[MCN] Rant : Greta Thunberg, climate crisis, our personal comfort zones, and the can-do attitude

[Lance Olsen]

It would be an immeasurable help if Greta Thunberg upped her game, specifically by telling her age mates what she knows about the breadth, depth, and severity of the climate crisis. 

She calmly told Daily Show host Trevor Howard that young people are responding because they recognize a “direct threat,” and they know that the world is getting warmer, and ice is melting, but she went on to say that, in her experience, “the awareness is not as it should be” and that people still “don’t understand how severe this crisis actually is.”

She hasn’t yet made the severity explicit, sharing what she almost certainly knows about it. 

She’s approached it, referring to feedback loops leading to an irreversible threat beyond human control, with implications for the future of civilization. She’s approached it in saying that people are “already dying” at only 1C, and she’s approached it in saying that the future of the young is being stolen before their very eyes. She’s approached it again when persistently repeating the basic science of the carbon budget.

She approached it again when characterizing the youth movement as a success-failure story, succeeding in raising awareness but failing to achieve emissions reduction, which is where the rubber really has to hit the road. 

She came at the lifestyle issue most directly in a Vice video, saying she doesn’t know if her generation is willing to make the necessary changes in their own lifestyles, which is again where the rubber must hit the road. She just hasn’t said it in any of her several speeches to youth I’ve seen so far.

She’s approached that need with her own decisions to stop flying, stop eating meat, and stop shopping unless she needs to. These steps may be within her personal comfort zone. But has she stepped beyond that zone to, for example, stop using a hair dryer, and start using a towel instead? If she has, she hasn’t said so.

She sat next to climate scientist Kevin Anderson during a televised Democracy Now interview. It’s hard to believe that she’s unaware of Anderson’s pointed view that billions will die if we don’t get aggressive in slashing emissions. But she hasn’t said it. 

It’s also hard to believe that she’s unaware that climate scientist Johan Rockstrom — a fellow Swede — has said that we’re heading ourselves into heat that will rule out the survival of 8 billion people, or even half that number. But she hasn’t said it. 

She is likely aware that a conference on 4C heating above historic levels reportedly concluded that it would cut the human population down to just one billion. But she hasn’t said it.

Maybe the saying would mean stepping out her comfort zone. She’s said giving up isn’t an option, and she’s said we haven’t seen anything yet, that there’s more to come. Maybe that “more to come” needs to come with her more open sharing of what she knows but hasn’t said. Her can-do message needs that important next big step.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a critic. She’s accomplished what decades of scientists failed to accomplish, at least partly because they were reluctant to step of their comfort zones. Along with that achievement, she has opportunity for another if she’s willing to take it.
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“We have only one planet and the time has come to transform our present lifestyle and consumption patterns...”

From the Executive Summary, WWF:  China Ecological Footprint: Report 2012 : Consumption, production, and sustainability.
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"People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more -- ever more."

Donella Meadows. Just So Much And No More. Yes magazine June 30, 2001
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/reclaiming-the-commons/437
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“Conservationists are unquestionably useful people. And among the many useful services that they have rendered has been that of dramatizing the vast appetite the United States has developed for materials of all kinds.”

“But what of the appetite itself? Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question. Over it hangs a nearly total silence.”

John K. Galbraith. “How much should a country consume?”
In Jarrett, Henry (editor), Perspectives on Conservation. John Hopkins Press. 1958
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https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf







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