All over Europe, children are walking out of class to protest climate change. Inspired by a Swedish 16-year-old called Greta Thunberg, who began her solo demonstration last year, they are planning to intensify their “strikes” until governments “do something”.
It would be easy to dash off a scoffing, sarcastic, sneering article. Some of the teenagers involved in the London march posted images of themselves on the ski slopes the following week, either not knowing or not caring about the carbon emissions involved in flying. The turnout would doubtless have been lower had the kids been asked to stay away from, say, an Ariana Grande concert rather than a math class. And “strike” is a funny word for something that mainly inconveniences working people, teachers in this case, by messing up their schedules.
Such a column would pretty much write itself. But I’d rather take the kids and their ideas seriously.
My 17-year-old daughter joined the Brussels march during the half-term vacation from her British school. Although her participation was more in the spirit of curiosity than that of activism, she was struck by how much effort the demonstrators had put into the event. So let me do the youngsters the courtesy of engaging with their argument.
Britain’s Labour leader put out a video in which some of the protesters explained why they were marching. “The government doesn’t really care about our future,” said the first kid. “They’re just trying to waste time,” said the second. “I really care about it, because it’s gonna be my kids who wake up and the world’s in pieces,” said the third. “We’re the ones who have to live here,” said the fourth. (I wonder, where does she think the rest of us live?)
The young protesters evidently believe that they are Virtuous People marching against Evil People. And the Evil People must be very evil indeed if they don’t care about their own children — which, in terms of evolutionary biology, isn’t exactly setting the bar high.
To be fair, this is how a lot of us thought as teenagers. We divided the world into good guys and bad guys, and we didn’t really trouble ourselves with working out what makes the bad guys tick. Bad guys don’t care about the future. Bad guys rejoice in destruction. Bad guys tear up rainforests and pour plastic waste into the oceans. Why? Because, duh, they’re bad.
Young adult literature encourages this Manichaeism, this division of the world into light and dark. J.K. Rowling doesn’t try to explain what makes the Malfoys nasty.
If you are determined to see your political opponents as orcs, you usually have to disregard a lot of what they say and do. To claim that the American or British governments “don’t care” about climate change or are “just trying to waste time”, for example, you need to ignore the official data on carbon emissions. The U.S. led the charge in cutting carbon dioxide emissions in 2017, the last year for which we have figures, cutting its output by 42 million tons. Britain also saw one of the biggest drops in the world. Since 2010, the U.S. has reduced its emissions by 21 percent and the U.K. by an extraordinary 35 percent, more than any other advanced economy.
How have they managed it? This is where it gets complicated. In the U.S., it owes a great deal to natural gas that can now be accessed through fracking — a technology that most of the marchers oppose. In Britain, carbon reductions have mainly to do with the closure of coal mines under Margaret Thatcher — a policy the Left still seethes about.
Now there are, of course, legitimate arguments about these issues, but few of the marchers are making those arguments. It is easier and more comforting to attribute base motives to people who don’t share their outlook. The idea that there might be a trade-off between the economic well-being of deprived communities and the levels of carbon emission and that Western countries are not primarily responsible for increases in carbon dioxide anyway is not intellectually difficult; but it is morally difficult for those who like to divide the world into simple good and evil. A right-wing government, in their eyes, can’t possibly be making tough choices in the national interest, because a right-wing government is, like the Malfoys, intrinsically rich, snobbish and selfish.
Most of us grow out of this worldview, but a few remain stuck — hence the 69-year-old British Labour leader’s video. The longer I spend in politics, the more I realize that socialism is the default creed for adults who can’t transcended their teenage certainties.
