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Uwhat must it be like to be greta thunberg? To be, at the age of 19, the world’s most prominent climate campaigner, taking on the burden of preventing – or at this late stage, simply mitigating – the greatest disaster humanity has ever faced? What might this feel like?
At the end of Amol Rajan interviewing Greta Thunberg (BBC Two), the conversation gets more personal and we get a few answers: how Thunberg doesn’t enjoy being stopped in the street and certainly doesn’t appreciate the threats to her family; how she despairs when she is told that her presence reassures people about the future of the planet because it implies that they place their individual responsibility on her.
But a fundamental insight into Thunberg’s existence had already been provided by the previous half hour of questions about her advocacy of “yearly, drastic, immediate reductions in emissions, on a scale unlike anything the world has ever seen.” Thunberg sacrificed her youth to deal with the climate emergency, realizing that it requires a radical rethinking of our entire way of life. Now she is doomed to hell arguing with people who cannot imagine changing this way of life.
Rajan, who argues in his introduction that Thunberg’s influence should be acknowledged “whether you admire her or despair of her,” spends much of the interview echoing the mainstream climate discourse—which means he risks sounding ignorant, to give a common catch and canard broadcast. The sport is in how efficiently Thunberg can knock down questions we should have so far moved beyond.
Early on, she is pressed for an opinion on nuclear power and shale gas. Aren’t they important components of a strategy to achieve net zero by 2050, under the Paris Agreement? Thunberg does say that the former is too slow and the latter is, uh, fossil fuel, and therefore not a fragile idea, but she emphasizes that her concern is about realizing the extent of the problem, not getting bogged down in hot issues : the arguments about which bucket of water to use will be distracted once people agree that the house is on fire. The distortion of our priorities is also the echo of Rajan’s question, steeped in conservative attitudes to which expenses are unavoidable and which should be questioned, about how we would “pay” for free public transport, a key Thunberg goal, during the ” cost of living crisis”.
Thunberg is presented with several versions of the same argument: We can’t do this because it would cost money or be inconvenient in the short term. At a time when both of the UK’s main political parties have recently been using the slogan ‘growth, growth, growth’, Thunberg’s claim that the endless pursuit of economic expansion might just be suicidal feels like listening to an intelligent alien being dropped with a ray to sort us out. Rajan’s question on the subject is remarkable: “Economic growth creates leisure, creates opportunities for new experiences – some of which will have a negative impact on the environment, but many of which people really enjoy. Flying is one of those… do you think flying should be illegal?’
More plausibly, Rajan asks how Thunberg can call capitalism a failed ideology when life expectancy and infant survival rates in China and India have risen as those countries have commercialized. Thunberg delicately notes that the collapse of life support systems, resource wars and other likely effects of runaway global warming could soon cause those graphs to slide back down.
Not everything is such a struggle. Thunberg often has a refreshingly flippant response to silly statements: her reaction to Rajan, who said earnestly that “There’s one person who towers over this debate — and that’s Elon Musk,” is unbridled giggles. And in this extended format, Rajan has time to include deeper questions. Asking whether the gap between what we are doing and what we should be doing is widening (yes) is valuable, as is the discussion of whether Thunberg should not encourage a general cynicism about politicians and should consider entering the politics.
She counters that although politicians will eventually implement the necessary actions, public opinion will be what forces them to act, and protest is an effective way to strengthen that consensus. Then politicians themselves become irrelevant and we can “reconsider what is politically possible” – paying reparations to poorer countries deeply affected by a changing climate that they did little to cause, for example , which Rajan puts forward for a demand that is absurdly unrealistic can become feasible.
Her main point is that it should happen soon. We are desperately short of time, and Thunberg has made it her mission to communicate that urgency. As this program shows, it’s awfully hard work.
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