest and highest quintile households on energy”.
And no compassion for the 109,000 Australian households that, in the past financial year, had their electricity disconnected because they couldn’t afford it. Another 65,000 are on hardship programs.
Perhaps, in their youthful zeal, students believe the ends justify the means? So, come winter when energy-poor elderly die from the cold, they will be rationalised as unfortunate collateral damage?
If the poorest in society receive such little consideration from students and teachers, what hope business? The same rising costs of energy, compounded by reduced access to base load power, are crippling them.
Tomorrow is Global Day of Planet Action in which children from 50 countries will participate.
When adult leaders can’t be trusted to look after the planet, students must take things into their own hands. “We are the voiceless future of humanity … We will not accept a life in fear and devastation. We have the right to live our dreams and hopes.”
And so they do. However, when finally these young idealists confront reality, it won’t be global temperatures they will have influenced, only the political climate.
But that’s for another day. For the moment, thanks to their left-wing education, they and the majority of their millennial brothers and sisters have unshakeable faith that socialist leaders will undertake the required action on climate change while simultaneously managing the transition away from capitalism.
Or, as Figueres puts it, impose “radical collaboration among businesses, non-governmental organisations, universities, local and state governments, and communities”.
Dianne Feinstein is right. Teenagers are not able to vote for her. But in just a few years they will be able to vote her out as they follow their utopian dreams down the road to serfdom.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/climate-kids-mere-pawns-in-a-bid-to-undermine-capitalism/news-story/8d256420e390aa04c99594c6b2d96cf8?utm_source=The%20Australian&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=TodaySHeadlines
