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.