Yup, there it went, that childhood we stole from Greta. Seems we evil fossil-fuel consumers let her slip without joy into young adulthood. We denied her playing by using coal, oil, and natural gas. Her parents and relatives never bought her a toy made from the byproducts of fossil fuels, ethylene and propylene. Were they real-life models of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi? “No toys for you.” Aren’t most toys made from plastic?
Every Barbie Doll, every Ken, every Barbie car or house, is like the proverbial butterfly in chaos theory. The insect flaps its wings in the Amazon, setting in motion events that lead to a hurricane or a tornado outbreak. Had Greta played with toys, well, who knows what dire weather events we might have faced? Toys produce storms, or droughts, or nice weather, or hot days, or cold ones, or the weather inside malls. Plastics robbed childhood from Greta. Blame Disney, Mattel, Fisher-Price…
Robbed of her childhood—her words, not mine—Greta is now a young adult, and someone is robbing her of her young adulthood, maybe older adults, the ones addicted to fossil fuels. She might have failed to save her childhood, but she’s determined not to fail in saving her young adulthood.
But she will fail because it’s Greta doing the robbing, and she’s robbing you as much as she’s robbing herself.
Stolen Childhood
In reality, she was the thief, not the rest of us. She’s the one hopscotching around the planet attending protests against the use of fossil fuels and not playing with Barbies. She’s the one claiming suffering directly results from climate change, enveloping Earth in hot summers, cold winters, and in-between springs and falls. And the hurricanes. Poor Sweden, her native land, now beset by weather extremes never before seen on the planet—according to her and her ilk. And the deaths in Sweden, now mounting it seems…Shoot! They’re not climate related. They’re gang related. There are bombings and shootings in Sweden akin to those in Mexico. Children murdered in stray gunfire…Was it the butterfly climate change that moved the migrant criminals into Sweden? Probably. What other cause is there but climate change?
Sorry, I got off topic. Greta was recently arrested during a protest in London. * Hauled off by police, she smirked. She’s worked her stolen childhood into international fame. She’s become an icon, a savior bent on sacrificing herself for the planet. It’s willful, too. No one is pushing her into her climate activism. She’s decided on a cause. And in fifty years, when she’s seventy and living comfortably in a green energy chalet, she will look back to congratulate herself on her accomplishments, such as costing millions of people billions if not trillions of dollars in extra energy costs without achieving energy abundance and independence.
And while she grows old under whatever climate conditions she chooses—tropical rainforest, tropical savanna, tropical monsoon, temperate warm summer and cool winter, temperate cool summer and cold winter, boreal, Arctic, arid cold or hot, semiarid cold or hot, Mediterranean, or high altitude—she has already outlived those children whose childhood has literally been robbed in their violent deaths, or cancer, or genetic flaws. Greta will find in looking back that in her efforts to convince the world to stop using fossil fuels, she possibly hastened the return of a colder world, a real climate change. She’ll never, of course, live long enough to see whether or not the current interglacial period returns to a frozen Northern Hemisphere nor live long enough to recognize that the use of fossil fuels might just have staved off a return to cold. She won’t live long enough to know whether or not the measures we now take will enhance a different kind of climate change from the one she believes is inevitable.
She’ll only live long enough to look back at her lost childhood, lost young adulthood, and lost middle age. She look back at her fame and consider that she was a major force in convincing adults to give up cheap energy and plastics, in effect, robbing them of the very instruments of turning the pre-Industrial Age into the advanced technological age in which we now live.
If You Had Your Druthers…
Do you prefer the climate in which you live to another climate? Do you realize—Greta doesn’t—that you can willfully change climate just by moving. I’ve listed above a number of climate regimes. Pick one; pick several. Stay or move. But if you intend to move, do it before there’s no energy system available for transportation. Otherwise, like an old Greta Thunberg, you might be relegated to a life in a chalet hoping in a land of the Midnight Sun that there will be enough solar energy to power you through winters—there won’t be—enough wind to turn the windmills, or enough hydroelectic power to run your lights. You'll be tempted, as she will be, to throw some carbon in the fireplace.
*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12639153/Greta-Thunberg-joins-hundreds-eco-warriors-central-London-protest-activists-bang-drums-chant-oily-oily-money-out.html
Every Barbie Doll, every Ken, every Barbie car or house, is like the proverbial butterfly in chaos theory. The insect flaps its wings in the Amazon, setting in motion events that lead to a hurricane or a tornado outbreak. Had Greta played with toys, well, who knows what dire weather events we might have faced? Toys produce storms, or droughts, or nice weather, or hot days, or cold ones, or the weather inside malls. Plastics robbed childhood from Greta. Blame Disney, Mattel, Fisher-Price…
Robbed of her childhood—her words, not mine—Greta is now a young adult, and someone is robbing her of her young adulthood, maybe older adults, the ones addicted to fossil fuels. She might have failed to save her childhood, but she’s determined not to fail in saving her young adulthood.
But she will fail because it’s Greta doing the robbing, and she’s robbing you as much as she’s robbing herself.
Stolen Childhood
In reality, she was the thief, not the rest of us. She’s the one hopscotching around the planet attending protests against the use of fossil fuels and not playing with Barbies. She’s the one claiming suffering directly results from climate change, enveloping Earth in hot summers, cold winters, and in-between springs and falls. And the hurricanes. Poor Sweden, her native land, now beset by weather extremes never before seen on the planet—according to her and her ilk. And the deaths in Sweden, now mounting it seems…Shoot! They’re not climate related. They’re gang related. There are bombings and shootings in Sweden akin to those in Mexico. Children murdered in stray gunfire…Was it the butterfly climate change that moved the migrant criminals into Sweden? Probably. What other cause is there but climate change?
Sorry, I got off topic. Greta was recently arrested during a protest in London. * Hauled off by police, she smirked. She’s worked her stolen childhood into international fame. She’s become an icon, a savior bent on sacrificing herself for the planet. It’s willful, too. No one is pushing her into her climate activism. She’s decided on a cause. And in fifty years, when she’s seventy and living comfortably in a green energy chalet, she will look back to congratulate herself on her accomplishments, such as costing millions of people billions if not trillions of dollars in extra energy costs without achieving energy abundance and independence.
And while she grows old under whatever climate conditions she chooses—tropical rainforest, tropical savanna, tropical monsoon, temperate warm summer and cool winter, temperate cool summer and cold winter, boreal, Arctic, arid cold or hot, semiarid cold or hot, Mediterranean, or high altitude—she has already outlived those children whose childhood has literally been robbed in their violent deaths, or cancer, or genetic flaws. Greta will find in looking back that in her efforts to convince the world to stop using fossil fuels, she possibly hastened the return of a colder world, a real climate change. She’ll never, of course, live long enough to see whether or not the current interglacial period returns to a frozen Northern Hemisphere nor live long enough to recognize that the use of fossil fuels might just have staved off a return to cold. She won’t live long enough to know whether or not the measures we now take will enhance a different kind of climate change from the one she believes is inevitable.
She’ll only live long enough to look back at her lost childhood, lost young adulthood, and lost middle age. She look back at her fame and consider that she was a major force in convincing adults to give up cheap energy and plastics, in effect, robbing them of the very instruments of turning the pre-Industrial Age into the advanced technological age in which we now live.
If You Had Your Druthers…
Do you prefer the climate in which you live to another climate? Do you realize—Greta doesn’t—that you can willfully change climate just by moving. I’ve listed above a number of climate regimes. Pick one; pick several. Stay or move. But if you intend to move, do it before there’s no energy system available for transportation. Otherwise, like an old Greta Thunberg, you might be relegated to a life in a chalet hoping in a land of the Midnight Sun that there will be enough solar energy to power you through winters—there won’t be—enough wind to turn the windmills, or enough hydroelectic power to run your lights. You'll be tempted, as she will be, to throw some carbon in the fireplace.
*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12639153/Greta-Thunberg-joins-hundreds-eco-warriors-central-London-protest-activists-bang-drums-chant-oily-oily-money-out.html
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