I expected that the comments on this post would represent a festival of fuckwittery and I'm not disappointed. Taking each point in turn:
Greta has never real had any advice of her own; her message is simply to draw attention to the fact that for decades we've been burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the advice of the scientific communities' majority stance, which is that man-made emissions are responsible for climate change and if we don't act to reduce them, we can expect to see a terrible outcome with great suffering and hardship.
"ohh, but she's getting paid, she's a puppet" - what, and the thick bastards saying this haven't figured there's 1000 times more corrupt politicians and media figures who are taking the money to support the fossil fuel industry, all to increase the wealth of obscenely wealthy old men who know that they'll be dead before things get too hot (literally) for them?
Yes, far too many countries have been reliant on Russian energy sources, I'll refer you back to the politcians. Britain, for example had a choice back in the 1980s during the political war upon coal miners whether to start investing in green energy to retain our relative independence in that sector, or... Yup, instead we opened a load of gas fired power stations, with the Government telling us that Britain's energy needs could be met cheaper and more reliably by relying upon imported energy from abroad. This is what you get when political ideology (wanting to crush the miner's unions at all costs) meets the short-term profiteering of the neoliberal free-market economy (cheers, Maggie).
In splitting up the UK's energy market we lost the ability to design and build our own power stations, the expertise has been divided, scattered. Again, cheers Maggie. But hey, we defeated 'the enemy within', right?
That's just in the UK but I expect its a similar situation certainly across Europe.
Meanwhile as this post tragically demonstrates, there's a bunch of folk whose thinking goes only as far as the price of filling up their 5.7litre pickup which they use to go to the shops or for pose value, who welcome the 'disappearance' of Greta as if it means there isn't an issue with climate change at all. Because its much easier to think that it'll all be OK and we can go back to how it was in the good ole days.
Try telling the people in Pakistan that, the latest nation to get ravaged by extreme weather events, or any of the coastal communities whose homes are literally disappearing under rising seas. Or the inland parts of the world where people are literally frying.
I can guess the likely response, especially since the ignorance required to be a climate change denier often goes hand in hand with other predjudices: and that will be they don't care about Pakistan because its a nation of brown people.
Back to Greta. Right now I expect she's wondering what it takes for people to wake up. Yes, people are hoarding coal and wood. That's not because they are the best energy sources but because they're the most dependable under the situation of Governments across the world not having taken energy creation and use, seriously enough.
Personally I think she might be planning on buying a large bowl of popcorn and sitting back to watch nations like America shoot themselves into extinction in a 'mad max' internal energy war.
