Sig! You really do need to dust off that thesaurus of yours 🙂 Yes, there is absolutely no doubt that there is a fad and a fashion and that boring insignificant people the world over are leaping onto the climate change bandwagon to to give their meaningless lives at least some semblance of purpose BUT I would argue that the currently useless bleating will gradually mutate into something that will actually promote an improvement in standard human behaviour.
As tenants rather than freeholders of our planet of residence one would understand that the landlord might be a tad miffed at us trashing the carpets, making firewood of the furniture and scrawling on the walls. I am in no doubt whatsoever that natural cycles and cataclysmses trump** human interference but if we are to survive then we have to clean up our act and at least think about adapting and maybe just maybe mitigating some of what is yet to come. The conflation of the multitude of different threads that make up what we are doing wrong and how much of a problem this creates or exacerbates is probably beyond the comprehension of most but is it not worth at least trying?
Nobody is going to look any sillier in the future than they do now - the world has always been full of very very silly people and climate change imo does not significantly add to the overall number but merely brings the throng into the limelight, which for many of the silly is an end in itself.
Noxious Greta is a living breathing, wheezing, coughing exemplar of the Rumsfeld known-unknown rant - btw, whilst he got unbelievable stick for that, it's actually been part of project management methodology since the early 70s at least....so the poor sod wasn't even original - she appeals to the many precisely because of that wide-eyed youthful innocence and inexperience in the same way that cat videos are now responsible for filling the internet video space not as yet occupied by porn. To my mind, by her furry cuteness (or saccharine sincerity, if you prefer) she is drawing the western world's attention to something that is worthy of attention....meanwhile, here in the UK, instead of worrying about dull stuff like rising tides, pollution, food and water precarity etc etc, we're fixated on trying the to leave the gang we belong to but keep our territory anyway. It takes all sorts but given the choice between living - and doing it comfortably - Brexit isn't even on the spectrum for me.
**sorry!...I said a dirty word. Honestly, the filth I come out with sometimes. I do hope you'll forgive me.
Please don't misinterpret my dispariging of imbicilic, media driven, over hyped eco agenda types with a lack of eco warriorness.
I have been accused by a few that know me of being a tree hugger because of my views on the planet, I have been a lifelong anti-pollutioner, upcycler, recycler, reducer of waste and 'green'.
I even worked for keep Britain tidy in the 1980s, way ahead of the curve I was in those days, I have done my share of media awareness whilst also getting my hands dirty.
What I see nowadays, similar to the LGBTQ+ promotion, the invention of hate crimes, the removal of free speech, is yet another hard left driven eco ideology emerging that will most likely alienate a large majority of people to the point where it becomes useless. Useless in the sense that lots of people will be paying lots of money for very little benefit.
On a cost based analysis basis, I don't think the current approach of using children to pull at the heart strings to raise the guilt profile of the public will work.
What is required however, is a commitment by global companies and governments to non-cynically restore some balance in what we are trying to achieve.
All of that balance needs transparency, debate and openness, none of which is currently present and I can see eventually they will try and make man-made climate change denial a hate crime, just as they have managed to shut down so many other debates over recent years.
We need moral leadership in this debate, not politically driven agendas from the hard left, no balance = no cost benefit = no consensus = hypocrisy = more authoritarianism.
