Greta is certainly doing her part! Are you doing yours?
The folks peddling the existential crisis seem to forget that eleven years doesn't mean shit to Mother Nature. Neither does two hundred years. A thousand years is but the blink of an eye to Mother Nature.
Ten thousand years ago the glaciers that covered my little farm here were receding. The planet was warming, thousands of years before anthropogenic climate change was even a possibility.
My inner sceptic doesn't fully embrace the climate-change hysteria, especially when the proposed solutions come from the likes of Goldman Sachs. Where I see rampant exploitation of natural resources that degrades our environment, I generally find the same Goldman Sachs capitalist mindset that now proposes to lead the for-profit charge against climate change.
That's just a little too cute, isn't it?
There's no question that the excesses of capitalism as we know it have ruinous consequences for our environment. The US has become the leading global oil producer by permitting wholesale fracking. Fracking technology has been around for a hundred years, but it didn't go viral, or scale up, as they say, till the last ten or fifteen.
At the onset of the modern fracking bonanza you'd see voices of protest here and there. Even Hollywood managed to put out an anti-fracking film or two, but anti-fracking representation has more or less disappeared, and the fracking train continues to roll merrily down the tracks.
That will end when America figures out that you can live a lot longer without oil than you can without clean water.
As you can see, it's possible to care about the environment while declining the invitation to climb aboard Greta's bandwagon.
There's plenty of other reasons why folks may not see anthropogenic climate change as an existential crisis. Maybe they're unemployed. Maybe they're homeless.
Maybe they're gonna be bankrupt and homeless in months because they can't pay their medical bills, in which case they're not too concerned about what happens in eleven years.
No amount of Greta Thunberg's hectoring will change that.
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