Greta Thunberg Should Be Angry—and So Should You

When sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations climate change summit on Monday (September 23, 2019), her fear and fury over its lack of urgency were palpable. “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”¹

It is an appalling tragedy that, in fact, empty words did steal much of Greta’s childhood—words she’s spent irreplaceable hours learning to recite with a passion that makes her parents (an actor and an opera singer) proud. Greta, though, clearly isn’t acting. Through tears of genuine terror, the Swedish teenager told applauding adults:

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points, feedback loops, additional pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice.

If the ability to recall statistics from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a few other scientists makes one a climate expert, then Greta is one. “For more than thirty years, the science has been crystal clear,” she—with an air of unquestionable authority—told world leaders. And she scolded them: “How dare you continue to look away?”

But Greta is not the only “expert.” In 1989, exactly thirty years ago, Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), said that by the year 2000, global warming would melt enough polar ice to put the Maldives and other flat islands underwater; that “ecological refugees will become a major concern”; and that governments had only a ten-year window to solve the greenhouse effect before the damage would be irreversible.² . . .

About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey (@revivingreason) is managing editor of The Objective Standard and holds fellowships at Foundation for Economic Education, where he writes in defense of freedom, and at Objective Standard Institute, where he teaches courses and hosts the podcast “Philosophy for Flourishing.”

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