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However, it also dawned on me that there was an orientalist streak about Greta’s narrative. She was justified to campaign to ensure the world woke up to the dangers of global warming, but her priorities were framed in her own privileges.

Her voice resonated among the same class of people that she belonged to — white upper-middle-class and the new millionaire Marxists that will never be seen discussing issues of the working class at a Tim Hortons in Regent Park, but most definitely at cafes with French sounding names.

That certainly does not take away from the value of what Greta is saying, but what she said at the United Nations alarmed me. For the first time I could see her anger as contrived.

I may be wrong, but having seen another young woman — Malala Yusufzai — whose plight moved me to start a global initiative for a Nobel Peace Prize for her, I could see the fingerprints of a speechwriter trying to make a child reject what her forefathers had accomplished in the last 200 years and reject it as the rape of mother earth.

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean,” she said. “Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams, my childhood with your empty words.”

Really Greta? Stolen your dreams?

The dream that allowed you to sail the Atlantic on the racing yacht Malizia II with the blessings of Pierre Casiraghi, the grandson of Monaco’s late Prince Rainier III and American actress Grace Kelly, and backed by people who generate more CO2 emissions than all of Somalia and Chad put together. Her donors include heiress Aileen Getty, American philanthropist Trevor Neilson, and filmmaker Rory Kennedy, a member of the political Kennedy clan.

Then she glared at the UN audience and threatened:“The eyes of future generations are on you and if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this.”

Carry on Greta, but don’t get carried away in the rhetoric of millionaire Marxists with an orientalist fetish for appearing to care.

The steam engine and the airplane went hand in hand with penicillin and insulin. Next time you visit a physician, remember what your grandparents accomplished was extending human life, eradicating poverty, providing literacy and individual liberties like never before.