05 November 2022

GREEN MATTERS: Greta Thunberg calls for downfall of capitalism...She argued that global warming can only be solved by a “system-wide transformation,

". . .Interspersed among the usual directives about the need to pressure political leaders, her message was more radical and more militant than it has been in the past. 


There is no “back to normal”, she told us. “Normal” was the “system” which gave us the climate crisis, a system of “colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide”, of “racist, oppressive extractionism”. Climate justice is part of all justice; you can’t have one without the others. 


We can’t trust the elites produced by this system to confront its flaws — that’s why she, much like Rishi Sunak, won’t be bothering with the COP meeting this year. COP itself is little more than a “scam” which facilitates “greenwashing, lying and cheating”. Only overthrow of “the whole capitalist system” will suffice.

 

Greta Thunberg Releases 'The Climate Book,' Featuring 100 Contributors: "Hope Is Taking Action"

Sophie Hirsh - Author
By

Oct. 28 2022, Published 2:44 p.m. ET ‘The Climate Book’ by Greta Thunberg will focus on creating your own hope, sharing stories, and taking climate action.

On Oct. 19, Thunberg shared a video to Instagram to hype her audience up for her upcoming book.

“Right now, we are in desperate need for hope. But hope for whom?” Thunberg states in the video, before exploring the ways hope will differently affect those who will be able to most easily adapt to the climate crisis and those “who will not be so fortunate.”

“To me, hope is not about pretending that everything will be fine,” she continues. “It is not about sticking your head in the sand or listening to fairy tales about non-existent technological solutions. It’s not about loopholes or clever accounting. Hope is not something that is given to you. It is something that you have to earn, to create.”

“Hope is taking action. It is stepping outside your comfort zone,” she adds. “So instead of looking for hope, start creating it yourself.”


The Climate Book
features passages written by scientists, philosophers, historians, meteorologists, engineers, economists, Indigenous leaders, and other experts. Each section of the book includes an essay by Thunberg as well, according to New Scientist.

You can read the full list of contributors in this Instagram post by Thunberg, but a few highlights include Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Bill McKibben, Margaret Atwood, Michael Mann, Naomi Klein, and Sônia Guajajara — all of whom we’ve written about on Green Matters before. . .

And just like with Thunberg’s other books, she will not be profiting from The Climate Book.


 

“I will not earn any money from this book as my copyright belongs to the Greta Thunberg Foundation. So all royalties go to charity,” she stated in an Instagram post.

And if you’re wondering about the cover of the book, which features stripes that fade from shades of blue to shades of red, these are known as “warming stripes,” which represent how average temperatures have changed over the past 100 years.

✓ 

www.rt.com

Greta Thunberg calls for downfall of capitalism

2 - 3 minutes

The teenage climate activist also blamed “racism” for warming the planet

"Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg has turned her attention to the political arena, calling for the downfall of capitalism, which she claimed is responsible for climate change.

✓ The 19-year-old climate campaigner launched her book – ‘The Climate Book’ – in London on Sunday night, telling the audience that the world is “never going back to normal again.” She argued that global warming can only be solved by a “system-wide transformation,” according to a write-up of the event by the Telegraph.

The capitalist system, Thunberg continued, is “defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.”

“If economic growth is our only priority, then what we are experiencing now should be exactly what we should be expecting,” she added, before calling the extraction of fossil fuels “racist.”

✓ As some of Thunberg’s critics pointed out online, global living standards have broadly risen under capitalism, while carbon emissions have fallen in the capitalist USA since the turn of the millennium. Thunberg replied to these critics on Wednesday, stating that she is not advocating for a return to “socialism, liberalism, communism, conservatism, centrism, you name it,” which she said “have all failed.”

✓ Thunberg, who has previously been criticized for failing to offer solutions to the problems she outlines, did not say what kind of system she would replace capitalism with.


Shooting to fame after she organized a series of school walk-outs in her native Sweden in 2018, Thunberg has since delivered her dramatic predictions of ecological armageddon to lawmakers across the Western world, to UN summits, and to the World Economic Forum’s yearly gatherings at Davos, Switzerland. WEF founder Klaus Schwab is also an advocate of radically restructuring the global order, a vision he calls “the Great Reset.”

Despite spending several years on the globalist circuit, Thunberg will skip the UN COP27 climate conference in Egypt next week, telling her audience that she now views the summit as a “scam” and an example of “greenwashing” – an attempt by politicians to falsely portray themselves as environmentally friendly. 

unherd.com


Greta Thunberg throws in her lot with the anti-capitalist Left

The activist has been showing a more overtly political stance in London

by Nicholas Harris

4 - 5 minutes

✓ "Last night, London’s Royal Festival Hall hosted a children’s crusade. The purpose? To “celebrate” the launch of The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg’s coffee-table manifesto which collects essays from climate scholars, interspersed with photography and doom data (the cover itself is a colour chart of global temperature, moving from halcyon blue to DEFCON red). London answered the call.

Greta was in conversation with a beaming Samira Ahmed (“You’re the coolest 19-year-old I’ve ever met!”), who gently quizzed her about life as the world’s most famous climate activist. The crowd adored her. They lapped up her awkward ingenuousness. It was the perfect middle-class day out, like a trip to Glyndebourne or Blenheim. Some had even brought their young children, clearly hoping to inspire them into the same breed of activism. And, belying her reputation for aggressive sermonising, Greta was perfectly charming. The fury of “How dare you!” Greta has given way to a likeable figure of exasperated passion.

But this isn’t the only thing about the Swede that has changed. Previously, she’d sold herself as a five-foot human alarm bell, a climate Cassandra. Her role was to warn, not to instruct: her most viral moments involved her scolding political leaders, not trying to supplant them. She strenuously avoided programmatic detail, saying such things were “nothing to do with me”. But now, on stage and in this book, she has found her political feet, specifically the Left-wing ideology of anti-capitalism and de-growth.


Interspersed among the usual directives about the need to pressure political leaders, her message was more radical and more militant than it has been in the past. There is no “back to normal”, she told us. “Normal” was the “system” which gave us the climate crisis, a system of “colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide”, of “racist, oppressive extractionism”. Climate justice is part of all justice; you can’t have one without the others. We can’t trust the elites produced by this system to confront its flaws — that’s why she, much like Rishi Sunak, won’t be bothering with the COP meeting this year. COP itself is little more than a “scam” which facilitates “greenwashing, lying and cheating”. Only overthrow of “the whole capitalist system” will suffice.

So now we are finally seeing the contours of Thunbergism. Run your eye down the contributors to The Climate Book and you can see who she’s been reading: Jason Hickel, Kate Raworth, Naomi Klein. For these people the climate crisis isn’t man-made. It’s made by capitalism, as are the other forms of social injustice which plague society. There’s no GDP growth — especially of the capitalist sort — without increasing carbon emissions. The only solution to this state of emergency is for rich countries to immediately abandon economic expansion as a social goal.

It is hardly surprising that Greta thinks this way given how closely tied environmental activism has become with the more experimental end of the modern Left. De-growth is surely not the only feasible solution to the climate crisis, but Greta appears to have no doubts. And, like the bulk of her generation, she has lost any faith in the gradualist, establishment Left’s power to change things. Her teens spent chiding national governments have made her one of the most famous people in the world — her twenties look set to be far more explosive, and even revolutionary.

 


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