Most of us are hypocrites on climate change. Maybe that’s progress

Greta Thunberg puts most of us to shame. The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist is en route to the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York, on a two-week, comfort-free journey by solar-powered sailboat. She doesn’t fly, because flying is bad for the climate. She helped popularize the Swedish movement of flygskam, or flight shaming, which asks Swedes to travel according to their beliefs.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, center, holds 

a placard reading “schools strike for climate” during

 a demonstration in Lausanne, Switzerland, on August 9.

Greta’s also a vegan. Her parents are vegan, too, after what sounds like a daunting kitchen-table campaign of repetition plus guilt. “I kept showing them articles and graphs . . . they always had excuses,” Greta told an interviewer. But “I kept telling them that they were stealing our future and they cannot stand up for human rights while living that lifestyle.”

Greta’s like an emissary from the future calmly stating that now is the time to panic. Who could argue with that? Not me. I recently swore off plastic straws on account of my own 16-year-old’s disapproval, even though his straw-shaming (sugrörskam?) consisted only of a single, sharp “Mom!” and a slow, disappointed head shake as I plucked my absolute-last-plastic-straw-I-swear from a coffee shop counter. If Greta were my kid, I’d be a vegan now, too.

Read the story from The Washington Post by Kate Cohen - “Most of us are hypocrites on climate change. Maybe that’s progress.”