What must it be like to be Greta Thunberg? To be, at 19 years of age, the most recognised climate crisis campaigner in the world, shouldering the burden of averting – or at this late stage, merely softening – the biggest calamity humanity has ever faced? What can that possibly feel like?
At the end of Amol Rajan Interviews Greta Thunberg (BBC Two), the conversation becomes more personal and we get a few answers: how Thunberg doesn’t enjoy being stopped in the street and certainly doesn’t appreciate threats to her family; how she despairs at being told her presence reassures people about the future of the planet, because it implies they are outsourcing their individual responsibility to her.
But a fundamental insight into Thunberg’s existence has already been provided by the previous half-hour of questions about her advocacy of “annual, drastic, immediate emissions cuts, on a scale unlike anything the world has ever seen”. Thunberg has sacrificed her youth to tackle the climate emergency, having realised that it demands a radical reimagining of our whole way of life. Now she is doomed to the pure hell of arguing with people who cannot conceive of that way of life changing.
Rajan, who asserts in his introduction that Thunberg’s influence must be acknowledged “whether you admire her or despair of her”, spends large parts of the interview reflecting mainstream discourse on climate – which is to say, he risks sounding ignorant in order to give commonplace gotchas and canards an airing. The sport is in how efficiently Thunberg can knock down questions we should, by now, have moved beyond asking.
Early on, she is pressed for an opinion on nuclear power and shale gas. Aren’t they important components of a strategy to hit net zero by 2050, as per the Paris Agreement? Thunberg does say that the former is too slow and the latter is, er, a fossil fuel and thus not a cracking idea, but stresses that her concern is driving awareness of the extent of the problem, not getting bogged down in hot-button issues: arguments about which bucket of water to use will dissipate once people agree that the house is on fire. Unskewing our priorities is also the rejoinder to Rajan’s question, steeped in conservative attitudes towards which expenditures are inevitable and which must be interrogated, about how we would “pay for” free public transport, a key Thunberg objective, during a “cost of living crisis”.
Thunberg is presented with several versions of the same argument: we can’t do that, because it would cost money or be inconvenient in the short term. At a time when both main UK political parties have recently used the slogan “growth, growth, growth”, Thunberg’s contention that the endless pursuit of economic expansion might just be, you know, suicidal feels like listening to an intelligent alien who is beamed down to sort us out. Rajan’s question on the topic is remarkable: “Economic growth creates leisure time, it creates opportunities for new experiences – some of which will have a negative impact on the environment, but a lot of which people really enjoy. Flying is one of those … do you think flying should be illegal?”
More credibly, Rajan asks how Thunberg can call capitalism a failed ideology, when life expectancy and infant survival rates in China and India have risen as those countries have commercialised. Delicately, Thunberg observes that the collapse of life-support systems, wars for resources and other likely effects of out-of-control global warming might soon cause those graphs to slope back down.
It’s not all such a struggle. Thunberg often has a refreshingly unguarded response to daft statements: her reaction to Rajan sincerely intoning that “There is one individual looming over this debate – and that’s Elon Musk” is untrammelled giggling. And, in this extended format, Rajan has time to include more profound questions. An inquiry about whether the gap between what we’re doing and what we need to do is widening (yes) is valuable, as is a discussion about whether Thunberg ought not to encourage blanket cynicism towards politicians, and should consider going into politics herself.
She counters that although politicians will ultimately implement the required action, public opinion will be what compels them to act, and protest is an effective way of amplifying that consensus. The politicians themselves then become irrelevant, and we can “reconsider what is politically possible” – the payment of reparations to poorer countries deeply affected by a changing climate they have done little to cause, to take the example Rajan puts forward of a demand that is absurdly unrealistic, might well become feasible.
Her main point is that this needs to happen soon. We are desperately short of time, and Thunberg has given herself the task of communicating that urgency. As this programme shows, it is a terribly difficult job.
