Across the world, children have been skipping school to take to the streets. They are protesting to demand an end to the use of fossil fuels as part of the Global Climate Strike campaign, which was inspired by the by now iconic Greta Thunberg, the Swedish 16-year old who have become a world sensation after she came up with the idea for the protests little more than a year ago.
We all know that the kids fear climate change and want to save the planet by ending the use of fossil fuels, but beyond that the detail on the youngsters’ placards are sketchy. In fact, even though it is obvious that takes more than headlines to set out a plan to reverse what the protesters say is a catastrophic change in our planet’s climate, most people know little about what it is the campaigners actually want. On the surface, it could appear that they are simply asking for change but leaving the detail for politicians to sort out, but when you take a closer look, a dark picture emerges in which the saintly Greta and her righteous disciples don’t appear quite so much like determined youths but rather like pawns in a game to bring about an overthrow of capitalism.
When Thunberg was invited to testify before US Congress, she was lauded for simply asking politicians to “listen to the science”. Now, what the science actually says is not quite what Thunberg claims (as we discuss here), but what’s more, listening to science is in fact far from all the movement demands. On their website we can read that “We need to act right now to stop burning fossil fuels and ensure a rapid energy revolution with equity, reparations and climate justice at its heart.” If you follow the link for “climate justice” you are taken to https://www.peoplesdemands.org/#read-the-demands-section – and this is where things get sinister, because The People’s Demands for Climate Justice has little to do with science and more to do with hard left politics.
It starts innocently enough, with a demand to “keep fossil fuels in the ground” – this is the type of demand you’d expect from a climate change advocacy group. Asking for a pledge from all developed countries to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 is, however, completely insane: Britain already has a target to decarbonise by 2050, a goal then Chancellor Phillip Hammond predicted would cost £1 trillion. No word on the cost of bringing that target forward by 20 years and enacting it across the developed world, but a good guess is that it would be so ludicrously expensive that it would bring about the worst economic depression the world has ever seen. Of course, it also leaves developing countries, which would see their pollution increase as production was shifted to regions with less onerous regulation.
But the first proposal is the only one which looks like having primarily to do with saving the environment. Next up is a demand to reject any “false solutions”, which is to say no biofuels, no innovation in agriculture, no carbon trading – in short, no market solutions: rational optimism in mankind’s ability to organically solve any threats to the environment through innovation and technology must be ruled out.
This, then, leads to the third demand which is to adopt the People’s Demands’ solutions. At first glance, these appear to be not so much about solutions but more about values: words like “participatory”, “transparent”, “respect” and “indigenous technologies” abound, alongside “agro-ecological practice and food sovereignty”. So, what are they actually proposing? If you look it up, agro-ecological practices “applies ecological and social concepts and principles to the design and management of food and agricultural systems”, and food sovereignty is about cutting out “the market and corporations” to ensure “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food.” Political and social justice language has crept into what was supposed to be about “science”, and it’s made explicit in the demands to “facilitate and support non-market approaches to climate action” and “end corporate interference in and capture of the climate talks”. The transformation of society must be totally organised and enacted by the state and designed to ensure social justice rather than just be targeted at climate goals.
The People’s Demands for Climate Justice is peddling some of the most hardcore leftist politics of anyone in the climate debate, and isn’t at all about a scientific approach to environmental policy – which is what the School Strikers claim to be – but rather about using the emotive subject of climate change as a smokescreen for enlisting support for a strategy to overthrow capitalism. Climate policy has always been big government’s Trojan horse, but by aligning themselves with the hard left, the Climate Strike organisation is exploiting a generation of children as useful idiots in a quest to transform society into socialist authoritarianism. Those who march in support of the Climate Strike and their parents probably don’t know this, but they should – and it ought to scare them a lot more than a rise in global temperatures.