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Scratching the Surface�

1) Speeches to the Public:
--This collection of 11 speeches between 2018-2019 may indeed be a helpful first step for those less political/on-the-fence in the Global North (thus, default liberals) to start engaging with the topics of climate crisis and an economic system dictated by money-power rather than social needs�
--However, speeches in written form are quite one-dimensional, and lack the detailed next steps for those already convinced.
--Only 3 of the speeches were originally directed at the public/activists (i.e. climate marches). The power of these speeches is actually less about the speaker/words, and more about the audience/environment; just being there, seeing others in your society not as merely working for wages or commuting or being spectators or privately socializing but actually as participants in politics, this can alter our imagination for social possibilities.
--I mean “politics� in the general sense of social decision-making. Of course, sophisticated dominance hierarchies want to simulate this while preventing actual participation, so they manufacture the narrow political theatre where puppet politicians bicker about divisive topics while the audience are rendered as divided-and-ruled spectators.
--Without being there to experience the stirrings of the audience and the conversations afterwards, the speeches themselves are repetitions of the same brief pitch. Greta’s writing levels up in the summary essays promoting the excellent 2022 compilation The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions.
--Side note: “e±ç³Ü¾±³Ù²ââ€� is used 7 times in this collection, whereas “equalityâ€� is absent. has a neat video episode on this shift: .

2) Speeches to Dominance Hierarchies:
--Now, most of these speeches were actually delivered to dominance hierarchies, i.e. World Economic Forum, various Parliaments, UN Climate Conference, etc.
--Here, the speeches alone are mostly performative. If we set aside the tendency which promotes sociopaths to the top of these dominance hierarchies, let’s say there are some enlightened elites that can be swayed on a moralistic/emotional level to prioritize addressing the climate crisis. What are the remaining barriers to change?
--To present concrete examples, we can consider:
i) Al Gore:
--As the former US Vice President to the Clinton establishment (infamous for NAFTA’s further power to global capital and repealing Glass-Steagall to further unleash Wall Street) with many political/financial ties, Gore has many strings he can pull.
--However, despite his successes in popularizing An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, his direct solution is abysmal, literally trying to camouflage the colossal parasite that is the global financial markets with a “green� “sustainable� veneer. How is investing in Amazon/Google/Intel/Visa helping the environment? The most these financial innovations can do is privatize nature and gamble with it in a casino (i.e. speculation, valuing short-term pillaging rather than long-term social needs; nature's time is inherently long-term).
…This is like sticking peace symbols on bombs and then calling yourself a pacifist.
ii) Bill Gates:
--As a top-notch capitalist oligarch, I mean philanthropist, Gates is determined to treat the climate/ecological crises as “technical� issues that can be solved within global capitalism.
…Strange, because he is also trying to solve world hunger, even though global capitalism already has the technologies to overproduce food, dumping “surpluses� to keep prices profitable for colossal corporations (Big Agriculture: featuring Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bayer which owns Monsanto, etc.) while displacing and ensnaring Global South farmers in debt traps.
--But you cannot just give money to the poor so they can afford food. And you definitely cannot challenge the imperialist global arrangements that prevent economic sovereignty (The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions).
…Instead, you facilitate the takeover by corporations like MasterCard into the Global South to spread “financial inclusion� (which clearly isn’t “political�). Because clearly it takes the “financial innovations� of a foreign multinational corporation rather than local control via economic sovereignty! After all, it’s not a political/social power issue, it’s just a technical issue.
…To paraphrase Paul Volcker after the 2008 Financial Crisis:

The only useful thing banks have invented in the past 20 years is the ATM.

…Volcker unleashed his own economic terror on the Global South when he was chair of the Federal Reserve (the Volcker Shock, helping to derail Third World industrialization and leading to the Third World Debt Crisis), which is the point of this section: no matter how ingenious or “enlightened�, these individuals are situated in positions that leave them devoted to profoundly exploitative and irrational structures.
…So, while I do not fully agree with the framing of The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg, I have to agree that lecturing to the World Economic Forum is rather performative, and we need to level-up our class/power structure analyses (learning from history with a historical materialist lens) to identify our true allies (understanding their structural incentives/potentials/limitations) and build winning coalitions (seeking high leverage points and building bargaining power). I’ll review some books that detail this soon�