'Feel the fear': Left use kids to push climate change

FPI / September 19, 2019

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Select Committee on the Climate Crisis on Sept. 18 held a hearing billed as “Voices Leading the Next Generation on the Global Climate Crisis”.

The hearing included the testimony of rising teen environmental star Greta Thunberg of Sweden, who started a global school walkout movement known as Fridays for Future.

On climate change, Thunberg told the Congress members, “I know you are trying but just not hard enough.”

“People in general don’t seem to be aware of how severe the crisis” is, Thunberg said, urging lawmakers to “unite behind the science” and take action, saying that people need to treat climate change “like the existential crisis it is.”

Jamie Margolin, a high school senior who sued her home state of Washington for its alleged role in causing climate change, told the committee: "I don’t think a lot of people in Congress understand the conversations that are happening every day in American high schools."

In response to a question about how American children are having their lives impacted by climate change, Margolin spoke about deep despair and nihilism felt by younger generations:

"Kids are joking, like, what is even, like, the point [if] the world is ending. What are we studying for? What are we doing?"

Thunberg, who said she traveled to the U.S. last month in a sailboat to prevent making a “carbon footprint” by flying from Europe, scolded the U.S. for being the “biggest carbon polluter in history” and the top producer of oil.

“And yet you are also the only nation in the world who has signaled with strong intention to leave the Paris agreement because it was a bad deal for the U.S.,” she said.

The Statistical Review of World Energy, a yearly study conducted by DP, found that carbon emissions decreased in President Donald Trump’s first year in office, continuing a three-year trend.

Related: Rumors of planet’s death exaggerated: Alarmists have 52-year perfect batting average, September 18, 2019

In a Sept. 2 Boston Globe op-ed titled “Beware Greta Thunberg’s science fiction — the end of the world is not nigh”, Hoover Institution analyst Niall Ferguson wrote that Grunberg’s arrival in the U.S. earlier this month to address the United Nations was “one of many recent events that illustrate how rapidly modern environmentalism is degenerating into a millenarian cult.”

Upon arriving in New York, Thunberg scolded Trump, saying he should “just listen to the science, [as] he obviously doesn’t do that.”

Ferguson wrote: “Science. Or perhaps science fiction.

“What does it tell us about our world that Greta Thunberg is about to add the UN General Assembly to the list of august bodies she has addressed in the past year, after the Pope, the World Economic Forum, and the European Parliament? ‘I want you to panic,’ she said at Davos in January. ‘I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.’ That is not the voice of science. It is the voice of a millenarian cult leader.”

Ferguson continued: “The end of the world is not nigh, however.

“Greta is right about one thing. The chances are virtually nil that the governments of the world will do as she asks. While the West virtue-signals, China, India, Brazil, and others will continue to attach more importance to growth than to curbing emissions in the drastic way she and her fellow Friday truants demand. The planet will grow warmer, just as it grew colder in the 1600s. And we shall adapt, taking advantage of the technological innovations that will gradually improve how we generate and store electrical power and ward off flood waters.

“It is 2059. To the embarrassment (but, I hope, relief) of Greta Thunberg, now 56, her great expectations of the end of the world have not been fulfilled. Jair Bolsonaro didn’t torch the Amazon. Donald Trump didn’t incinerate the planet. You should come back to New York to celebrate our survival, Greta. But this time fly.”

Free Press International