Guest post by Davos David Middleton
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took time Thursday to advise Swedish climate worrier Greta Thunberg to attend college and study economics before telling others how to manage the planet’s resources.
The topic came up in Davos at the World Economic Forum (WEF) when Mnuchin was approached for comment about the 17-year-old’s warning that the world’s largest economy needed to completely and immediately divest from fossil fuels, AFP reports.
“Does Greta Thunberg’s call for an end to fossil fuel investment threaten U.S. economic growth?” a member of the press asked.
“Is she the chief economist or who is she? I’m confused,” Mnuchin said, before adding this was clearly “a joke. That was funny.”
“After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us,” was Mnuchin’s succinct summation as he elaborated further.
[…]
The Trump administration and Greta Thunberg have crossed ideological paths before at Davos.
In a speech on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump castigated the “prophets of doom” and those that predicted a climate “apocalypse”, while Thunberg sat silently in the audience.
[…]
Thunberg left school in Sweden aged 16 to travel the world and deliver her message of impending climate catastrophe
Breitbart News
Greta… Go to college, study resource economics and watch National Lampoon’s Animal House…
Well. Mr. Mnuchin’s claim is that Greta Thunberg doesn’t understand economic theory. This seems like a reasonable accusation, and Greta hasn’t tried to refute it. Her response was essentially, nyah, nyah, I don’t care. When you’re seventeen, that is a reasonable counterargument.
Let us say for the purposes of argument that carbon dioxide emissions really are a negative externality. (Personally I flinch from conceding even that much, but let’s do it anyway.) The positive internalities (if that is a real term) of the production, sale and consumption of fossil fuels are millions of times more valuable.
My dad was born and raised in rural Saskatchewan in 1919. He lived in a house with no electricity or running water. Heat came from a wood-burning stove. Draft horses were used to work the family farm. By 1954 he lived in a house with electricity, modern plumbing and a coal furnace, and he owned a Chevy Belair. His life had been completely transformed for the better to a degree that is now impossible for any living Canadian.; improvements in our standard of living can now only be marginal. If you were to tell my dad, when he was in mid-thirties, that he had been living in an economic Eden (with a perfect climate) when he was a boy he would have been speechless at your stupidity.
Greta? … Study economics?!
More like study engineering. Study the scientific method. Study the history of civilization.
In short, get a grip on reality.
You don’t need a degree (economics or enginnerring) to work out the world can’t live without fossil fuel just go a farm or see a freight operation. The corrct response to Greta is tell her to tell her parents to live without any fossil fuel and its use in any way. We never fro m her ever again. Because pointing t he fact that her parents are total hyprocrites will knock her mouth off or she will have screaming matches with her parents – good chance of a split then Greta phenomen will disaappear given it is driven her parents and their funders.
How can we miss Greta if she won’t go away?
It is truly a dystopian world when it hangs onto every word of a child afflicted by mental illness and elevates her to figure like Joan of Arc. This is a person who, when 8 years old, was struck by anxiety about climate change. She stopped talking and eating and lost ten kilograms in two months and urged her parents to give up meat and flying to “save the world”. They resisted, but she accused them of “stealing her future”. Eventually, her parents gave up meat and flying to, as they put it, “save Greta rather than save the world”. Her mother had to sacrifice her career as an international opera singer in order to humour Greta.
There is a guy by the name of Rex Nutting of MarketWatch, who has come out swinging in defence of Greta in an article titled “Who knows more about economics: Steven Mnuchin or Greta Thunberg?”
Excerpts from the article”
“Mnuchin and his ilk are betting everything that we’ll survive climate change without breaking a sweat
A guy who still insists that the 2017 tax cut “will pay for itself” should not be lecturing anyone about economics, but there’s something about being in Davos that brings out the arrogance in people who think money and power confer wisdom.
…I suppose that if Mnuchin were answering the 911 phones, he’d demand an advanced degree in chemistry from anyone reporting a fire.
….Greta Thunberg may not have a Ph.D., or a job on Wall Street waiting for her, but she does have common sense: “I’m here to tell you that, unlike you, my generation will not give up without a fight.””
One flaw in his argument – The evidence of a fire is clear, the consequences immediate, and the remedy clearcut. The evidence for catastrophic climate change is neither clear nor immediate and the remedy suggested by Greta and her ilk quixotic and catastrophic.
Then where does Greta get her “common sense” from? Her anxiety disorder?