Greta Thunberg is one of the only public figures who is being honest about environmental breakdown. Her speech in the UK Parliament contained a litany of truths that are almost entirely absent from the political debate. The scientific community has unequivocally warned that we have to roughly halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to have a shooting chance of avoiding catastrophe. This assumes away dangerous tipping points and feedback loops and relies on the global deployment of carbon capture technologies that have yet to be invented. It pays little attention to temperature rises resulting from emissions to date.
In particular, she is right to chastise political leaders for spreading false narratives of progress. Global emissions are rising, and nations’ commitments are woefully inadequate, setting us up for warming in excess of 3C, double the 1.5C the world must aim for. Moreover, the conspiracy of silence over issues of justice grows more egregious by the day, by the extra megaton of carbon released. We are speeding through a disaster caused by the economic systems of the wealthy West that falls hardest on those countries and communities who have suffered under the injustices of these systems for generations.
Thunberg began her speech by drawing on one of the most powerful moral arguments around: that the promises made to younger generations have been broken. She is right to try and reclaim this for younger, more progressive movements. A backlash against the broken, false promises of neoliberalism also permeates the narratives of regressive political movements around the world. Donald Trump riles up his base by invoking their lived experience of social and economic marginalisation. He then blames this state of affairs on the most marginalised: migrants and religious and ethnic groups who have been most impacted by the failures of those neoliberal policies that Trump seeks to entrench, from deregulation to tax cuts.
