Perhaps you could articulate what you do find annoying about her?
It is sound inasmuch as you accept the basic premise that the grouping she chooses to identify herself into as âpowerlessâ is uniquely relevant, in her case, generational. She is also Swedish, a citizen of the wealthy post-industrial West, which is also failing to resolve the problem. As such, she has far more relative power than the vast majority of humanity. She isnât truly being failed, she is part of the failure - and part of the bizarre collective orthodoxy that has dominated the UNFCCC effort since Rio, insisting that we just have to keep trying harder to make it work with a set of institutions that has amply demonstrated over 29 years that it is not fit for purpose - and when it fails, she happily assigns blame.
I completely understand her frustration, but it is not particularly unique.
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Sure. I think itâs her precociousness. The kid at school that would be described as âjumped upâ. The preachy message. The alienating language. The rather uncomfortable pushing into the limelight. The hypocrisy. Itâs hard to put my finger on specifics but thatâs often the case for when you find someone annoying as opposed to a stronger reaction like abhorrent or repulsive.
Now presumably @Bekloppt will have to make a start on his long list of people he finds annoying so that he too can be judged at your righteous morality altar?
Iâve been saying this since some time. Electric cars might be marginally less polluting than those using fuel (although their batteries need some polluting materials too), but essentially, as long as the main part of electricity is produced with fossil materials, the situation is rather worse imo.
What people need to realise is that the only way to get out of this is the word LESS, applied in everydayâs life. Less car travel, less consumption, less voyages, less meat consumption etc. I canât see any other way out than this. The hope that new technologies will allow us to continue our ever-growing consumption rate, is just pie-in-the-sky stuff.
In that sense, I fully agree with your stance on activists flying around the globe to take part in a conference, and about the overblown size of these delegations. Itâs quite incoherent.
I think thatâs a spectacularly poor, and deeply cynical reading of the situation.
When Greta started her campaign she was a child. She didnât have a vote. She certainly didnât have âpowerâ in the way you describe it. All she had was anger that her generation was being failed.
She has power now, in so far as she has a high profile, lots of followers, and certain celebrity. But she has remained consistent in her central message. Elected leaders have the power and the responsibility to address this. Sheâs right.
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As I noted above, I actually have more respect for her than most of the ENGOs, and she has certainly elevated the profile of climate change. But I donât think it is either a poor or cynical reading. It is the nature of a collective action problem with a stable equilibrium that is not Pareto-optimal that all individual actors who understand it correctly will see themselves as powerless to change the outcomes. She simply chooses to emphasize her generationâs particular form of powerlessness. But what, for example, could Obama have done differently? Promise even more than the tepid offering in Poznan and Copenhagen that Democrats still carried like a millstone into the 2010 Congressional elections, which basically froze any hope of real progress?
What I resent about her insistence on the responsibility of elected leaders is precisely that - they get elected. By us. The other thing that irks me is that she denies responsibility for thinking of solutions, but happily condemns tangible initiatives such as carbon offsets for being insufficiently pureâŚthen condemns the lack of capital flows into those opportunities when they donât happen.
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Iâve generally found that criticisms of Greta fall into one of two areas. 1) her intensity, earnestness, her social demeanour etc. Which of course are side effects of her autism. 2) her age, in that as a kid she should shut up and leave it to the grown ups. (2 is Less relevant as she gets older, but of course her maturity gives us another stick to beat her with - hypocrisy. As if itâs possible to even exist within a capitalist western country without being a hypocrite)
I donât want to start a fight, but I really do think you need to think about how much of your reaction to her is a consequence of her autism.
She does come across as preachy and use blunt language. She does struggle to engage with the public discourse with the humility we expect.
Thatâs clearly because she is autistic (and as I have an autistic brother I do know a bit about this). You are criticising her for various degrees of social dysfunctionality, while saying âyeah, but itâs not because sheâs autisticâ. Thatâs as hollow as saying âIâm not racist butâŚ, before going on massive racist diatribe.
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I donât think itâs her responsibility to think up solutions, and she is right to criticise offsetting, which is riddled with problems.
A lot of this is framed around our understanding of what is meant by âsolutionsâ.
To me, and I think Greta, the solution to climate change is fairly obvious. Understand what limits we are working within (we pretty much know this already). Donât breach those limits, and if that means we canât do something (like regular flying, for example), then we just canât fucking do it.
Find when people criticise environmental campaigners like me for not having solutions, they are often referring to engineering or technology solutions that enable us all to carry on as normal.
Sure, offsetting is riddled with problems. So fix them. But when the agreement everyone thinks is wonderful in 2015 envisages $100 billion per annum flowing to clean energy (and similar) in the developing world, of which roughly half would be private investment, throwing out the only available mechanism to monetize them was madness. Offsets are going to resolve the whole problem, but unless developing world countries accept a carbon budget now (which I think some have a legitimate basis to see as deeply problematic), something that looks very much like offsets have to be involved. As well, while projects like HFC elimination were problematic in the extreme, there have been many effective projects that have been done to lasting benefit.
As for the obvious solution, I donât think that level of simplification is actually useful, and if there is no pathway to get there, it isnât actually an obvious solution. We donât have a public consensus among the Haves that we are going to do that, nor a consensus among the Have Nots that they are not going to work to become Haves themselves. The best outcome of a prisonerâs dilemma is also obvious. The fact that we donât get there is why it gets called a dilemma. Screaming that the (1,1) box is better but someone else needs to figure out how to make it happen is at best tedious.
And no, my criticism is not technological in nature, it is explicitly political. Environmental campaigners donât have political solutions to the global political problem, they seldom even have a political solution to the political problem in their own country.
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LOL. speaking from someone who has a wheelchair-bound family member, thatâs quite a statement. Seriously, weâre not talking about a sack of potatoes here. Chairs average about 350lbs, up to 500lb for some of the bigger ones that have an elevator function. good luck carrying one of those up a flight of stairs.
my parents were able to do a 3 week tour of Europe so the infrastructure is there for it. Surprising that a world conference isnât able to make that happen
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Some further details have since emerged. There were, apparently, several accessible entrances at the venue just not, it seems, at the entrance that her delegation was directed to. There seems to have been an element of communication breakdowns here rather than any intrinsic failure to provide for an accessible venue or deliberate snub.
It shouldnât happen, of course, but the solutions that were available were not seemingly explored or brought sufficiently to anyoneâs attention.
Itâs both simple and not simple. I think a large part of the difficulty of climate change is that the starting point is over-complicated.
The starting point should be that the Earth has fundamental limits that we cannot breach if we want to remain alive and have a viable civilisation. If you start from there, a lot of the arguments start to become trivial.
Fundamentally itâs a budgeting issue. We have a budget. We need to stick to it.
I appreciate that that politics of implementing the policies following that initial problem identification are challenging, not least the ethics of the developed v developing world issue, but that shouldnât be an insurmountable problem.
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Was talking about this with Ms Mascot at lunchtime, and my point was that there is absolutely no way a large conference venue in the UK in 2021 does not have an accessible entrance or policy measures in place to accommodate wheelchair users.
I think there is something a bit fishy going on.
It is actually pretty basic. She came to the entrance that doesnât have direct access, in a vehicle that was not allowed past that point and through a channel that is reserved for delegates with the highest level of credentials. Just a fuck-up, not a lack of accessible entrances or policy. Lesser delegates would have been routed through ramped entrances, and there are others in attendance in wheelchairs. Then compounded by no one taking charge of the situation to either let that one vehicle go through the next 50 meters or so and then around, or arranging for transit through one of the other entrances.
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Bidenâs methane rule is something real. Only regulatory, so ephemeral in the face of a Trump Restoration, but real.
Waiting for Trudeau to put forward the offset crediting rules Canada has been sitting on for at least 5 months.
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So, your brother, youâve never found him annoying (save for elements that could be ascribed to autism)? As you probably know, Iâm also on the spectrum - I know that some of the behaviours associated with my condition can wind people up (particularly my wife!), but I also know that sometimes I can just be annoying. You know. Like someone neurotypical.
If someone was to ascribe or excuse all of my potentially annoying behaviour to my mental health condition Iâd find that a pretty insulting belittling of my own agency. Because sometimes Iâm trying to be annoying. On purpose. Let me own that!
So given that Iâm pretty sure you know that I am on the autism spectrum, maybe you ought to think about how youâve responded to me here?
So hard to know whether Iâm now joking, isnât it?
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Outstanding work, once again, from George Monbiot:
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In all seriousness, my problem with you (and others) is ignoring her or dismissing her because you find her annoying. I acknowledge she can be annoying, but I donât think that an reason to dismiss her out of hand, especially as the reasons you find her annoying are the result of a disability.
Iâm sure while you find it find OK for people to find you annoying, youâd have more of a problem if you were dismissed, ignored, or ridiculed for your spectrum behaviours.
As a side point, I think a big reason for Gretaâs success as an an activist/campaigner is precisely because her autism compels her to speak directly and bluntly.
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But Iâm quite evidently not ignoring her or dismissing her. Where did you get that idea from? I specifically took note of her comments and agreed with her.