Greta thunberg

Friday

Cockburn

Who REALLY blew up the Nord Stream pipelines?

From our US edition

Four days have passed since the Nord Stream pipelines mysteriously ruptured in the Baltic Sea, just outside of NATO territory. Sabotage is suspected. Many in the West blame Vladimir Putin; others, such as Tucker Carlson, Radek Sikorski and, er, Vladimir Putin, blame America. But to truly solve this mystery, Cockburn thinks circumstances require us to cast the net a little wider. Here are some potential saboteurs deserving of further scrutiny. Greta Thunberg How dare we! The gray Swedish doom-gremlin has dedicated much of the last years to warning us of the looming Armageddon, traipsing from the UN to Davos to COP26. Is it farfetched to suggest that Thunberg might take dramatic steps to ensure her cause is the only option on the table?

nord stream

Monday

Rikki Schlott

Young people should see climate change as a challenge

From our US edition

I’ve been fed two competing storylines for as long as I can remember. On one side, the world I’ve inherited is a tinderbox just waiting to erupt in flames. If I’m not the one engulfed, then surely my children or my grandchildren will be. And on the other side... crickets. The conversation around climate change has no spectrum. It’s just a bimodal screaming match luring young people into either skipping along into the sunset in blissful ignorance or slowly sliding into the fiery pits of hell in nihilistic resignation. Through young eyes, the dominant message from the right amounts to: your ecological inheritance is diddly-squat to us.

climate change

Saturday

Peter Wood

Our present bewilderment

From our US edition

Bewilderment, a novel by Richard Powers issued last September, has been praised to high heavens by Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Naomi Klein, and reviewers at NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Republic, among others. This ought to be enough to warn any sensible reader to stay far away from its pages and to resign promptly from any reading group that nominates it for collective perusal. But I am not always sensible. The title lured me, for what better word to describe our Zeitgeist?

bewilderment

Monday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Energy is the most important issue in the world

From our US edition

One issue more than any other will dominate airtime and influence policy in 2022: energy. Americans are seeing the highest prices at the pump in seven years. Since Biden took office, average gas prices are up by more than $1 a gallon. In November, gas prices in Mono County, California hit more than $6 per gallon, forcing some residents to drive to Nevada (where gas taxes are lower) to buy fuel. The price of natural gas in the US is at its highest in seven years, and up more than 180 percent in the last year alone. In Europe, the situation is even worse. Europe’s gas reserves are at record lows. In Germany, which already had the EU’s highest energy prices, bills are up 30 percent in a year.

energy

Thursday

Bill Wirtz

Greta Thunberg didn’t win the German elections

From our US edition

Greta Thunberg is back in business. Previously slowed down by European pandemic restrictions, the Fridays For Future movement has now hit the streets, starting in Berlin. 'We must not give up, there is no going back now,' Thunberg told thousands of local protesters. The appeals and influence of her movement have translated, at least somewhat, into a stronger climate-focused youth vote in last month's German elections. The Green party has made significant advances in Parliament, becoming one of the kingmakers in upcoming coalition talks. Yet Germany’s environmentalists aren’t the only ones who outperformed their previous results. The liberal-democrat FDP scored 23 percent of Germany’s first-time voters, the same amount as the Greens.

greta

Saturday

John Ferry

Does Nicola Sturgeon care more about oil revenue or climate change?

'Now, as I've hopefully made clear throughout all of my remarks, the North Sea will continue to produce oil for decades to come. It still contains up to 20 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. Our primary aim – and I want to underline and emphasis this – our primary aim is to maximise economic recovery of those reserves.' The words are from a speech made in June 2017, a few months after the Paris Agreement that aimed to limit climate change came into effect. A speech by a pro-oil Conservative, or perhaps the head of an industry group working on behalf of the oil sector? No. They are, in fact, the words of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaking at the Oil and Gas UK Conference that year.

Friday

Ross Clark

Greta Thunberg is right

I am not usually on the same page as Greta Thunberg but she is absolutely right when she accuses the UK of lying about cutting its carbon emissions by 44 per cent since 1990. I have heard ministers repeatedly make this claim on radio and television while hardly ever being challenged on it — so I am thankful that Thurnberg has done what others have failed to do. The government’s 44 per cent claim is based on its official figures for territorial emissions — i.e. those physically spewed out within the UK. It excludes emissions from international shipping, aviation, the manufacture of goods elsewhere in the world for the benefit of UK consumers and the burning of biomass in UK power stations.

Monday

Ross Clark

Is climate change to blame for Germany’s flooding?

Greta Thunberg has declared the floods in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands to be the product of man-made climate change, adding ‘We’re at the very beginning of a climate and ecological emergency, and extreme weather events will only become more and more frequent.’ Well, that’s sorted out that one, then. We hardly need Angela Merkel or the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, to confirm it for us. Nor, indeed, do we need to hear from Michael Mann – aka Mr Hockey Stick – to tell us that the floods are the living embodiment of what climate scientists have been warning us about for decades.

Thursday

Andrew Willshire

Greta Thunberg doesn’t like you

Dorian Lynskey recently wrote a piece celebrating Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday entitled 'Bob Dylan doesn’t like you'. The article highlighted the disdain Dylan has for fans, critics, journalists, and even the Nobel Prize Committee. Feted as the voice of a generation, and often acting like it, he still has nothing but scorn for those who acclaim him as such. Another 'voice of a generation', some three generations removed, Greta Thunberg has been acclaimed by many politicians for her climate activism. But there is little sign that Thunberg has anything but scorn for them in return. It would be fair to say to most world leaders 'Greta Thunberg doesn’t like you'.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Unhappy blend of melodrama and allegory: Southwark Playhouse’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice reviewed

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a musical fantasy set in a Nordic town near the Arctic circle. Johan is a magician whose healing powers have won him the respect of his neighbours. But his rebellious daughter, Eva, has been expelled from school for scrawling ‘down with the patriarchy’ on a mirror. She’s also suspected of trying to sabotage a local factory that refines energy from the Northern Lights. The wicked factory owner, Fabian, is an emotional cripple who lives with his sick mother and rejects claims that the aurora is fading because too much energy has been extracted from it. If he continues to run the factory at full tilt, he may harm the atmosphere and destroy the town.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Skates on the edge of parody: The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form reviewed

Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg. Followed by a hugely unconvincing stab at tuneless industrial metal on a song called ‘People’, in which the aforementioned — me and you, not them, of course — are cautioned to ‘WAKE UP!!’ Leafy Wilmslow’s middle-class skag-head prophet, Matty Healy, is back, then, with a series of injunctions for us all, spread over interminable length and always skating on the very edge of parody. The 1975 are probably Britain’s biggest ‘rock’ band — those quote marks are needed — and this vast slab of pretentious, gullible, vacuous commendations to us all went straight in at number one.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why schools should stay shut

Has the stock of any politician fallen more sharply, these past three or four years, than that of Shami Chakrabarti? As the leader of Liberty, and an almost weekly performer on the BBC’s Question Time, she was a respected purveyor of leftish sanctimony to the masses, a humourless voice of conscience and, I think, self-regard. The battles she fought then were at least, in the main, on the side of decency — and while we might have found her a little trying and even bumptious, there seemed no doubt that here was a young woman motivated by principle. That notion was swiftly expunged when she accepted a brief from Jeremy Corbyn to whitewash anti-Semitism in the Labour party via an ‘independent inquiry’ headed by herself.

Thursday

Matilda Olofsson

Why I support Greta Thunberg in her fight against COVID-19

From our US edition

My name is Matilda Olofsson and I am Greta Thunberg’s arch-nemesis. For every positive action her climate activism encourages, I have taken it upon myself to cause an equally negative reaction. For example, when Greta challenged world leaders to address the issue of reducing carbon emissions with her famous ‘HOW DARE YOU?’ speech, I marched straight down to my local park and chastised a bunch of kids for riding around on push bikes when limousines exist. So naturally, when I heard of Greta's inclusion on a CNN coronavirus 'facts and fears' panel I was livid.

greta

Wednesday

Cockburn

Does Greta Thunberg have the answer to COVID-19?

From our US edition

COVID-19 is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma and hidden within a Chinese wet market, or possibly a CCP laboratory. World leaders are baffled by how to respond. The science keeps contradicting itself. The world’s greatest mathematicians can’t keep up with the ever-changing data sets. Who can the poor and frightened public turn to for help? Never fear, Greta’s here. That’s right. Little Miss Thunberg, a 17-year-old Swedish girl who dropped out of high school to sound the climate change alarm, is turning her mega-brain towards COVID-19, just when we need her most. On Thursday evening, CNN will host a live town hall called ‘Coronavirus: Facts and Fears’, featuring former acting CDC director Richard Besser, former HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Miss Thunberg.

Greta Thunberg

Saturday

Rod Liddle

What a relief to no longer have to pretend to be sociable

Hulking fat chavs pushing shopping trolleys full of lavatory paper back to their Nissan Micras. I can’t think of a better image to sum up the coronavirus crisis right now. I saw a bunch of them outside my local branch of Morrisons on Sunday morning, their expressions uniformly defiant and smug. One family had at least ten multipacks in their trolley — and nothing else. Surely one cannot live on toilet tissue alone, no matter how agreeably scented it might be? I assumed they were part of the panic-buying crowd, although having seen the size of their arses it may well be that this was simply their requisite amount for a single day of copious wiping. I had driven to the supermarket in time for its opening, at 10 a.m. All I needed were a few breakfast rolls and some cigarettes.

Tuesday

Digby Dent

The evolution of Vermont

From our US edition

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Putney, Vermont Ahoy, polloi. While I am a fan of the Reformation, I take a circumspect view of change. This old salt has a soft spot for tradition, yes, but he was taught from an early age that the vagaries of life are best met by suppressing doubt and feeling with industriousness and booze. Mostly booze. Mine not to reason why. Nevertheless, I persisted. Things change, of course. For instance, I’ve taken up residence in Vermont for a few weeks with a gal pal I dated between wife number two and wife number three (who is also wife number one, but that’s a story for another time).

vermont

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Trump, Greta and the Profits of Doom

From our US edition

There’s money in misery, so the world’s corporate elite welcomes eco-catastrophist Greta Thunberg to its cult center at Davos. There’s also money in optimism, the fuel of markets and speculation — but Davos doesn’t like Donald Trump. Strange that a legendary capitalist turned deregulating politician is the odd man out on the magic mountain of money, but a socialist child who calls for overriding democracy and the forced transformation of national economies is a spiritual figurehead for the masters of moolah.The smart money at Davos is on Greta, because the risks are lower in the command economy that Greta and her drones want. The outcomes are pre-ordained, and all innovation is fixed between business and government.

greta thunberg davos

Monday

Steerpike

Did Greta do a Corbyn?

Has Greta Thunberg been caught out repeating the same trick as Jeremy Corbyn? Thunberg tweeted an image of herself sitting on the floor of what she described as an 'overcrowded' train on her way back to Sweden: https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1205969006982815751?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw However, the tweet quickly sparked controversy with German train operator Deutsche Bahn appearing to derail Greta's suggestion that she had been forced to sit on the floor, claiming she had a 'seat in first class': Greta quickly hit back, claiming that 'overcrowded trains' are a 'great sign': https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1206203503363985408?

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

The NRA’s next spokesperson should be a teenager

From our US edition

I find most personal attacks on teen Swedish climate activist and newly minted TIME Person of the Year Greta Thunberg to be boorish, tactless and unnecessary. Even more so when the leader of the free world is up in early hours of the morning tweeting about her simply out of what appears to be press envy. President Trump’s weird obsession with TIME magazine transcends decades, so his latest jab at Thunberg is unsurprising. What’s even less surprising is the media reaction to the president’s tweet instructing Greta to ‘chill out’.

NRA
greta thunberg
Ben Sixsmith

Greta Thunberg is Donald Trump’s mirror image

From our US edition

The TIME magazine ‘Person of the Year’ award is in essence an excuse to have a big old argument. Every year, TIME recognizes an individual who has earned a great deal of attention, in an attempt to attract some of the excess to their publication. In winning ‘Person of the Year’, then, Greta Thunberg sits alongside not just Gandhi, Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II but a rogues’ gallery that runs from Putin and George W. Bush to Hitler and Stalin. If they are going to have this dumb, opportunistic award, then, it makes sense to give it to Thunberg. Who has been at the heart of more controversy? Don't say Donald Trump. Hardly anyone is interested enough to even try understand the impeachment scandal outside the US. The Hong Kong protesters?