Scott Morrison has responded to Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN Climate Action Summit with two key words: “needless anxiety”. While Gret was given a speaking role at the summit, Morrison lucked out. Nevertheless, he made the comments while attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Morrison’s stance reads as a denial of the seriousness of climate change, demonstrating the opinion that the earth’s situation isn’t quite yet serious enough to be rendering anxiety amongst the youth.
While Greta told the world’s leaders: “All you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth, how dare you.”
Scott Morrison said: “…They [Australia’s youth] will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, but they’ll also have an economy that they can live in as well.”
Which is a fairytale if I ever did hear one and his shoutout to the economy during a discussion on environmental damage is just cringe.
In her speech, Greta said:
“For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear…the popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50 % chance of staying below one point five degrees…”
However, Morrison’s comments failed to mention any one of the various facts Greta arose. Instead, the comments were almost strictly concerned with the attitude of kids.
“You know, I want children growing up in Australia that feel positive about their future.”
Scott Morrison
A pretty unreasonable request. Greta is quite right – her generation will be burdened with healing the massive environment damage left behind by former generations. She said halving emissions within 10 years wouldn’t be enough:
“50% may be acceptable to you but those numbers… rely on my generation sucking hundreds and 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.”
It’d be pretty darn hard to feel positive about those prospects.
“We’ve got to make sure that…we do not create an anxiety among children in how we talk about and deal with these very real issues,” Morrison declared.
But perhaps Greta was just being frank about the impending crisis. Perhaps she felt like she had to, after all, she called out our world’s leaders: “You are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.”
Greta’s speech garnered a lot of media attention in its aftermath. It became the subject of discussion for Fox News segment The Story which involved some pretty explosive comments by conservative writer, Michael Knowles.
He claimed that climate hysteria wasn’t about science and that “if it were about science, it would be led by scientists, rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.”
While has since Fox News apologised to Greta, Knowles has stood by his comment.
Morrison did give a shout out to the kids at the United Nations General Assembly: “I’ve always liked kids to be kids. And we’ve got to let kids be kids…”
It’s 2019, surely by now we’ve all learnt that children having opinions and expressing them is valid. As it turns out, Greta Thunberg likes being a typical kid too. She just feels like she no longer has that choice.
“I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean,” Greta said, holding back tears. “Yet you all come to us young people for hope… You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”