Dominic Green Dominic Green

The apotheosis of St. Greta

‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words’ is perhaps the whitest thing anyone has ever said at the UN. What is the correct answer? Is it (a) Go to your room? Or is it (b) Forgive me, to make it up you, Daddy and I are going to set the entire course of human civilisation on a new track?

The correct answer — if you want to see your name in the Times or get a slot on CNN, and if you want to avoid getting mobbed by climate cultists — is of course, to apologise, mortify the flesh, shove tofu plugs into your every orifice, hail Greta Thunberg as the most radical and relevant UN debutante since Yasser Arafat, and then praise the pigtailed prophet of planetary paranoia for ‘staring down’ the dark emperor of pollution, Donald Trump.

The emissions you can smell aren’t carbon, but methane. If you watch the footage, Greta leans forward excitedly at Trump’s approach. It’s almost as if she’s expecting he’ll do the same as every other leader, and seek her blessing, like the MPs who declared a ‘climate emergency’ for her, or Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelected president of the EU, who made a show of kissing her hand when she came to pour brimstone on Brussels. But Trump keeps going, completely oblivious, and obviously with more important things to do than to kiss her ring.

How can you stare down someone who doesn’t even know you’re there? Magical powers. The acclamation of Greta Thunberg is as profoundly irrational as the millenarian cult of purgation and redemption that she advocates — puritan in its authoritarian demands, lascivious in its sensitivity to pain. The intrusion of this kind of sub-religious foolishness into politics is always a bad sign. It shows that we are in an environmental crisis, and that the world is coming to an end.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in