To date, Greta Thunberg has been recognized as a great inspiration by almost all political camps in the Western world. However, her opinions on system changes have been met with total silence.
A three-degree meteor – bringing massive-scale refugee movements, water shortages, wars over natural resources, the extinction of more animal species and the destruction of our natural environment – is heading straight for the earth. It will strike if there is no radical change, but our economic and political rulers have no radical changes to offer. They still try to market themselves as authoritative, knowledgeable and with big green investments and optimism because “the technology exists”, right?
The presumption is that it is major green investments and innovations that will solve the climate issue. But the tendency in industrialized countries is that companies have stopped investing, that they increasingly hoard their profits according to the IMF. The latest trend is so-called “superstar firms” such as Blackrock, Google, and Apple that buy up smaller companies, creating technology monopolies, thus replenishing their savings without investing. Capital is stockpiled instead of being used to contribute to solving inequality, climate injustice, lack of trust which could all lead to a breakthrough in the climate negotiations. In the US alone, $4 trillion is kept in the large companies’ “cash vaults”. We see no political will to change these structural problems either in the US or Europe. But for the public, everyone wants to cuddle up to Greta and appear progressive.
The latest example is the EU climate initiative Green Deal marketed as Europe’s equivalent of “putting a man on the moon”. The EU will, supposedly, “stimulate and facilitate”, raising €1tn within ten years, which will lead to CO2-reducing initiatives. It may sound ambitious, but you have to ask where the real priorities are. Is it the climate or big companies and banks that are being protected? A €1tn to save the world can be compared to the four times larger amount of €4.2tn spent to save the banks between 2009 and 2013. The flaunted €1tn is not money set aside, it is a promise to banks to underwrite private investment. Thus, the public takes the risks of bank loans while companies use the financing and top up their savings. What is taken from the EU budget is not €1tn, but only €7.5bn, which can be compared to the €29bn that is being invested in environmentally harmful gas infrastructure. The “moon landing” is nothing but smoke and mirrors and hypocrisy!
The climate correspondent and Swedish public-service journalist Erika Bjerström recently classified Greta Thunberg as a left-wing populist despite Greta’s clear references to climate research. She argues that Greta raises justice issues – that she points out that in reality, it is “public opinion that runs the free world. Every great change throughout history has come from the people” – and consistently criticizes our economic and political leaders and thus, as Bjerström puts it, does not give people any hope. Instead, she would prefer Greta to bless the EU’s Green Deal.
No, it is not people’s protests or activism that we should support or young people’s demands for system changes we should believe in. Instead, are supposed to continue to rely on a combination of what is increasingly evolving into centralized capitalism with executive politicians in green makeup, on banks and technocrats. As an individual, you must instead deal with all the concepts of guilt and shame. We should not even have children because they, like halogen lamps, consume too much energy. Life itself is to be sacrificed while visions of an essential new social order must at all costs be undermined and its critics side-lined. The governing bodies will not budge. They will not work for system changes that give us a society where people have the right to take action and the right to a healthy planet. On the contrary, the Davos crème de la crème, parliamentarians, authorities, journalists and think-tanks will meet such thoughts with resistance.
The climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) was labelled by the British liberal think-tank Policy Exchange an extremist organization aiming to break down liberal ideas. Furthermore, the British group National Counter Terrorism Policing Network considers XR to be an extremist organization alongside neo-Nazis and Islamic terror groups.
How long will it take before Greta and Fridays For Future are targeted? How long will society allow a younger generation to be happily liberated from the poisonous realism of the establishment, openly and disparagingly speaking their mind about the rulers?
However, climate gifts from smiling philanthropists, political climate promises dressed in green tinsel and new banking deals are deceiving ever fewer.
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