Mr. Singer’s statement that he has never heard a more powerful four minute speech might be true. Either because he has not heard that many speeches at all of any length or because most speeches, powerful or not are not four minutes long, either they are three minute, five or twenty, who knows. I read once that the Gettysburg Address was under three minutes, for example.

Barring the above word gimmick, I find appalling, though not unique, that thinkers one expect to be honest, if not out of courage, simply due to their insulation from the risk of hunger, cold or violence, contribute spread confusion. “People are dying”, she says. Are more people dying today from global warming or from lack of electricity?

Miss Thumberg probably would have trouble getting hired in Hollywood if her acting and reciting are always as poor as displayed in the referenced four minute speech. But if many appear to be piling on her, the real issue is the damage to the truth that is done by people like Mr. Singer.

Maybe I am being unfair because I have known Asperger from up close, but it is beyond me that anyone can really believe a 15 year old person with no experience and a condition that makes for a short attention span is managing the enterprise of traveling the world, meeting leaders, marketing online and offline and writing touching speeches. Before the age of the internet, such charades would only appear in youth oriented books or movies. I have no doubt others plan and execute and pull the strings.

As for comparing Gandhi’s struggle to individuals whose CO2 footprint includes dumping their perfectly good phones every year and their perfectly good sweaters every time their influencer tells them to, the disingenuousness leaves me aghast.

Human action and development comes at the expense of other species undoubtedly. We eat, get warm and lay waste, just like any other species, but we seem to do it so successfully that we are crowding out the rest. From the warmth of the Princeton faculty lunchroom, it may seem this is a really bad thing, but maybe not so much from the viewpoint of those who have known the stench of rotting human flesh during famine or have bled from pushing a plow by hand.

We may have come to a point where our elbows are rubbing too close and we may be as a species chewing more grass than our pastures afford. Management of our limited real estate is clearly subject to the tragedy of the commons and rational coordination can make us all better.

As with all large scale human negotiations though, complexity is hard and special interests taint everyone’s opinions without exception. Resorting to violence or deception is to be expected. Individuals or small groups will often take the Attila view and not hesitate to pursue a small benefit even when it inflicts an enormous damage on the collective.

That can apply to the small thug who will irradiate half a continent around Chernobyl to advance his career or to protect his weekend dacha near Moscow or to the oil executive who skimps on platform maintenance in the Gulf of Mexico but also to the loose brotherhood of intellectual and entrepreneurs who will take many freedoms and opportunities away from people all over the world while pushing an agenda that benefits them though may inflict on humanity far more harm in the short and long term.

Green entrepreneurs are likely as old as fossil fuel executives and it is cheap trick for the former to have their children accuse the latter of not to care since they will not be here to face the consequences of their actions. Achieving the best compromise between raising the welfare of less fortunate people, letting Swedish teenagers shop a bit on Zara and Apple Stores and keeping our planet reasonably sustainable requires rational discussion, not hysteria.