Greta Is Right

It would appear that there are some people out there who really don’t like Greta Thunberg. Her main crimes, in their view, are that she is young, female, Swedish and extremely smart. She is also right about the lamentable lack of governmental action to tackle the climate emergency.

Many of Ms Thunberg’s detractors are themselves in a state of denial about the dire consequences facing planet Earth if we do not take immediate action. As blogger Enrique Dans points out:

“Greta knows that all those promises by politicians and businessmen to decarbonize by 2050 are nonsense, and that in reality, what we do in 2050, when she will be 46 years old, will make no difference, because by then you will be lucky to be alive.” (Blog, 7/12/19)

The science behind the climate emergency is incontrovertible and the time for talking about what might happen has now passed. Sarah Gray, editor of American website ATTN, details a number of ways that our lives will be changed as the emergency develops. These include food shortages, water shortages, extreme weather, power disruptions, and the loss of natural habitat. (ATTN.com, 01/08/15)

These are not predictions based on worst case scenarios, they are based on scientific modelling of available data. For example, the Natural Resources Defence Council reports that 42% of bee colonies in the USA alone had collapsed in just one year. Whilst the loss of bees may not immediately strike you as devastating their effect on the food chain is immense. (Alexandra Zessu, 31/12/15)

Around one-third of everything you eat relies on bee pollination.  Climate change means that when bees come out of hibernation the flowers they rely on have already bloomed and died. That is bad news for the bees, but disastrous for us. The loss of bees could mean the loss of apples, cucumbers, broccoli, pumpkins, carrots, avocados, almonds, amongst other crops.

It would be nice to think that the scientific warnings were now being heeded. But, we were warned previously. As Extinction Rebellion point out in 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists including the majority of living science Nobel laureates, penned the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity”calling on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and warning that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.” (Extinction Rebellion website)

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) average surface temperatures on Earth rose 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit (0.95 degrees Celsius) between 1880 and 2016, and that change is accelerating with most of the warming occurring in the past 35 years. 

In 2017, 159 nations ratified the Paris Agreement to try to halt the warming at 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) above Earth's average temperature before the Industrial Age. Given industry's and transportation's reliance on fossil fuels, many studies say that agreement will be difficult to keep to. For example, a 2017 study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that Earth's climate will be 1.5 degrees higher as early as 2026. (Space website)

Greta Thunberg is right. Setting targets to be met in the future is a recipe to do nothing in the here and now. It is a way for the present cadre of politicians across the globe to offset the responsibility to future generations. It is the equivalent of taking out a massive loan and leaving it to your children to pay it off. 

In her speech to the United Nations in September she told the assembled leaders:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,”

She continued:

“The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.”

You can view the entire speech here, and if you haven’t already done so I propose that you do so.
https://youtu.be/KAJsdgTPJpU

Millions of young people across the globe have rallied to her call. But, young people, as Greta Thunberg knows very well, do not have the power to implement the policies needed to save the planet. That power lays with a political elite whom she rightly condemns as “immature”.

Turning down an award for her contribution to the environmental debate in October the young activist said “Politicians and the people in power” need to listen to the “current, best available science.” A task they seem reluctant to do despite offering reassuring words of action at various summits. Summits incidentally that most of them use private jets to attend.

It is not that politicians, or their advisers, do not understand the science. In most cases it is not that they disagree with it either, though some do. The problem is that they cannot agree with its implications. In order to bring about the changes necessary to save the planet it requires a massive shift in our current economic system that would, essentially, require the replacement of capitalism with a system more geared toward sustainability and environmental need. And, that is not something that most politicians, representing a class that benefits most from environmental degradation, will accept. Hence, their scepticism about the arguments.

Unfortunately, it is not just politicians who do not like the implications of change. Many ordinary people do not want to change either. Many regard the climate emergency as important but not to the extent that they no longer want holidays abroad, or to eat less meat. Sure, most people will use long lasting light bulbs and recycle, but they still want to have a car. In many cases, to be fair, that car is not a luxury but essential to get them to work. 

A symbol of an irrational organisation of social life in which rather than build homes close to where people work, we build on green belt sites and expect people to travel miles to their work. According to the Office for National Statistics the average person in England and Wales travels nine miles to work. In the USA the figure is even higher with the average American travelling 16 miles to get to work. According to a 2018 survey on average, European workers spend 1 hour and 24 minutes a day commuting, travelling 18 miles in total. 

But, the resistance to change is also entirely understandable. We live in a socio-economic system that relies on the production and consumption of commodities. We, particularly those of us fortunate enough to live in the richer nations, have been conditioned to be consumers regardless of whether we actually produce anything. Our entire system is based on the circulation of money which is a proxy for labour power. Instead of being paid in food or TV’s or clothes we are paid in cash which we can then exchange for food, housing, clothing etc.

In an article on Canadian TV’s website Christy Somos notes the four things that Greta Thunberg says we should do to ward off the climate disaster. These are:

            
             Don’t fly.

          Go vegetarian or vegan.

          Join an activist group.

          Vote.

The last of these is interesting. Somos says:

“As Thunberg addresses the nation’s leaders, it’s important to remember who put them in charge in the first place. Thunberg urges everyone to use their right to vote and to pick a candidate that is going to put climate change front and centre in their platforms, and to continually press those in power to adapt their policies and adopt new legislature to save the planet.”

At the last American Presidential election the people’s of one of the World’s largest democracies elected a climate change denier. According to the New York Times since taking office Trump has proposed nearly 100 environmental rollbacks, including weakening protections for endangered species, relaxing rules that limit emissions from coal plants and blocking the phaseout of older incandescent light bulbs.

In November Trump began the process by which America will leave the Paris Cimate Change Accord by 2020 making the United States the only country in the world that will not participate in the pact.

Meanwhile, in the UK we have just elected a Government that scored only 5.5 out of 45 on the Friends of the Earth environmental score. The Labour Party scored 33 the highest of the 4 parties scored, even higher than the Greens. Whilst giving the Tories credit for one or two of their policies this was the verdict of Friends of the Earth on our incoming government:

“Overall, their manifesto comprehensively fails to address the climate and nature emergencies, which are hurting communities right now and will deliver catastrophe in the future.”

Our Prime Minister has a mixed record when it comes to the Climate Emergency writing columns for The Telegraph in which he claims to care passionately for the environment at the same time as supporting the building of more roads and of a fourth Terminal at Heathrow. Moreover, during his stint as Foreign Secretary he cut 60% of climate attaches across the World. He also received a £25,000 donation from the climate change denial campaign group Global Warming Policy Campaign during his leadership campaign.

Faced with a clear choice between a party with an impressive Green Industrial Revolution and one whose leader took money from climate change deniers and whose manifesto barely mentioned the environment, the voters of the UK chose the latter. Despite this polls before the election suggested that two-thirds of electors thought the climate emergency was the most important issue.

The fact that the media spent so much time and effort undermining the Labour Party with spurious claims about anti Semitism and personal attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit position meant that the climate emergency never got a look in. The electorate, with a fairly low attention span apparently, was easily sidetracked to vote for a PM and a party that will fail to deliver on its, already meagre, environmental promises. This may yet turn out to be one of the Tory supporting media’s greatest betrayals.

For those of us on the British left currently gripped by a mass depression following our failure to get our most socialist leader in decades elected, the tendency to withdraw into ourselves is very tempting. Faced with a developing internal civil war triggered by the leadership ballot, and with the prospect of a real war with Iran looming, we may too easily fall into politics as usual mode.

That would be a mistake. Greta Thunberg is right. We cannot rely on politicians and businesses to save the planet. Those of us with years of activism to our names need to make common cause with this new young generation. Not to tell them how to do it (they have managed to build a global movement without too much in the way of adult support), but rather because it is in all our interests to push the climate emergency front and centre stage.

It is also important that we create the conditions in which young activists realise that the climate emergency was not caused, as many of them think, by ‘the older generation’, but rather by the global social system – capitalism – that many of us have spent a lifetime opposing. A new way of organising society means that perhaps for the first time ever some form of socialism is not just a utopian dream but the only viable alternative if we are to survive as a species.