“We have lost two years.” With this phrase, Greta Thunberg is a candidate for a transformation from a magic wand: from princess of alarmism to queen of optimism. Anyone of us, in fact, would sign because the still image of which we are prisoners as in a spell (still in the fairy tale area we are, but black black fairy tale) was only twenty-four months old. Instead, economic analysts warn us that due to the pandemic the calendar of our GDP – that of Italy, but it is not that they are so much better in the rest of the world – will go back a couple of decades. Twenty years wasted. Other than two, dear Miss Thunberg.
Okay, we deliberately messed around, but we’ll explain why and how soon. Professional duty requires us to clarify that Miss Thunberg had in mind her house specialties in expressing her frustration to the Guardian at the poor successes achieved two years after her first strike in defense of the climate, and Covid was only in the background: «In the last two years – he said – the world has also emitted over 80 billion tons of CO2. We have witnessed continuous natural disasters all over the world. Many lives and livelihoods have been lost, and this is just the beginning. ‘ Here she is again, the little millennialist that we admire a little and that saddens us a little, that a little bit is right and a little annoys us. Only now, dear Greta, excuse us but we have something else on our mind.
We have a virus that has passed like a typhoon over our lives, which has destroyed the lives of many of us making us lose affections, jobs, months of turnover, maybe years if the overlocking of closures, reopenings, re-closings that throws continue. a shadow of uncertainty about any activity anyone of us wants to undertake, from going to the bar to opening a bar. And when that happens – and it happens once every two or three generations – then priorities change. And climate change remains an absolute emergency but it scares us a little less. Because if one wants to quit smoking but then ends up in the hospital because he is run over by a train and not because of a lung tumor, he thinks first about getting well and then about cigarettes. It is also a question of fatalism, a feeling perhaps not too constructive but human, too human.
So Miss Thunberg, don’t tell us, as you did yesterday, that “the G20 government bailout packages are providing significantly more support for fossil fuels than low carbon energy.” And maybe yes, the restart could be “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put the world on the right track”. But we need to walk, not sermons. It is an existential issue, not a toxic whim. Because happy degrowth has many fans, but unhappy degrowth can’t have even one.
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