Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Time Magazine’s 2019 “person the year” Greta Thunberg, who has spoken to world leaders at multiple United Nations Climate Summits, has been known as one of the world’s most influential climate activists since her rise to global prominence in 2018.
She has received admiration and gratitude from such influential figures as Sir David Attenborough, Prince Harry, and former President of the United States Barack Obama, who Tweeted in 2019, [emphasis, links added]
“Just 16, @GretaThunberg is already one of our planet’s greatest advocates. Recognizing that her generation will bear the brunt of climate change, she’s unafraid to push for real action. She embodies our vision at the @ObamaFoundation: A future shaped by young leaders like her.”
But despite the amplitude that government and media elites have lent to her voice, it is remarkable how infrequently they address her ultimately tyrannical political agenda, which she shares with much of the environmentalist movement–it’s not just about solving climate change, as many who sing her praises would apparently like you to believe.
What Thunberg’s Movement Wants
An influential subset of the environmentalist movement is not just interested in regulating the market and investing in green technology to avert climate disaster—they’re out to eliminate the free market system altogether, for social as well as environmental reasons.
In Naomi Klein’s 2014 New York Times bestseller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, she constantly renounces free markets, writing that “free market ideology continues to suffocate the potential for climate action” and that “revolutionary levels of transformation to the market system [are] now our best hope of avoiding climate chaos.”
Klein argues that: “Just as the climate change deniers I met at the Heartland Institute fear, there is a direct relationship between breaking fossilized free market rules and making swift progress on climate change.”
But she doesn’t just want to transform the economy for environmental reasons.
“I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up,“ she writes.
And, “It can disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it in the hands of the few, and radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off in pieces.“
In 2021, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reintroduced her Green New Deal resolution in Congress (after having introduced it with Massachusetts Senator Edward J. Markey in 2019), which according to ocasio-cortez.house.gov, “has inspired over a dozen pieces of legislation and 10 regional Green New Deals.”
The Green New Deal, which enjoys support from more than 40 members of Congress, aims to radically diminish or socialize free market activity by instituting a universal income and universal health care program, requiring every building in the United States to be fitted or retrofitted with new state-mandated energy systems, eliminating all fossil fuel use including gas and oil, and many other regulating or eliminating private enterprise in many other ways.
The deal would cost American taxpayers at least $10 trillion according to the self-proclaimed socialist Ocasio-Cortez, but would likely not be achievable for any less than $51 trillion to $93 trillion according to an estimate by the American Action Forum.
These goals are in line with Ocasio-Cortez’s consistent repudiation of “capitalism,” which she called “not a redeemable system” in a Yahoo Finance interview and told an SXSW audience “cannot be redeemed,” each time making social as well as environmental arguments against capitalism.
In 2019, Thunberg wrote with two co-authors in Project Syndicate that:
“After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.”
At the time, I wondered whether she would count free markets among the systems that require dismantlement, as much of the environmentalist movement does.
But Thunberg’s forthcoming book, The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions (to be released this February), puts all mystery on the topic to rest.
According to a passage she released on Twitter last month,
“Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea.”
Justice and Property Rights
When Thunberg and others suggest the diminishment of markets, they are implicitly expressing a preference for whatever alternative method of resource distribution would replace them. So let’s look at what such alternatives would necessarily consist of.
Any resource, in order to be useful, must first be cultivated by one or more individuals. A tin vein in the ground or an apple growing on a tree is of no value to anyone until energy and will have been exerted to make use of it.
…snip…
When a free person produces a good to be traded or sold, having automatic initial control over that good by virtue of having produced it, he or she exists in a free market with respect to that good unless and until another individual or group takes control of that good against the will of the producer.
And if the producer voluntarily relinquishes control of the good to someone else before or after producing it, for example in a trade or as an employee, the good still exists in a free-market paradigm unless and until an individual or group takes control of the good against the will of the new owner.
Therefore, any legislative prevention of free-market activity must necessarily entail the control of resources by someone against the will of whoever obtained the resources through production or voluntary exchange.
And indeed, environmental public policy proposals by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Naomi Klein, or anyone else almost always include either regulation (coercive prevention of certain market activity) or taxation (coercive acquisition of control over resources against the will of their owners) as an integral part of the plan.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the full original article here.
Greta a example of the leftists Brainwashing in the Government Run Schools Do parents have anymore reason to take their kids out of these indoctrination Centers we once called Schools