Five years ago, on this day, August 20, 2018, Greta Thunberg did her first school strike.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 408ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was Greta Thunberg was the daughter of a famous Swedish opera singer and her very supportive dad. She had been in severe emotional mental distress because of climate change, not eating/agoraphobic etc. You can read about it in her book and I recommend you do.
It was a simple straightforward protest that has become mythology-sized and some people want to believe that she is the pawn of a globalist movement and everything is mediated and manipulated. And they find “proof” of this, to their own satisfaction. And on and on we go.
What I think we can learn from this is that the media latch on to to young people and ‘odd’ “people as the “stars” of a movement…
Greta is very smart and very very funny.
What happened next
The climate movement went up like a rocket and has come down like a stick because it doesn’t know how to do anything other than marches and rallies and sleepovers.
There’s an impressive amount of Just Stop Oil action, but the broader movement doesn’t have a granular capacity… Oh well, too late now anyway.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.