Greta Thunberg May Be Green — How Green is Her Thinking?
As I’m sure all readers will know, environmental activist Greta Thunberg is currently sailing across the Atlantic to attend a United Nations Summit on climate change, in order to avoid having to fly. Very committed and intended to impress, but is it just a publicity stunt? More importantly, how green is this gesture?
I came across an interesting article on the British Guido Fawkes website Greta’s High Seas Hypocrisy¹. The title seemed intriguing, so I read it. The article claims that “her trip is not nearly as environmental as she first made out”, and two pieces of information were offered in support.
Firstly, “the €4 million yacht she’s sailing on is made of carbon fibre — a material with a carbon footprint 14 times higher than that of steel, and that ‘spews out a significant amount of greenhouse gases’ during its manufacturing”. Following up on the source for that information², it continued “On the other hand, carbon fiber doesn’t corrode, degrade, rust or fatigue. That means it has a much longer lifecycle, so it potentially only has to be produced once where a steel part would have to be replaced multiple times. That makes its full lifecycle impact look a lot better”. The original article perhaps doesn’t give the full picture therefore, although it could be argued that the urgency of the climate change problem means that such considerations are irrelevant, given the timescale involved.
The second detail was more eye-catching. “It transpires that the five people bringing the boat back from NYC will first fly over to the States, meaning in total Greta’s PR trip will end up creating six times the emissions it would have done if she’d just flown over to begin with”. The source for this was merely a tweet³, but it was from Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank, so presumably the information is reliable.
So even if she is being sincere in her aims, she obviously needs to think more clearly. Behaving greenly isn’t that easy. Perhaps she could have stayed at home; has no-one heard of video-conferencing or Skype?
Footnotes:
1. https://order-order.com/2019/08/16/gretas-titanic-hypocrisy/
2. https://recyclenation.com/2015/10/is-carbon-fiber-better-for-environment-than-steel/
3. https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1162311408144531457?s=20
