By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Greta Thunberg needs to get a grip.
The celebrity teen climate activist addressed the United
Nations and excoriated the assembled worthies: “You all come to us young people
for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your
empty words.”
Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty
parties can’t be found at Turtle Bay. A 16-year-old from Sweden, Thunberg
thundered, “I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean,” which
would have been easy enough to achieve, beginning with not taking two weeks to
sail across the Atlantic last month in a jet-travel-eschewing publicity stunt.
Greta Thunberg is the leading edge of a youth movement
against climate change — including a global “climate strike” last week — that
is being promoted and celebrated by adults who find it useful for their own
purposes.
Kids are powerful pawns. The catchphrase “for the
children” has a seductive political appeal, while kids offer their adult
supporters a handy two-step. The same people who say, “The world must heed this
16-year-old girl” will turn around and say to anyone who pushes back, “How dare
you criticize a 16-year-old girl?” (I can feel the tweets filling up my
mentions right now.)
There’s a reason that we don’t look to teenagers for
guidance on fraught issues of public policy. With very rare exceptions — think,
say, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who was a child prodigy — kids have
nothing interesting to say to us. They just repeat back what they’ve been told
by adults, with less nuance and maturity.
Much of the climate advocacy of young people boils down
to the plaint that all parents know well: “I want it, and I want it now.” As
one headline on a National Geographic story put it, “Kids’ world climate
strikes demand that warming stop, fast.”
Behind the foot-stomping is the idea that a long-running
global phenomenon could be quickly stopped, if only adults cared as much as the
kids did. This fails to account for such recalcitrant factors as costs and
complexity, but when do children ever think of those? (And who can blame them?
They’re children.)
Instead, the youthful climate activists claim they’ve
been sold out by their elders. Greta Thunberg put it with her usual accusatory
starkness at the U.N.: “You are failing us, but young people are starting to
understand your betrayal.”
This is laughable. By no global measure of social and
economic well-being have we failed kids. According to HumanProgress.org, the
global poverty rate fell from 28 percent in 1999 to 11 percent in 2013. Life
expectancy increased from 63.2 years to 71.9 years from 1981 to 2015. The
completion rate for primary school increased from 80 percent in 1981 to 90
percent in 2015. The same benign trends hold for hunger, child labor, literacy,
and so on.
If climate change proves a significant challenge, today’s
youth will have more resources and technology to grapple with it than any other
generation in the history of mankind.
Of course, the adults they listen to don’t tell them any
of this. Instead, they feed the kids a diet of apocalyptic warnings that
children repeat back as if they were urgent insights. One speaker at the youth
climate rally in Washington, D.C., last week said that we have just 18 months —
yes, only until the beginning of 2021 — to forestall irreversible environmental
harms.
According to National Geographic, “more than a few
teens who began as fervent activists have dropped out, citing depression,
anxiety, and other fears that the world’s leaders will not act in time to
prevent their lives — and the lives of their children — from being
irretrievably altered by climate change.”
This is nuts, and it’s the adult enablers who are
ultimately responsible. As for the kids, they’ll be all right. One day, they
will grow up, even in a warming world.
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