GRETA'S NEW BEST FRIENDS

Greta Thunberg has a load of 'new best friends', including New Zealand's Climate Change minister James Shaw. But while Greta  wants system change, Shaw just wants to tinker with the motor a bit.

THERE HAVE BEEN SOME  vicious and ugly personal attacks on Greta Thunberg in recent days, revolving around her Asperger's and her appearance. These attacks though have largely been coming from uninformed climate change deniers who, unable to face the facts, have resorted to 'playing the ball, not the man'. In this case 'playing the sixteen year old Swedish girl with Asperger's, not the ball'. Greta has shown a maturity beyond her years in the way she has managed to shrug off these attacks and even with a little self-deprecating humour as well. Sadly she has had to put up these attacks ever since she started campaigning.

While we, of course, condemn these personal attacks on Greta, less obvious has been the insidious behaviour of those claiming to be her new best friends but who continue to act in a way that she has consistently criticised and opposed.

While Greta may yet to have arrived at a finished analysis of the planet's plight, she has struck an emotional chord around the world in a way a thousand reports and articles have not. It has come at a time when we have reached a crucial point in the planet's history. No matter what the dwindling number of climate change deniers may say or try to obscure, global carbon dioxide emissions hit a new high in 2018. Similarly the past five years have been the hottest since modern records began. And no one could have not noticed that extreme weather is happening at ever more frequent intervals.

Thunberg wants revolution. “We must change almost everything in our current societies,” she told the business suits and politicians at Davos earlier this year." Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”

James Shaw : His support for Greta Thunberg is fraudulent.

But the peddlers of a so-called sustainable capitalism, of a 'green capitalism', show no inclination to panic or display any kind of urgency. But they are all lining up to be  a friend of Greta's.

In New Zealand, Climate Change Minister James Shaw has this week tweeted his solidarity with Greta. He wants us to think he's on the same page as her. He isn't. Shaw, and the Green Party he co-leads, continue to peddle the  dangerous snakeoil of a corporate friendly environmentalism that will see the country slouching toward supposed carbon neutrality in 2050 - when it will be just about too late. While Greta is calling for system change, James Shaw just wants to tinker with the motor a bit.

The central issue is that James Shaw, the Green Party and the Labour-led goverment it blindly follows, regard the market economy as sacred and untouchable. But as Albert Einstein said : “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” As Greta has alluded, we must reject capitalist 'pragmatism' - the drive for ever more profit and growth - if we are to find a way to limit the catastrophe we are facing. But at the United Nations this week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was celebrating the 'trading opportunities' offered by climate change. Its business as usual, apparently.

James Shaw's new tactic  is to try to  deflect criticism of his support for the neoliberal economy by agreeing that the country could  go faster with the pace of reforms and make more progress. But it is no good talking about the speed of 'reforms' when we are on the wrong path to begin with. James Shaw won't even countenance campaigning for a 'Green New Deal' in New Zealand because it would cut across his support for the market economy.  With 'friends' like James Shaw, Greta certainly doesn't need enemies.