“It’s common knowledge that children and drunks speak the truth. Seldom has this saying been more accurate than in the case of Greta Thunberg. Her message is clear: rich countries like Sweden must reduce their emissions by at least 15 percent per year for the two-percent target to be reached. ”
February. “But she's supposed to be competent to publicly pass judgement on crimes against humanity? When a child expresses such maledictions and makes such accusations — crimes, criminals! — which basically amount to hate speech, seizing on her words and exploiting them exceeds the limits of what is acceptable in a democracy and under the rule of law. Writing so fanatically about childhood is abuse in itself.”
Thunberg panders to cheap emotions, according to the Czech self-admitted right-wing, liberal-conservative news site Echo24. “The travels around the world of a 16-year-old girl who — in her own words — is autistic and sees things in black-and-white can, however, at best satisfy the public's need to celebrate its own emotions. Greta Thunberg's immaturity is not her disadvantage. She appeals to a society that is itself immature and dependent on a daily flood of cheap emotions.”
Leave it to The Guardian, then, to argue that young activists deserve to be heard every bit as much as their elders. “Young people have a distinctive and valuable perspective,” The Guardian noted in an editorial in February. “They deserve to be heard. ... There are sensible questions to be asked about the influence exerted by parents and other adults on children professing strong opinions. But we should respect and welcome efforts by children and teenagers to make their voices heard and influence decision-making. After all, they will be living with the consequences for longer than the rest of us. ... If children want to take to the streets and demand tougher action to avert disaster, who can blame them?”
And that’s the crux of the climate argument. The old guard — and, make no mistake, climate deniers tend toward the older range of the age spectrum — want to keep things pretty much the way they are. It’s the younger generation who ultimately will have to live with this generation’s inaction on the growing climate emergency.
That’s Thunberg’s point.
Germany’s AfD has met the enemy and it is — wait for it — Greta Thunberg. Yes, that Greta Thunberg. The Swedish climate activist, ardent defender of a green planet and, lest we forget, 16-year-old schoolgirl is, in the words of the rightwing populist rabble-rousing group Alternative für Deutschland, a fraud and “mentally challenged.” The AfD doesn’t much care for Thunberg’s autism — one AfD candidate in the recent EU parliamentary elections demanded that she receive treatment for her “psychosis” — but that pales in comparison to AfD’s characterization of climate activists as a “CO2Kult” (exactly what it sounds like in translation), driven by “Klimawandelpanik” (climate-change panic) and its bastard cousin “Klimagehirnwäsche” (climate brain-washing).
Mocking a 16-year-old schoolgirl for her autism is fair game to the European Institute of Climate and Energy (EIKE), a seemingly righteous name for a climate-denying philosophical cousin of the Flat Earth Society, an outfit with links to prominent conservative groups in the US that reject mainstream scientific thinking on climate change and our growing reliance on emissions-generating fossil fuels.
Skinheads, populists, climate deniers, fossil-fuel apologists, Big Oil and alt-right groups are not the only ones who have it in for Thunberg. Her weekly #FridaysForFuture school strikes to draw attention to the climate emergency — the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement — have drawn growing criticism in recent weeks from an increasingly vocal handful of Extinction Rebellion protesters who believe that the kids should stay in school.
The Belgian liberal writer, thinker and founder of the Hayek Institute Drieu Godfridi, writing in Contrepoints, is appalled by the way the media has made a media star out of a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sweden.
“A (16-year-old) child may not marry, buy real estate, vote or take part in most of the legal acts of daily life,” Godefridi wrote in
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/14/germanys-afd-attacks-greta-thunberg-as-it-embraces-climate-denial
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/27/climate-strike-poses-a-dilemma-for-adults