Greta Thunberg, in her speech
to the United Nations General Assembly, let them have it. (See below.) Over a
century ago, when authoritarian elements in the French officer corps trumped up
a treason case against a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, novelist Émile Zola
wrote an open letter to the president of the French Republic, which began “I
accuse” (j’accuse), in which he named an anti-Semitic major as the culprit
behind the miscarriage of justice. Zola changed the terms of discourse about
the Dreyfus affair from the question of whether Dreyfus committed treason to
the question of who framed him.
Thunberg just changed the
discourse about the climate crisis by fingering the culprits.
In mobilizing people for
political accomplishments, framing is everything. The
100 corporations that emit most of the world’s suffocating carbon
dioxide first tried to frame the crisis as illusory and untrue. Then they
argued that the science is disputed. More recently they’ve tried to suggest
that emissions are an individual problem and could be solved by individuals
becoming vegetarians and such stuff and nonsense as that. The hundred
include state-owned
Chinese coal companies and in the private sector, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and
Chevron as the highest-emitting companies, whose profits depend on the
burning of fossil fuels. ExxonMobil covered up its own scientists’ findings of
rapid global heating and paid for PR campaigns to muddy the waters and allow it
to keep profiting from wrecking the planet.
Thunberg isn’t having it. What
these corporations and their governmental enablers are doing is a crime. It
is a tort, with real live victims. They include everyone who is now, like Ms.
Thunberg, 16 years old, since the current corporate carbon dioxide emissions
are creating increasing global heating that will rob them of a normal life as
we defined normal in the twentieth century. She told them, “You have stolen my
dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
But it isn’t only the future
against which an epochal crime is being committed. It is the millions who have
already been displaced by drought, wildfires, sea-level rise, storm surges and
extreme Hurricanes turbocharged by Frankenstein-like warm oceans. Thunberg took
up their cause, too.
Above all, she dismissed the
discourse of hope. She demands immediate, practical action. No big vacuum
cleaner will be invented to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at an
affordable cost. Capturing carbon dioxide and storing it is extremely
dangerous, since the gas could kill large numbers of people if it leaked.
Individuals skipping a hamburger or going green is not enough. We need
governmentally-supplied infrastructure. We need trains and metros. We need
electric buses and automobiles. The latter require charging stations. The task
can’t be accomplished by individual consumers.
Governments, the
representatives of which she was addressing, have been mostly do-nothing. They
are accomplices in the crime. They give big monetary subsidies to the biggest
polluters, actually paying them to commit the crime.
Ms. Thunberg’s version of
“j’accuse” is “How dare you?”
How dare they.
“‘You have stolen my dreams
and my childhood with your empty words,’ climate activist Greta Thunberg has
told world leaders at the 2019 UN climate action summit in New York. In an
emotionally charged speech, she accused them of ignoring the science behind the
climate crisis, saying: ‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all
you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth – how
dare you?’”
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