Meh, climate change, what’s all the fuss?

Greta Thunberg is getting some attention.

So now it’s time for the right-wing adults to unload on her – Brendan O’Neill out in front as usual.

Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg. One can imagine her in a sparse wooden church in the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s warning parishioners of the hellfire that will rain upon them if they fail to give up their witches.

Well, by the same token one can imagine Brendan O’Neill in a crowd laughing and jeering while a “witch” is drowned.

The article as a whole is quite remarkably stupid, because it’s all about the style with not a word to say about the substance. The campaign to do something about climate change is anti-progress, ignore it!

O’Neill’s conclusion:

Young people, Ms Thunberg isn’t your leader. She’s a patsy for scared and elitist adults. Don’t do as she says. Instead, refuse to panic, mock the blather about hellfire, and appreciate that mankind’s transformation of the planet has been a glorious thing that has expanded life expectancy, allowed billions to live in cities, and made it possible for even the less well-off to travel the globe. Sin against St Greta.

Yes, industrialization and technology have been glorious things (with plenty of glitches along the way – Bhopal can stand for the kind of thing I mean) for those of us who were in time to enjoy them before things got too bad…but that’s a bit like setting a house on fire to keep warm. Yes for awhile the result is what you wanted, you’re cozy and warm, but then the fire gets closer to the room you’re in. Some of the fire getting too close is already happening: Paradise, California can stand for the rest the way Bhopal did.

So O’Neill’s “forget about climate change because we have a pleasant life right now” is utterly stupid, but his sneers at Thunberg are cruel. The reporting is that she’s on the autism spectrum, so an adult writing in public about her “monotone voice” is just being a goddam bully, which is nothing new for Brendan O’Neill.

And then there’s Helen Dale, who’s always reminding us that she’s a “classical liberal.”

Why? Because she’s campaigning for the idea that we should do something about climate change? Therefore she should be bullied into a meltdown on national television? I’m not seeing the chain of reasoning there.

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