By Kyle Smith
Sunday, November 07, 2021
In his closing monologue Friday night, Bill Maher
launched a devastating seven-minute attack not only on Greta Thunberg, the
youthful climate-change hysteric, but on what you might call Thunberg-ism.
Maher made clear that his sympathies lie generally with the Left’s
environmentalist doomsaying but said Thunberg simply doesn’t matter as much as,
say, Kylie Jenner:
Someone must tell [Thunberg], you
may be the conscience of your generation, but you don’t represent it. I really
wish you did, Greta, but you don’t. But I can show you who does. [Puts up
picture of Kylie Jenner sitting on a roll of money]
Maher points out that Jenner has 279 million followers on
Instagram, 266 million more than Thunberg. One of these young women is a lot
more influential than the other, and it isn’t the carbon Puritan but the
conspicuous consumer who best represents the youth.
The young woman who refuses to fly,
or the young woman who refuses to fly commercial?…This is not a screed against
comfort or capitalism, I’m fond of both. . . . Like her dad, [Jenner] is a
self-made woman. But Kylie embodies and embraces a lifestyle that is pretty
much the opposite of carbon neutral. The younger generations f***ing love it .
. . she also has entire rooms full of things she’s only worn once. . . . In
polls young people always claim to be more concerned about climate change than
other generations, but they don’t act like it. . . . The cognitive dissonance
between planet-destroying conspicuous consumption and planet-saving rhetoric is
breathtaking. You say you love Greta and her message but everything else you
love is a climate disaster. Far from rejecting consumerism, young people are so
obsessed with labels. . .
Maher goes on to say that young folks love Bitcoin,
the mining of which is worse for
the environment than actual mining. Cryptocurrency uses more energy than
Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google combined, and more than some
entire nations, and yet young people could not love it more if it came with a
side of avocado toast. 94 percent of crypto buyers are either Millennials or
Gen Z which makes it a little hollow when you’re out there chanting for us to
put the planet ahead of profits. What do crypto fans say about this? They say,
‘Well, yes, it uses too much energy now but in the future . . .’ Oh yeah, ‘in
the future,’ that’s right. Same thing my generation said. ‘Let them handle it
in the future, I’ll get mine now.’ Like Bitcoin, the smartphone is a huge
contributor to carbon emissions because the cloud isn’t a cloud, of course,
it’s a vast network of servers . . . all that liking and subscribing and
following requires lots of fossil fuels. And yet you would need the jaws of
life to pry a smartphone out of the hands of anyone under 30. What would it
take to convince Gen Z and Millennials to give up their phones? A pollster once
asked, and 43 percent said it would take five million dollars to give up their
phone. One in ten said they’d sacrifice a finger for it.
Maher notes “you can’t do both,” meaning the Thunberg way
and the Jenner way. Jenner publicly decried the loss of 500 million animals in
Australian wildfires, then showed off her $1500 mink slippers:
It’s always so sad when fire kills
potential slippers . . . do you want to be progressive, or excessive? . . .
When Kylie’s lifestyle becomes uncool and unpopular and you stop loving Bitcoin
and stop thinking that stuffing your face is harmless, then I’ll take you
seriously. Until then, shut the f*** up about how older generations ruined the
planet. . . . I wish your generation was better than mine. I really do. The sad
truth is, we’re completely the same. Lots of talk, and at the end of the day,
hopelessly seduced and addicted to pigging out on convenience, luxury and
consumption.
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