Admittedly, being Time’s Person of the Year isn’t what it used to be in the magazine’s heyday, but the choice is always interesting.
It is inevitably a window into the thinking of the chattering classes (and their chattering offspring).
Greta Thunberg, 16, is Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019.
A more revealing choice than the Swedish teen and climate activist could not have been made.
Time’s Charlotte Alter, one of the authors of the magazine’s profile of young Greta, tweeted about how lucky she was to do the profile, adding that . . .
…this story is about Greta Thunberg, but it’s also about the explosion of youthful anger that has erupted across the globe over the last year . . .
Geta is angry because she believes she believes greedy adults are destroying the planet. I’d be angry, too. Here is a snatch of what she said at the U.N.:
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
As I observed earlier (and also here), when Greta was just bursting on the scene, no child should sound like this. (But I agreed that she should be back in school.)
She should not be frightened out of her wits because of incomplete science.
But her prescritions (anti-business instead of pro-human ingenuity) are in line with trendy beliefs.
Bjorn Lomborg, maverick environmentalist, has said that he disagrees with Greta:
… I disagree strongly with Greta Thunberg’s climate policies (unrealistic and far more costly than the benefits they will derive) But of course, she should be treated respectfully, just like all participants should be treated in the climate debate.
Lomborg has advocated innovation rather than preaching apocalypse:
We need to fix man-made climate change by ensuring that innovation can drive down the cost of low-carbon energy alternatives. But linking rising temperatures to every single challenge facing humanity is just a distraction.
I’ve always hated using the young as mouthpieces for adults’ ideologies.
In Greta’s case, it is particulary bad: the kid is scared.
Greta’s anger and fears apparently made her appealing to the editors of Time. This is no way to use a teenager.
Made of sterner stuff than your humble blogger, the Washington Times’ Cheryl Chumley says that Greta is old enough to know better than to let herself be used this way.