Greta Thunberg is Climate Victim #1
Yep, you read that right, but let me say it again so it’s clear where I’m going.
Greta Thunberg is Climate Victim #1.
This week Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl who took a sailboat across the Atlantic to give her impassioned save-the-world speech at the United Nations, has been all over the news. She’s trending on Twitter, she’s headlining on CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and loads of other mainstream outlets. She misses school every Friday to “protest” climate change, she’s the head of a global children’s climate-protest movement, she’s spanning the globe scolding adults of our impending climate disaster. She looked directly into the U.N. camera’s lens and said, with incredible passion, if we don’t address climate change “we will never forgive you.”
Well, I won’t forgive us either, but it’s for completely different reasons.
Greta Thunberg is an amazing girl. Imagine any teenager with enough passion, determination, drive, and gall to step onto a world stage and look adults straight in the eye and tell us to change. Wow, that takes guts. I admire her every time she stands up and talks.
I also get a tear in my eye every time she stands up and talks, because as a parent I can see how much pain she is in. She’s hurting, and that pain has turned into helplessness, feelings so extreme that she feels she has no choice but to yell at us adults to fix things. She’s not doing this because she’s comfortable, or because she’s an “advocate”; she’s doing it because she hurts. Greta Thunberg is in a tremendous amount of pain, and she’s expressing it on a world stage. Imagine how much pain it would take for your child to stand up and yell at adults. It must be excruciating.
How did Greta get into such pain? How is it she hurts so much?
The answer is, unfortunately, very simple. We did it to her. We adults hurt Greta. And we hurt her so much that she has to travel the world screaming at us.
Think about it for a second. Greta Thunberg is not a scientist, she offers no new opinions on what’s happening with climate change. She is simply parroting to us what we’ve been telling her and the entire world for years: the world is dying, mankind is the cause, we all have to reverse everything we’re all doing or else we’re going to die die die. This is what she’s heard from US. We’ve offered no solutions, Climate Hysterics yell at Climate Deniers, the Himalayas are melting, we have 12 years to live. The BBC published an article last month that said that the 12 years is really 11 months. ELEVEN MONTHS. That’s next August, folks. Greta Thunberg literally thinks that she won’t see her next summer because of climate change. No wonder she’s in such a panic.
Shame on us. How did we let that happen? Never in my life have I seen a situation where adults want to hurt children like this. Not only are we hurting them, we’re celebrating their pain. We scare them to death, then bring in the CNN cameras when the tears start flowing, then broadcast their pain to the entire world. It’s disgusting.
If you walked into my house and made my children cry for any reason whatsoever, you and I would have a private meeting out by my woodshed. There is no way I would let you do that to my children. And if I saw the CNN trucks parked in my driveway I’m pretty sure their cameras would end up in the bottom of a gulch somewhere. Why would I react that way? Because I’m an adult, a parent, and my job is to bring a voice of reason into a sea of panic. I don’t cause that pain then celebrate it like we’re doing with Greta.
Greta isn’t a climate scientist. She doesn’t understand the difference between real science (stuff we can actually prove), computer models that try and predict the future, and climate science fiction. Why doesn’t she? Because we’ve jumbled all that together into one giant mashed potato sandwich and stuffed it down her throat. Then we roll the cameras when she coughs it all up.
Greta doesn’t understand that her cell phone, her computer, her clothes, her food, the sailboat she traversed the Atlantic in, the lights in her hotel room, the electricity that powered her microphone, the cars and other modes of transportation she used to get to the United Nations — virtually everything in every step of her life — all of those used fossil fuels to create and enable her. Instead, she just demonizes oil companies because we told her to.
Greta doesn’t understand that she’s being used by adults to promote their climate-death messages. That’s tragic.
When CNN reports on Islamic terrorists using children as bullet-shields, we gasp in horror. But somehow, when we use children as climate-shields we instead hold her up as a hero. What’s wrong with this picture?
I am a climate realist. I believe that the planet is warming and that, with 7 billion people and counting, we need to be responsible in how we manage that. Yes, we need to be proper planet stewards, and we need to be responsible with that. We need real solutions that don’t reverse global economies to enable. I truly want us to address this problem.
But I completely reject the Church of Climate Change movement, whose only currency is Climate Fear. How dare you foment hysteria on a global scale and scare all of our children like this? It’s Climate Terrorism, pure and simple. You have no right to do it, and I reject it completely.
Let’s celebrate Greta Thunberg for the amazing girl she is, not for the climate-panic we’ve stuffed into her. We need to stop the global climate terrorism movement now, and come back to a pragmatic, responsible approach to tackle this problem.
If you believe the world is ending today, then please spend your life savings and buy land up on Pike’s Peak. Go for it. I fully support your desire to do that. But please quit telling my children that the world is dying. It’s not, so stop saying it.
Marc Cortez is a 20-year veteran of the solar energy and electric vehicle industries, and is the founder and CEO of Liquid8, a water conservation startup.
