Many breathed a sigh of relief when Greta Thunberg announced she was not going to attend COP 27 Climate Change meeting which is now underway at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. The COP process is a ‘greenwashing scam’, she explained.

It seemed that the girl, although not even having reached the age of 20, had already emerged from the catharsis of teenage simplistic idealism. Was she having doubts about promoting a goal of dubious worth at a cost that is unknown but without a scientific breakthrough is incalculably high? Seemingly so, and that corroborated the notion that at a coming of age (historically at 21), she reached a maturity society expects of each emerging generation to take balanced judgments sufficient enough to have voting rights.

Alas, this proved to be too sanguine as Greta’s true position emerged.

First, she announced that her foundation was to finance several like-minded people to attend the jamboree in Egypt, an act which rather undermines her declaration about the worth of the meeting.

Secondly, she released her new book which is a compendium of about a hundred of the world’s most radical left-wing writers. In announcing the book, she declared ‘normal’ was already a crisis and continued:

‘What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and genocide by the so-called global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.’

Her stated goal is to overthrow ‘the whole capitalist system’, which she says is responsible for ‘imperialism, oppression, genocide and racist, oppressive extractionism’. There is no likelihood that she is hitting the hammer on the nail by using oppressive extractionism to describe the use of African child labour to mine for cobalt and other materials vital for the ‘energy transition’ to renewables.

She is ranting against the system which, while creating many billionaires, has trebled the average living standards across the globe since 1950. And, far from being a north-south divide, we see those countries formerly defined as being the heartland of the oppressed, colonised, and exploited ‘South’ – India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China – growing much faster than the countries defined as the ‘North’. Indeed, former ‘South’ countries: Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea (not to mention Middle East oil states) now have living standards at least comparable to those for the majority of countries defined as being ‘North’.

Greta Thunberg is deluded by apocalyptic preachings and canalized via an extreme form of climate alarmism into a revolutionary whose ideology seeks to the overthrow of the system of governance and the global economic principles without which we would live in severe discomfort if not abject poverty. But many see insights and a forward program in her statements while irrational climate fear is prevalent among western nations’ youth.

20th century mass movement for Peace and Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament, like the modern green movement, included many malcontents seeking radical transformations of the economy. They too were fueled by slogans like Net Zero! Stop Coal! Solar not Nuclear! – slogans that were unaccompanied by realistic plan to accomplish the stated goals in a way that is in any sense affordable. For Australia to achieve Net Zero for electricity alone, in addition to the outlays for wind/solar and the quadrupling of transmission costs, would require 25 Snowy 2.0’s. That’s the equivalent in terms of battery costs of three times today’s annual Gross Domestic Product; this is for a system that would be immeasurably less reliable than the one we are being urged to discard.

However, aside from revolutionary communism, 20th century mass movements did not have leadership cadres including billionaires like George Soros, the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, and perhaps the UN’s Secretary General Antonio Guterres as well as Greta Thunberg, who openly promote replacing the system that has underpinned the present period of unprecedented global affluence.

Although the Climate Change movement, with its green energy solution, has similarities to the revolutionary ideals of socialism in seeking to replace the market system, it has some fundamental differences. The socialism of yesteryear was designed to replace what was deemed to be an anarchic system of production said to be accompanied by great waste because it depended upon private property and a market system that failed to orchestrate the disparate views of individuals and the different production potentialities.

20th century socialism was envisaged and sold as a means of making those states adopting it richer and more egalitarian. Yesteryear’s promoters of revolutionary communism and socialism, once in power, spectacularly failed to achieve these goals in the 20th century and, in attempting to avoid the failures, brought unprecedented curtailment of individual liberties.

Woke greens seek to use those same mechanisms of socialism, not to grow economies but to achieve other, less materialistic, targets. Adopting central planning and regulatory measures is a proven route to making us all poorer – and this is a goal of the more radical elements within the Net Zero movement and one that is regarded, at least in principle, as acceptable collateral damage by the movement at large.

At least by the standards and goals of the green leadership, greening of energy systems would not be considered a policy failure if it is accompanied by a marked reduction in living standards. This is unlikely to be the view of those who unthinkingly are attracted to their broad goals. Many of the supporters of forcing the replacement of coal and gas by wind/solar, attracted to superficialities, like the sun-and-wind-are-free, accept claims that renewable power is cheaper than that from fossil fuels.

Experience proves otherwise…