Poor, exploited Greta

If you didn’t laugh you’d cry, as they say, and few things capture that sentiment better than the look-at-me antics of climate-change crusaders. Fighting for a clean, green world in a polar bear suit? Go ahead, enjoy a snigger and try not to think about the years of school-approved brainwashing that produced what can sometimes seem an entire generation of arrogant dolts.

Sometimes, though, it’s impossible to be neither amused nor appalled but merely disgusted by the manipulative cynicism of those so ready and eager to exploit the frailties of others. The feted and much troubled teen green guru Greta Thunberg, for instance, who spawned the kiddie climate marches, has announced via the tweet reproduced above that she will be joining the UN’s upcoming carnival of climateers in New York. Rather than ride a carbon-spewing jetliner, she and her camera crew will be tapping clean, wholesome renewable wind as an example to the world of no-carbon travel techniques.

It isn’t often reported, but young Greta suffers from an unfortunate list of quite severe mental ailments, as Paulina Neuding explained via Quillette:

Greta is eleven years old and has gone two months without eating. Her heart rate and blood pressure show clear signs of starvation. She has stopped speaking to anyone but her parents and younger sister, Beata.

After years of depression, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks, she finally receives a medical diagnosis: Asperger’s syndrome, high-functioning autism, and OCD. She also suffers from selective mutism—which explains why she sometimes can’t speak to anyone outside her closest family. When she wants to tell a climate researcher that she plans a school strike on behalf of the environment, she speaks through her father.

Given their ostentatious concern for the planet’s good health, you might think the green urgers would display a similar concern for the welfare of a very fragile child. But no, none of that. Instead, the people behind the Malizia II, an IMOCA class racing yacht, will be tapping her fame to promote their boat and its various sponsors.

And here’s the genuinely sick aspect of this latest catastropharian freak show: the yacht on which Greta will cross the Atlantic is a floating testament to the use and utility of oil and its byproducts. Packed with electronics and braced with Kevlar (poly-para-phenylene terephthalamide), it is driven by sails that owe nothing to natural fibres. For those interested, serious yachties discuss the merits of the construction method here.

And then there is the carbon fibre which gives the hull the strength to sit up on its hydroplanes and scorch the ocean at 40kph and more. As Mark Harris observed in The Guardian:

… To become the strong, light composite material industries love, carbon fibre is combined with a plastic polymer resin. But the manufacturing process, in which sheets of composite material are often laid up by hand, is wasteful.

By the time they’ve been trimmed to size, almost a third of these carbon fibre sheets end up on factory floors, according to recycling company ELG Carbon Fibre. Where the material does make it into products, most of it will ultimately end up in landfill, the firm says …

According to the green-brained, the environmental peril of carbon-fibre construction is so pronounced severe restrictions on its use must be introduced as a matter of global urgency.

Poor Greta. A sad kid being paraded for the cameras by the absolutely shameless.

— roger franklin