15 year old Greta Thunberg spoke the words in the title in her statement addressed to the participants at the COP24 meeting in Katowice in December 2018. This article from Resilience uses her title and the Hans Christian Andersen story of the Emperor with No Clothes to illustrate the modern story of the desirability and feasibility of perpetual economic growth that we all choose to ignore. The young Swedish activist, who also appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos this month, was like the child who told the naked Emperor that he had no clothes. She spoke to the powerful participants telling them that if they loved their children above all else, then the greed for unending wealth that drives our modern capitalist consumer society should be put aside. Exponential growth of technology, fossil fuel and capital accumulation are the emperor’s new clothes of modern society that we choose to overlook.
“Technologies have taken over our society. Meanwhile, there is no doubt that capitalism and the market economy have been major drivers for the transition to a fossil fuel economy. For companies, regardless if they wanted to or not, it has been impossible not to mechanize if they want to stay in business. And mechanization led to specialization and bigger scale, which in turn led to linear production processes, a fundamental break from an economy that earlier was sustainable and largely regenerative. Competition also pushed producers to externalize as many costs as possible, be it social, cultural or environmental.
Governments have also been keen on growth oriented policies, “international competitiveness” to keep corporations happy to invest and operate in their country. This gives the governments more tax revenue to spend (perhaps also money into their own pockets). The power of corporations has also increased with globalization and de-regulation, to some extent the result of intentional politics and to some extent the result of the capitalist take-over of more and more of society.
By and large, citizens, consumers and workers have of course also benefited from this, at least as long as growth continued and the elites (economic, political or technocratic) didn’t abuse their powers by taking too big a share of the pie. Calls are now made, however, that “consumers” shouldn’t waste so much food, eat less meat, stop driving the car and don’t fly. Oddly enough no one makes the same call for people in their role as workers – are we to consume less we also need to produce less, shouldn’t we? No calls are made for companies to produce less or countries to shrink their economies.”
Can young people turn off complacency about climate change? This article argues, citing Greta Thunberg, that they can.
“Young people have no tolerance for complacency: they have never known a time when climate change was not a threat. For them, it is about the ‘here and now’ and talking ‘solutions not science.’ Being the most digitally connected generation yet, our youth have the capacity to channel that motivation into globally coordinated efforts. Seeing as they will soon become our future leaders, decision-makers and consumers, it would be absurd to exclude them from our climate communication initiatives.”
Greta Thunberg article and TED Talk
Greta Thunberg speaks in Austria – (10 mins.) World Summit – May 2019. “We are losing the battle – let’s start acting. Stop stealing our future and selling it for profit”
Greta Thunberg – “We live in a strange world”. She confronts celebrities at a Gala performance and asks for their help. “There is still time to fix this”.
Community Action for Spaceship Earth 