Funny meme and all, but I kind of hate how people dog on Greta for caring about the world. Like talk about how “ineffective” she is all you want, but she’s doing more than 99% of people, at least she tries.
I think some of it is the activism vs practice question. Who does more to curb climate change: someone protesting about it a lot, or someone who sits down and does the hard work of getting, say, a renewable energy engineering degree and designs next gen wind turbines? There's a decent argument for the latter - which is also a quiet, behind the scenes role that doesn't have the benefit of making you famous at the same time. There's a certain "Look at me" energy to all activists that can be pretty offputting. Just some thoughts.
Designing turbines doesn’t mean jack shit if nobody ever installs the damned things. Case in point, we’ve already got high quality green energy solutions, and we already don’t install the damned things. You need to push people towards actually adopting that technology, otherwise any advancement you make is meaningless.
And it's already at the point where they're cost-effective over the short-medium term. This isn't even factoring in carbon taxes or anything. It turns out, shipping in train cars of coal or diesel to a power plant costs tonnes of money, while the wind and sun are free. Amazing, who could have predicted this?
solar is dirt cheap now. it costs less to deploy per megawatt than nuclear, the previously undisputed king of energy production at scale (accounting for batteries too, iirc), it has extremely low maintenance costs, it allows for extremely granular energy logistics, and it is a massive boon for energy sovereignty because once you import the panels and battery cells you can keep that entire capacity domestically controlled, and decades down the line still remanufacture end-of-life devices into new ones using the materials already present in the used panels and batteries. and in the us, specifically, vast swaths of land are already devoted to energy production, they're just often used for bioethanol, which is objectively stupid in comparison.
even hostile regulatory regimes cannot meaningfully stop renewables, and that's all due to how well the tech works.
The problem is we’re still not building enough, and we’ve started too late to prevent further severe damage. Plus a whole lot of major political groups would still be happy to completely ignore climate change, despite it being a science-proven thing for several decades.
Politics and corporate dishonesty has directly led to severe environmental damage, including thousands of human deaths, and will continue to do so even with current renewable trends.
I actually have started to think that in current cicumstances, democracies are kinda incapable of solving hard problems until they become critical. What clinched it for me was here in Aus where (like many parts of the world) we've been having a housing crisis. Housing affordability in the big cities (where 95% of the population lives) has plummeted over the last couple of decades. A significant part of this was due to negative gearing and captial gains discounts enacted by the Howard govt in the mid-late 1990s.
Everyone has known this is a problem for ages, but it's a hard problem because the 2/3rds of the population that are already homeowners desire prices to increase (my house is worth more!) while the other 1/3rd trying to get into the market want the prices to lower. So the can has been kicked down the road for ages, because even when people can see that forever inflating prices will be bad for society long term, they like the short term benefits too much.
It's only this year, when the problem has reached a sufficiently critical level that the current govt has tackled it. A second-term government with a historically weak opposition currently. The affordability problem had to get so bad that even existing homeowners could see it was gonna mess up their kids ability to ever buy a home. Only with this combination of very safe political position + problem reached completely critical level could the necessary legislative changes actually be made.
Hard problems can be solved, but the unfortunate reality is we might need to let them get way worse than they need to be before the public will have a taste for resolving them. I think the US govt debt crisis is going to be another one of these. Either taxes need to increase, or spending needs to decrease - but each party are vigorously opposed to one of these. It's already bad (interest payments on US federal debt now cost MORE than the entire miltiary budget?! INTEREST!!) but I think it's gonna need to become critical before there's the political will to solve it.
Democracy is still the way to go, but with civic-mindedness at historic lows making the "good but hard" decisions govts need to be able to has become extremely difficult.
There's a certain "Look at me" energy to all activists that can be pretty offputting
Please tell us how she and activists generally should be doing it properly.
or someone who sits down and does the hard work of getting, say, a renewable energy engineering degree and designs next gen wind turbines? There's a decent argument for the latter
Lie. Misjudgement rather. Current gen wind turbines are fine, the pols lack the will to deploy them.
Also, Exxon has known about global heating since the 60s. The issue has been the messaging and culture war game, not our lack of engineers.
The other thing is, current wind gen turbines + Solar are only fine because of all the improvements those quiet engineers have been making for decades.
Why have we seen an explosion in global renewables uptake in the past handful of years? Sure, there have been some political shifts due to global emissions treaties etc. But the vast majority of the change is because now the technology is so good that it outcompetes fossil fuels.
It more than doubled 2022-2025, and is still going crazy. Because around that time we reached a key inflection point where it became the best economic choice. As much as motivation by abstract ethical goals is important, actual change occurs when material conditions support it.
The real proof of this? China. They are a totalitarian state completely immune from external (or internal) activism. And they are leading the charge on renewables installation.
It's the engineers at Tesla and BYD making electric cars that are as good or better than ICE cars that have made them successful, not because people were shamed into buying them.
We're not going to solve the problems of climate change by sheer political will. Yes, politics and messaging have an (important) role to play, but the biggest changes come from the hands on, practical, unglamourous, difficult work of finding real solutions that work in the world. We're gonna solve the problems of climate change by making the renewables transition economically desirable.
I've never read a more braindead glorification of the salaryman life than this silly paragraph of yours.
As if there was glory in doing paid labor. The engineers at Tesla are good people but they're just doing a job. They're paid handsomely for it. If money was offered for them to do something else, they'd do something else. That's how it works with paid labor for most people. There's no shame in that but also no glory.
I'm am engineer myself, also paid handsomely, and in no way would I ask for people to glorify my everyday work over the work of activists who actually face adversity and plenty of hostility for what they do.
You also grossly underestimate how powerful the astroturfed activism against green energy can be. If there were no public consciousness about climate change (which is largely stimulated by activists!!) then the established fossil industries, with their huge money, would have a much easier time smothering any attempt to put green technology into the markets through negative PR, political lobbying and lawfare. Which is EXACTLY what they do in other countries where consciousness about climate change doesn't exist, like Russia.
Thing is that the people who in the end decide what's done aren't any of those. They're policy makers.
And the express and explicit job of policy makers is generally to do what the people want them to do. (They often don't bit that's besides the point for the moment).
That means that the correct way to get these things actually getting done is to convince THE PEOPLE that it needs to be done. That's the job activists do.
Only AFTER THAT POINT do people like engineers, financiers et cetera enter the picture at all! So without activists, none of the other jobs really... Matter.
Policy makers aren't what determine what happens. It's economics.
Example: Texas has the highest rate of solar buildout of any US state. It's sure as shit not because the Texas electorate and policy makers care about green energy. It's because they accidentally made it economically viable by being a state with little paperwork for building stuff.
They legislated the cheapest method of transportation out of existence. Not allowed to compete with trucks and rail. 100 years ago! And it's still not allowed
That's only true if the economically favorable options are allowed to be developed and to compete in the first place.
Why do you think the USA doesn't have a real coastal and riverine transport system? Why is everything transported by truck and rail across the continent? Certainly not because the Mississippi and Ohio rivers are any worse as potential waterways than big rivers in other countries.
It was a POLITICAL choice made 100 years ago that smothered river and coastal shipping. They legislated the cheapest method of transport into non-competitiveness.
In her case it's only offputting to people stuck in an algorithm that spews the most uncharitable headlines about her possible and that have been brainwashed by generations of fossil fuel propaganda ranging from "climate chainge aint real" to believing things like the plastic they put in the recycling bin actually gets reused and not dumped on a mountain of plastic in China and now Africa.
I don’t tend to encounter any reasonable good faith criticism of her compared to waves of regurgitating chud memes and opinions based of half remembered New York Post and such headlines from over the years. I would not count “but why don’t she become a scientist inventor instead!?!?” To be good faith either as some in this thread have argued.
Sure but saying people that don’t like her are brain washed by big coal is being disingenuous. When you get political there are many reasons you may not be liked.
The practice thing is sometimes still too focused on certain innovation that doesn‘t have a realistic impact at scale. While activism can be off-putting, it‘s still important to get a lot of ppl on board to even accept the reality of global warming and the potential for arising negatives, even just for those within their lifetimes. It would help a lot if more ppl would care for affected regions or the following generations, but that‘s too much to ask for from a lot of ppl merely surviving. Often those most affected (who increasingly understand the causes) still cannot gather enough momentum to steer a population/nation into a better path, because of their numbers and low status/resources. Citizens in developed countries still have more power in affecting global policies - albeit slow and hindered by economics as well as necessities - through their collective decisions, which are affected by beliefs and circumstances - in turn affected by awareness, societal acceptance etc.
While important to r&d, short to mid-term it‘s probably just as important to reduce (still growing) emissions with tried and tested renewables at scale until potential geoengineering is accepted and proven effective.
Problem is the atmospheric content will still lead to warming even if we magically stopped emissions (not net-neutral, an aboslute stop) somehow tomorrow. We still have to get to net-neutral in the first place (over multiple decades). Completely stopping climate change for many decades (or maybe centuries) to come is physically impossible just by carbon removal.
The orders of magnitude in the sun-earth system make total human primary energy production look laughable and the physics behind the problem require loads of energy if carbon capture is the method.
Regarding R&D: best-case we find some effect in opposite magnitude to how we manipulated the atmospheric windows to (mainly) solar radiation. That‘s how we managed to unbalance the system in the first place, total human energy output would never manage climate change by itself, but there‘s secondary effects which lead to more energy input.
A much simplified practical example: slowly opening blinds in a room requires much less energy than the total energy of a constant stream of additional light is let in - the room is heating up over time, not being able to emit enough energy away; water evaporates, making air able to hold more heat, etc. - just that this room is spherical with a thin floating canopy, a balanced internal heat source through radioactive decay, is sunlit 24/7 half its surface (while revolving) and not able to get rid of heat through convection or conduction, but mainly by thermal radiation - which is much slower compared to the other means - 70% of it surface covered by thin water which still captures most of the added heat, expanding in turn. Ofc evaporating water is a more complex climate effector.
We can just cap warming at some level within this century, even with idealised aerosol input in desirable atmospheric strata to offset insulating effects. If we focused only on carbon removal and would manage to reduce atmospheric content, certain sinks (especially oceans) will over time release the delta in CO2e back into the atmosphere (natural mechanism of equilibrium), even slowing down the desired reduction of certain particles. Oceans are currently the largest carbon sinks, but it takes centuries for carbon to be fully dissolved throughout them, so not viable.
Still, it would be big if we even got this far, but unlikely.
Some effects witnessed by natural processes recreated through technical lab equipment look promising if large-scale engineering, economics and politics behind global implementation get solved.
Both are equally important parts of the solution. We can churn out Nuclear reactors, solar panels, and wind turbines all day, but if people don't believe in them or believe the disinformation about them, what was the point? If a politician wants to implement these things as policy and people won't vote for them because of it, it doesn't matter how robust the infrastructure could be because it won't happen.
Greta and activists like her lay the groundwork for people to see these solutions as a requirement for moving forward and get voters onboard so the system those voters are apart of can feel comfortable making those changes.
I agree with you to a degree, the method is the message and if people find you annoying you aren't doing anything, but this is work that needs to be done.
She was probably THE person that made climate change as a topic become main stream in the world around 2018/2019. Suddenly governments (except the US I guess) started to actually implement meaningful climate change laws. The whole thing then sadly became a background topic again with covid, the Russian Ukraine war, Iran, Gaza, AI and all the other shit that has happened.
I’m gonna dog on people venerating the ground she walks on like she is a saint for saying that an issue that have been a main stream talking point for decades is still an issue.
It’s more that she’s perceived as whiny and doesn’t really have anything meaningful to co tribute to deal with the problem, as she famously stated when she literally said “it is not out job to provide solutions, it is our job to demand solutions”
While it’s nice to get visibility, being a childish grandstander about it while hanging with rich influencer friends and clout farming, living lavishly off your fame you got by complaining is borderline counterproductive to the movement.
Regarding her quote, she's absolutely correct. Providing the solutions to the populations problems is quite fucking literally the main job of any government and the reason why taxes are paid. Hating her for it is just an extremely advanced form of bootlicking
She's done nothing in recent years except co-opt trendy causes to keep herself relevant. She's become a full-on tankie. The PR stunt she pulled with the party flotilla which both trespassed international borders and brought zero aid should've been the end of her influencer career, and for many people it was.
excuse me the flotilla was illegally intercepted in international waters
that aside, climate change is a result of our current capitalist (neo-liberal) system of economy where growth is the main goal for everything. her turning in to a "full-on tankie" is just her seeing this reality
Whether or not they can legally stop the vessels in international waters part is up to interpretation. When it is known that a vessel is going to sail through a blockade, with certain justifications you can intercept it before it reaches the coastal waters. It makes sense that they intercepted the vessels in international waters because there were over 50 vessels to be stopped and there was no question whatsoever where they were headed to. Trying to stop all of them only after they reach the coastal waters would put immense pressure to intercept all of them in time which would lead to unsafe interceptions. If it would even be possible at that point.
The legal question comes from whether or not the blockade itself is legal or not.
She is not though, she has not realistic solution to this problem. We could literally just use aerosols to counter the warming which would work a billion times better than whatever she is is proposing lol
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u/SecondaryMilk 5d ago
Funny meme and all, but I kind of hate how people dog on Greta for caring about the world. Like talk about how “ineffective” she is all you want, but she’s doing more than 99% of people, at least she tries.