There’s something revolting about young eco-truants

I mostly felt sorry for the young eco-truants who wagged school to take to the streets and demand action on ­climate change.

Children protest at Sydney’s Martin Place last month. Picture: AFP

I mostly felt sorry for the kids who wagged school to take to the streets and demand action on ­climate change.

There they were, fantasising about being rebels, basking in the glow of cringe-inducing praise from oldies at the ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald.

This was a youth revolt, we were told. People gushed about it being a rebellion, a new generation taking on The System. We were witnessing a “youthful call to arms”, as an excitable scribe at The Sydney Morning Herald said. One nine-year-old attendee got the 30-somethings of the twitterati all excited by waving a placard that said: “Beware — radical student activist.” These kids must have gone home at the end of their exhausting day of virtuous truancy thinking they were a mix of the French revolters of 1968 and those brave souls who stood in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Poor buggers. The truth — which they may discover one day when they’re older and wiser — is that there was nothing remotely rebellious about their eco-truancy.

On the contrary, these kids are miniature foot soldiers of the status quo, cheerleaders for what is surely the stiffest, most deathly orthodoxy of our time: that mankind is a pesky plague on the planet and something must be done to rein him in.

That isn’t a revolting viewpoint — it is a conformist one. It is the key bourgeois ideology of the early 21st century. It is cleaved to by politicians of all persuasions, pro­moted with religious-like zeal by every global institution, and pumped into kids’ brains via an education system that spends more time panicking the next generation about global warming than it does introducing them to the wonders of Shakespeare.

Rebels? Please. Being a noisy, self-satisfied eco-warrior is the squarest thing you can be these days. These kids are the militant wing of establishment thinking.

If these children had been taught some critical thinking — rather than so much eco-orthodoxy — they might have spotted some clues to the non-revolting nature of their school strike.

There’s the aforementioned media praise. I’m sorry, but when the decidedly non-edgy ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald are lavishing you with love, that’s a pretty good sign you are firmly in the middle of the road.

“I’ve never felt prouder,” a columnist for The Guardian said about the coal-phobic truants.

That’s another clue. The Guardian has spent the past two years in a state of boilerplate panic about real political revolts — Brexit, the French riots over eco-friendly fuel taxes — yet now it cries tears of pride at the sight of a few thousand kids calling for the Adani coalmine to be halted.

That’s because this was a safe and morally obedient demonstration. It posed no challenge whatsoever to the orthodoxies of our age — it echoed them.

Indeed, the tone deafness of this march of self-righteous children and their cheerleaders in the media establishment can be seen when we consider what is happening in France right now.

In Paris and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in the most heated demonstrations since 1968, to protest against climate-change policy — in this case, the raising of fuel taxes in the name of lessening pollution and “saving the planet”.

It is testament to the aloofness of the eco world view that it never thinks about the consequences of its diktats, its demands that we all live meeker, plainer, less fossil-­fuelled lives.

So French President Emmanuel Macron raises fuel taxes and doesn’t give a second thought to the impact this will have on the pockets of people who rely on their vehicles for their livelihoods.

And Aussie greens cavalierly insist that a new coalmine shouldn’t be built without seeming to care what that would mean for people who need jobs and people who need coal.

If we take the largest and most important revolt in the world right now — the French one — it is pretty clear that our own eco-truants and their establishment cham­pions would be on the side of The Man (Macron) rather than The People.

But there was a bigger problem with the school strike than the fact its attendees suffered from ­delusions of rebellion.

The demo also spoke to one of the most insidious things about the ideology of environmentalism: the way it stokes up generational conflict.

The fact the green lobby so often pushes children to the forefront of its propaganda is revealing. It confirms that this is a quite morally infantile movement. Children are more naive, more lacking in experience and more ­instinctively self-righteous than most adults — so it is striking that greens view them as the ideal mouthpieces for green ideology.

It’s because environmentalism is itself all of those things: it is a naive world view; it discounts ordinary people’s needs to the lofty end of “saving the planet”; it is riddled with virtue signalling.

From going vegan and sticking a solar panel on your roof to making a great display of sorting your rubbish on a weekly basis — the closest thing we have to a religious ritual in this irreligious age — much of environmentalism seems to be about saying “I am a good person” rather than about addressing the pollution problems that still exist.

And who better to front such a simplistic, showy ideology than that section of humanity that tends to be the most simplistic and showy — kids?

Worse, the message greens keep sending kids is that older ­people, people such as your parents, have royally screwed up the planet and it is down to you to save it. This makes some youths hostile to the people who made their comfortable, free, open lives possible in the first place: their parents; the old industrial workforce that created our modern nations; the explorers and discoverers who conquered nature on our behalf; the inventors of machines that allowed us to exploit nature’s resources for the benefit of mankind.

Young people are incited to fear and loathe these people who took risks and made sacrifices to create this world in which fewer people go hungry and life expectancy is rising, and where in countries such as Australia people enjoy the kind of lives earlier generations couldn’t have imagined. I hate to say it, but to sneer at older generations makes you an ungrateful brat. But it isn’t the eco-brats’ fault.

The problem here is the out-of-touch, anti-progress chattering classes who use children as moral battering rams against the further development of society and the economy. Shame on these overgrown infants.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked and author of Anti-Woke, a selection of essays published by Connor Court.