What a brilliant take‑down by New Zealand’s best columnist, Mike Hoskings, of the appalling Greta Thunberg.
Being nagged and insulted with melodramatic hyperbole by a child is deeply irritating.
Greta is a crashing bore, plainly relishing her new found Joan of Arc fame. She’s a certainty for the Nobel Peace Prize, an award already stained by some of its past injudicious nominations.
Warning the world about the global warming threat is unnecessary. Being able to take effective action is another thing. Marching in the street achieves nothing.
Only dictatorships, which sadly, to varying degrees is the nature of most countries’ governments today, are at face value, in a position to act 100% effectively, but they won’t. Why? Because their principal concern is the retention of power and they’ll be quickly overthrown by a mass uprising should they do so.
The reason for that is to take the actions the naïve Greta calls for will bring about a catastrophic economic depression. Thus so too for political survival reasons, no elected government will act in that way.
We saw this illustrated in the last Australian Federal election. With the result seemingly in the bag, Labour, to their great credit, campaigned on eliminating Australia’s major export industry; coal mining. Doing that meant a huge drop in Australia’s standard of living, specially in Queensland, and voters weren’t prepared to bite the bullet. But note this. The sector of the electorate which failed to vote was overwhelmingly the mindless young.
These are the hard realities of political life, as always, full of contradictions.
For example, Jacinda recently went to Japan to promote tourism, or, in other words more climate‑threatening jet flights. Then she went on to New York to attend a climate change conference. Hypocrisy?
No; Reality. Greta made a thing of sailing across the Atlantic to do her preaching. I trust she’s going to swim home on her return, but I’ll offer two to one she’ll be in a jet.
In short it’s easy to preach on this issue, but bloody hard to actually do something on an epic scale about it, as the child demands.
The issue is not one of human survival as represented but instead of pending significant implications climate change. Human history shows our capacity to cope with change and it’s not always bad. Greta for example, will doubtless enjoy eating the bananas and pineapple growing in her back garden.
Google “Hoskings on Greta Thunberg”. It’s brilliant.
11 Comments
Please, please don’t fall into the awful, moronic trap of adding an ‘s’ to a surname.
I didn’t know his name was Bob Jone 😂
Mike is quite right. Their Achilles heel and our saving grace is that they are all talk and no action. I remind myself of this whenever I misguidedly take their statements at face value. I find it reassuring that nothing will come of their empty words. Greta is right too. How dare they? Waste our time and tax dollars, I think she means.
There is one purpose to the Greta hysteria.
Our equivalent in Jacinda Ardern will be shut out from winning that Nobel Prize.
For that we have Greta and all the nonsense surrounding her to thank.
The yacht cost 15 million, a crew flew to New York to sail it back while she and her entourage are to all fly back.
Amen. Being preached at by a grotesquely over-priveledged youth who plainly has zero understanding of history irks me enormously. $15 million pound carbon fibre yacht (with a diesel back up) and droning on about her losing her dreams…Come again? I actually feel a bit of sympathy for her as I think she is being used, and no matter what she goes on to do from here, she will only be remembered for this. Greta would do well to realise that life for many people is nasty, brutish and short. The solution to the climate changing isn’t to tear everything down, but to build new tech over the top.
Bob,
When Greta made it to the Big Apple in her carbon fibre (did I say carbon) and aluminium (not aluminium) yacht I was told aluminium takes 8 times more energy to produce than steel – oh dear and forget about the ropes, mast, rigging et al made from hydrocarbons and lots more aluminium. What really made me laugh was the yacht carrying Thunberg, the Malizia II, was manned (sorry personned) by Pierre Casiraghi, the grandson of Monaco’s late Prince Rainier and American actress Grace Kelly. Is that the same Monaco where they hold the Monaco Grand Prix running, I expect, zero carbon F1 cars running on electric bio-fuel. Here’s a small taste of how tough his life is in Monaco.
https://www.boatinternational.com/luxury-yacht-life/people-parties/on-board-with-blue-blooded-sailor-pierre-casiraghi–39829
That’s how I saw it ! Greta was not discussing or informing Greta was preaching (to the choir in fact). The minute you preach at people they turn off probably feeling belittled to boot ?
Pedophastry: using children as props to stifle rebuttal. If an idea truly has merit it does not matter who presents it. Corollary is that pedophastry suggests a weak argument. Scoldilocks does not have tools required to assess data analytically or skeptically. Her emoting for the media is tedious pantomime, reflecting only the brain-dead public discourse of our era.
Love your comments.
Just to be pedantic if I may, it is Mike Hosking singular.
Maybe in a few years CO2 and water vapour will again be plant fertilisers. In the meantime I’ll keep my showers short and breathing to a minimum lol.