Enter The Dark Lord
Well here you have it. Disaffection with “business as usual,” corrupt, inefficient, representative democracy had reached such a pitch that in the 2016 presidential election we installed an unabashed authoritarian into the White House. This man doubles down on ignorance. He knows nothing about many things that he fancies himself to be supremely knowledgeable about. He is doubly ignorant. He understands that knowledge is a impediment, inefficient — if you have sufficient power to order your underlings, those of unquestioned loyalty who see the world as you do, to “make it so.” He is the analog of a man-god Egyptian Pharaoh, or a oriental potentate.
What are the odds that he will voluntarily leave office, if he is voted out in 2020, as have the merely human, fallible predecessors who “served” before him?
Even an intelligent child “knows” that something is desperately wrong with this man.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, 16, gave an angry and emotional speech to hundreds of world leaders at the United Nations in New York City on Monday, telling them their empty words and lack of action are a disgrace. “How dare you,” she thundered to wide applause.
Here is transcript of her speech:
My message is that we’ll be watching you?
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing. 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!
For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees (Celsius) and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.
To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just “business as usual” and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.
There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.
We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
Thank you.
The October 20 issue of the NY Times magazine had an excellent article contrasting Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump appearances at the United Nations. If you’d like to read the article CLICK HERE.
One thought on “Enter The Dark Lord”
Some people have equated Greta to a Nazi fascist for the sole reason that she is demanding that the current adult population pay attention to how we are destroying our planet. She, and many of her generation, are telling us older folks that she would like to have a chance to breathe clean air, to walk in the sun without blistering from heat, and be able to drink water that did not need 20 filters to make it potable. To know the joys of strolling through a forest or observe wildlife in habitats other than zoos seems like a given to us, yet this is not so for generations born within the past two decades. Greta has the wisdom of the ages deep within her, while the leaders of most countries (including our own) have the temperament and acumen of a spoiled, sociopathic four-year-old. Many of us question how this dysfunctional and dystopian society came to pass, how we bought into the mumbo-jumbo of nonexistent nostalgia, the longing for an age that happened only in the imaginations of creatures like Trump. In my opinion, what happened was that we traded in our curiosity for a delusional sense of security. We, as a species on the whole, bypassed our frontal lobes, where reasoning and facts make a difference, and allowed our coarser nature to erupt into a volcano of suspicion, distrust and fear. All-in-all the genie is out of the bottle and whether we can undo what has been done is unlikely.
Greta, I should have done more when I was your age. I should have screamed bloody murder from the rooftops of the world, for by not doing so, I am complicit in this tragedy. You sat vigil at the Swedish parliament while I drove my car to the grocery store. You sailed the ocean to tell the world of your plight, while I sat in a seat on an plane to do some bit of business. So I apologize to you, Greta and the hundreds of millions of young people on this planet. I am the problem and I hope that whatever I can do to lessen my impact for the time I have remaining will mean something, though I wouldn’t blame you if you turned your back on me and all of those who have brought us to the brink of self-destruction.