"How to deal with a "woke" teenager"

From Walrus

"After our daughter of fifteen years of age was moved to tears by the speech of Greta Thunberg at the UN the other day, she became angry with our generation “who had been doing nothing for thirty years.”

So, we decided to help her prevent what the girl on TV announced of “massive eradication and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.”

We are now committed to give our daughter a future again, by doing our part to help cool the planet four degrees.

From now on she will go to school on a bicycle, because driving her by car costs fuel, and fuel puts emissions into the atmosphere. Of course it will be winter soon and then she will want to go by bus, but cycling through the freezing builds resilience.

Of course, she is now asking for an electric bicycle, but we have shown her the devastation caused to the areas of the planet as a result of mining for the extraction of Lithium and other minerals used to make batteries for electric bicycles, so she will be pedaling, or walking.

Which will not harm her, or the planet. We used to cycle and walk to school too.

Since the girl on TV demanded “we need to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels” and our daughter agreed with her, we have disconnected the heat vent in her room. The temperature is now dropping to twelve degrees in the evening, and will drop below freezing in the winter, we have promised to buy her an extra sweater, hat, tights, gloves and a blanket.

For the same reason we have decided that from now on she only takes a cold shower. She will wash her clothes by hand, with a wooden washboard, because the washing machine is simply a power consumer and since the dryer uses natural gas, she will hang her clothes on the clothes line to dry, just like my parents and grandparents used to do.

Speaking of clothes, the ones that she currently has are all synthetic, so made from petroleum. Therefore on Monday, we will bring all her designer clothing to the secondhand shop.

We have found an eco store where the only clothing they sell is made from undyed and unbleached linen and jute. Also can’t have clothes made on wool, because the emissions from farting sheep are supposedly causing bad weather.

It shouldn’t matter that it looks good on her, or that she is going to be laughed at, dressing in colorless, bland clothes and without a wireless bra, but that is the price she has to pay for the benefit of The Climate.

Cotton is out of the question, as it comes from distant lands and pesticides are used for it. Very bad for the environment.
We just saw on her Instagram that she’s pretty angry with us. This was not our intention.

From now on, at 7 p.m. we will turn off the WiFi and we will only switch it on again the next day after dinner for two hours. In this way we will save on electricity, so she is not bothered by electro-stress and will be totally isolated from the outside world. This way, she can concentrate solely on her homework. At eleven o’clock in the evening we will pull the breaker to shut the power off to her room, so she knows that dark is really dark. That will save a lot of CO2.

She will no longer be participating in winter sports to ski lodges and resorts, nor will she be going on anymore vacations with us, because our vacation destinations are practically inaccessible by bicycle.

Since our daughter fully agrees with the girl on TV that the CO2 emissions and footprints of her great-grandparents are to blame for ‘killing our planet’, what all this simply means, is that she also has to live like her great-grandparents and they never had a holiday, a car or even a bicycle.

We haven’t talked about the carbon footprint of food yet.

Zero CO2 footprint means no meat, no fish and no poultry, but also no meat substitutes that are based on soy (after all, that grows in farmers fields, that use machinery to harvest the beans, trucks to transport to the processing plants, where more energy is used, then trucked to the packaging/canning plants, and trucked once again to the stores) and also no imported food, because that has a negative ecological effect. And absolutely no chocolate from Africa, no coffee from South America and no tea from Asia.

Only homegrown potatoes, vegetables and fruit that have been grown in local cold soil, because greenhouses run on boilers, piped in CO2 and artificial light. Apparently, these things are also bad for The Climate. We will teach her how to grow her own food.

Bread is still possible, but butter, milk, cheese and yogurt, cottage cheese and cream come from cows and they emit CO2. No more margarine and no oils will be used for the frying pan, because that fat is palm oil from plantations in Borneo where rain forests first grew.

No ice cream in the summer. No soft drinks and no energy drinks, as the bubbles are CO2.

We will also ban all plastic, because it comes from chemical factories. Everything made of steel and aluminum must also be removed. Have you ever seen the amount of energy a blast furnace consumes or an aluminum smelter? All bad for the climate!

We will replace her memory foam pillow top mattress, with a jute bag filled with straw, with a horse hair pillow.

And finally, she will no longer be using makeup, soap, shampoo, cream, lotion, conditioner, toothpaste and medication. Facewashers will all be linen, that she can wash by hand, with her wooden washboard, just like her female ancestors did before climate change made her angry at us for destroying her future.

In this way we will help her to do her part to prevent mass extinction, water levels rising and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.

If she truly believes she wants to walk the talk of the girl on TV, she will gladly accept and happily embrace her new way of life."

Comments

[Jose]

Walrus, my two cents..just take away her iPhone..lol

16 degrees, today our high was 66 and were are dying down here.

[oldman22]

glad I am not your daughter

[JohninMK]

I enjoyed that, it made me smile. Thankfully my teenage children are now at the end of their 40s. Thank you.

[turcopolier]

oldman22

You have no idea how much. I like the commercial in which someone's round heeled daughter has left her bedroom window open so that her teen aged lover can climb in and screw her in her parents' house. Unfortunately the kid dropped his phone in the yard. The dog barked. Papa went out and found it and went to her room to return it to the kid. In my house that would have cost her a year of my support for college.

[walrus]

Disclaimer- this was written by Armstrong economics dot com, not be me.

[Fred]

Walrus,

You'll have to take potatoes off the menu; Ms Wokeness surely wouldn't want to culturally appropriate the staple crop of the indigenous peoples of South America.

[Rick Merlotti]

Great post, will share with Doom Prepper sister.

[Vegetius]

Just turn the 'cultural appropriation' back on her by suggesting that Africans give up refrigeration, anti-biotics, vaccines and the wheel.

Not only will this cause young brows to furrow, if implemented it would very quickly alleviate regional overpopulation.

[Curtis Fromke]

This might be of interest to your daughter. https://youtu.be/6o2CeLGqEzk

[pretzelattack]

are we not allowed to rebut the science denial on this blog? why is that?

[turcopolier]

pretzelattack

I will let you make your pitch so long as you are not disrespectful of the opinions of others. I warn you that charges of Ludditism against me or anyone else here will result in you being banned. The fact that people do not interpret the data as you do does not mean they are stupid. Keep that in mind. We are not students to be abused in some crackpot marxist's classroom.

[A.Pols]

"are we not allowed to rebut the science denial on this blog? why is that?"

Noticed he used the words "science denial". That kinda sorta sums up the position, doesn't it? That would suggest to me that he means to imply something more like "truth denial". But, I await, with bated breath, what he has to contribute in the way of rebuttal.

[plantman]

"We will replace her memory foam pillow top mattress, with a jute bag filled with straw, with a horse hair pillow."

OMG! I choked on my coffee when I read that!
Very funny.
Thanks

[John Minnerath]

The best piece I've seen on the fallacies of the climate change fanatics.

[Cortes]

Imagine the delight when she opens the handmade gifts from the family on Christmas Day!

[FND]

If I remember right, I think Walrus is in Australia where they use centigrade, not Fahrenheit, which is around 60F

[different clue]

Thank you for the disclaimer. I was just going to have said: "freezing? Where is this? Up in the Snowy Blue Mountains?"

[Serge]

Ah yes, a modern classic

[rho]

These climate kids are all little hypocrites. Luisa Neubauer, Green party climate activist and something like the German handler of Greta, had a public instagram page back when she started getting famous. The instagram profile is now scrubbed, but her initial omission earned her the nickname of "Long Distance Flight Luisa".

You can still find lots of compliations of her travel photos on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoB36JFN0WQ

[A.I.S.]

My favorite climate specific politics (unironically):

1: Minimize the number of wars. Pretty huge carbon/enviromental footprint of those and that is before someone blows up a chemical plant.

2: Eco restoration/local terraforming. Planting some damned forests can be done quite cheaply and it actually works. In particular, Russia should set a sizeable part of its not overly violent prison population to plant a lot of trees in the currently thawing permafrost parts (in return for lessened sentences assuming they werent sentenced to hard labor anyway). Seriously, what actually is bad about climate change is habitat destruction, and habitats can be recreated.

3: Renationalize public transportation, let public transportation be run be competent people who are paid according to how well the trains run. (Switzerland does that, best trainservice in Europe, fully state owned. Germany used to have good trains that it got privatized). I am aware that public transportation has a less good cost reward ration in the USA.

4: Make planned obsolenscence a criminal offense unless there are good non profit related reasons for it. (which can be the case in some situations)

5: Simply reduce our societal emphasis on profit, ideally back to the level it was in during the 50-70s. For a lot of business decisions, there is currently a legal requirement to go all in on short term profits over sustainability, long term thinking etc. These legal requirements should be changed/abolished. It is not an accident that, particularly in Germany, family owned firms frequently outperform shareholder controlled once because they think more longterm.

Essentially, society should incentivise different behaviour then it does right now.

[Stephen Wiggins]

Actually, Celsius not Centigrade. And I don't know where Walrus lives but it is 38 today with a forecast of 41 for tomorrow. Winter lasts about three weeks with overnight temperatures of minus three (daytime about 8). The rest of his piece I wholeheartedly endorse.

[Stephen Wiggins]

Dear Greta sailed across the Atlantic on a "carbon neutral vessel" constructed of carbon fibre, with dacron sails. Where in the natural environment, do carbon fibre and dacron grow?

[Dwight]

I see another form of science denial among many people that accept the IPCC findings (and those like me, who think the IPCC may have greatly underestimated the risks). This denial is the idea that we could stop using fossil fuels if only everyone accepted the science, and that converting to renewable energy would solve the problem while allowing us to continue our societies and economies basically unchanged. AIS make some excellent proposals below, beginning with stopping wars, and all these are essential but probably insufficient. Radical decreases in consumption would be necessary for emissions anywhere close to "zero," as Walrus' article humorously illustrates. No Democrats are calling for that, and they are instead pushing for new cold wars with Russia and China on top of the Middle East wars of the past three decades. Colonel Lang may not agree that climate change is a problem, but he seems to have long advocated for less war which would have been good for the climate, not to mention the people of Iraq and the United States. Your average Democratic politician simultaneously laments the laughably inadequate Paris Accord while also pushing war with Russia and Syria, and now it seems China. This is science denial, in my view.

[Somkuti Balint]

Excellent!

I will share it with my dark green friends.

[anon]

Why bother.Just tell her that she can save the planet from over population which is the main cause of man made destruction and simple choose to not have children.