The Hollowness of Greta Thunberg
She’s a lot of noise, but not much substance.
This week, 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg made headlines after she gave an incredibly powerful speech to world leaders at the UN Climate Summit.
The speech resonated with a lot of people, and for climate activists, Thunberg broadcast what most of us have been feeling — world leaders are watching climate change worsen and are doing nothing to stop it, forcing regular people to do something instead.
This idea has been at the core of Thunberg’s message as a climate activist, as well as the climate strikes she started with her FridaysForFuture movement, and it is a good message. As someone who believes climate change is the most important problem we face, I think it’s a good thing that we have someone reminding our leaders that climate change is a problem.
However, Thunberg has been missing one key component to make her work actually worthwhile: a solution.
Thunberg has refused to endorse any specific policies to deal with climate change. Thunberg hasn’t weighed in on any of the existing solutions, from carbon pricing to fuel efficiency standards to the Green New Deal, and she hasn’t put forward any solutions of her own.
While she seems like a force for change on the surface, she lacks substance when you dig deeper.
What Thunberg is saying is something that everyone already knows: climate change is a problem. Although it seems like the world is stalling on climate change now, and admittedly there is less action than desirable, most people are aware that climate change is a problem. They’re aware of what the science says, and they’re aware that we need to decrease carbon emissions if we want to avoid catastrophic damage to our planet.
Previously, climate activists needed to emphasize that climate change was a problem, because people weren’t yet aware of it, or didn’t understand its scope. Now, however, the role of climate activists like Thunberg needs to change. They still need to emphasize the importance of climate change, but they should also start moving towards solutions to the problem.
Solutions are where our leaders are the most lost. They don’t know how to tackle a problem as broad and seemingly unstoppable as climate change, at least not in a way that doesn’t have disastrous side effects.
What they need is urging from the public, a message of support from engaged citizens telling them there is a solution that’s a win-win, and we have their back when it comes to that solution.
There are already many groups that support specific solutions to climate change. The Sunrise Movement has championed the Green New Deal, the Citizen’s Climate Lobby advocates for carbon pricing, and the organization Project Drawdown has compiled a list of hundreds of climate solutions that can be enacted by both individuals and governments.
These are just a few groups, and they’re a good start, but they need more power behind them. They need activists like Thunberg, who have vast name recognition and global reach, to support their specific policies if they can ever hope to have them implemented.
Thunberg also needs these policies for her to be taken seriously.
A lot of people have become apathetic with climate activism, and it’s not hard to see why. With Thunberg’s message essentially boiling down to “do stuff”, it’s hard to see climate activists as having real ideas.
While a lot of people and leaders are on board with climate solutions in theory, the roadblock they’ve hit is where to take it. There’s an undeniable global urge to solve the problem of climate change, but action has been slow because the path forward is too abstract.
However, if activists like Thunberg pushed for specific policies like government subsidies for renewables or a collective shift towards lower consumption of meat, then the general public would have a concrete call to action. The climate movement would be given new life, as it would have a specific goals, and activists would be able to hold world leaders accountable depending on if they achieved those goals.
Now, Thunberg has to make a change. She’s been able to rile up the masses with her speeches, but without a goal, they’ve been left without anything to do. Her platform and support are huge, and she’s certainly done good things with the influence she’s been given, but she has to turn her activism into policy if she wants to see real solutions to climate change.
