How the World Failed Greta Thunberg

The Perils of Praising Teenagers

Greta Thunberg takes part in a demonstration in Stockholm [Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency via Reuters]

Catch-up service:
Is Culture Dying?
How To Be Charles Darwin
Prince’s Genius Guitar Solo
My Book Of the Year
20 Observations On Friendship

Thirteen days after October 7th, 2023, Greta Thunberg posted a message on social media “in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza”. It was accompanied by a picture of herself and three young women holding placards proclaiming support for Palestinians. Thunberg called for “an immediate ceasefire, justice and freedom for Palestinians and all civilians affected”. She had not, up until then, posted any comment on the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas. After being heavily criticised for this omission she added a message that it “goes without saying” she was against those “horrific” attacks.

A few weeks later she attended a climate crisis march in Amsterdam, wearing a Palestinian keffieyeh. Addressing the crowds, she called for a ceasefire in Gaza. As she did so, a protester attempted to grab the mic. “I came for a climate protest,” he complained. As he was pushed aside, Thunberg and other activists began chanting, “No climate justice on occupied land.” The discomfort among climate activists with Thunberg’s stance of Palestine isn’t restricted to one protester: the German branch of Fridays For Future, a climate movement inspired by Thunberg, has firmly distanced itself from her.

But to Thunberg and her loyal followers it makes no sense to separate climate from Palestine or from any other social justice cause. Last weekend, in Stockholm, she spoke at a march in support of, in her words, “climate justice, Palestine, Congo, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Sápmi, feminism, antiracism, Ukraine, East Turkistan, Sudan, class struggles, queer rights and many more.” One group’s fight is everyone’s fight, she said, and no one is free until everyone is free.

It is hard to discern robust logic here even if you generally take the same side as Thunberg. Peace and justice for Ukrainians does not depend on when China allows same-sex marriage. Neither does solving climate change require the overthrow of the whole capitalist system, as Thunberg repeatedly and blithely asserts. To take lots of wildly disparate causes, conflicts and histories and smush them together into one big blob of “injustice” is now a common move among activists. It raises the suspicion that they are not, actually, focused on making a material impact on any of these causes, and that they are primarily motivated by the act of protest itself.¹

Surely environmentalists don’t like uprooting trees?

Thunberg is consistent in her simplism, at least. She has never pretended to be detained by debate or argument. Her position on the issue which brought her to the world’s attention has always been aggressively basic. “The climate crisis already has been solved,” she said in 2019. “We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.” Just don’t ask how, exactly. It’s true that we have enough facts to determine that man-made climate change is real; it is obviously not true to say that we “know” all the solutions. Should we ban air travel, tax carbon, build nuclear power stations? Climate campaigners themselves disagree on all these questions.

The politicians, celebrities and journalists who hailed Thunberg in 2019 were not interested in pointing this out or in pressing her for details. To do so seemed in bad taste. It threatened to make the sceptic seem complicit with climate denialism, and, worse, a bully. After all, Thunberg was a child, a fact she highlighted in her speeches. She was also autistic. Our job, as adults, was not to question her but to listen, and to take our beatings - to accept her fierce accusations of hypocrisy and cowardice without question.

Greta Thunberg’s finest moment to date was her speech to the United Nations in 2019. She opened it by saying, “My message is that we’ll be watching you”. She then glared unsmilingly at the audience while they laughed uncomfortably. It was a moment of intuitive political genius which set the tone for what was to come: an address in which she sternly chastised those before her. Thunberg’s confrontational style was very compelling. In an essay on the UN speech the classical scholar Rena Frey frames it as a brilliant rhetorical innovation.

In our democracies, children are excluded from full citizenship. When do take part in public debates, they tend to do so in words crafted to appeal to adults. Frey cites the example of Samantha Smith who became famous in the United States in 1982 after writing a letter to the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov about her fears of nuclear war. Smith became a celebrity “Goodwill Ambassador”, visiting the Soviet Union and appearing on TV in both countries to campaign for peace. Smith was respectful, non-authoritative, and conventionally childlike, which made her message palatable to the grown-ups.²

Thunberg took a radically different approach. She scolded her high-status audience for their failings without the slightest attempt to charm or ingratiate herself to them or to adult viewers. Frey argues that Thunberg acted as what the Greeks called a parrhesiastes - a truth-teller who courageously confronts those in power, speaking bluntly without regard for decorum. Adults who take this stance can easily across as bombastic or merely rude. Thunberg’s speech, coming as it did from a teenage girl with a disability, was transgressive and electrifying. Afterwards, it was the powerful who sought to ingratiate themselves with her.

Did Thunberg’s teenage activism make a real difference, or was it all sound and fury? I think it would be wrong to say she didn’t have an effect on climate politics. In her defiantly unreasonable way, Thunberg increased the salience of what was already a high-profile issue. She strengthened the sense of an emergency: “climate change” became rebranded as “climate crisis” in her wake. An executive at an investment fund recently told me that Thunberg helped elevate the importance of environmental concerns in boardrooms. While the full extent of her influence is hard to measure, her distinctive voice clearly resonated beyond activist circles.

But it’s 2024, and Thunberg is not a child anymore. She is 21, and if she is to go down in history as someone who made a truly significant impact on climate policy, she’ll have to change tactics. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece which compared Greta with Bono. His model of activism is very unfashionable these days, because it involves close cooperation with political and business elites and a grasp of policy trade-offs. But his work on AIDS had a vast and tangible impact on human welfare. However influential Thunberg has been, it’s unlikely that she has or will save a million lives.

High-profile activists have or acquire reputational capital. They must then decide how to spend it. Bono knowingly took a big hit to his reputation by collaborating with George W. Bush. In an alternative history, Thunberg used her authority as a tribune of the climate movement to campaign for nuclear power, even it meant losing some of her supporters. Whether it was that or something else, she could have developed a set of plausible policy demands and begun to negotiate with the world’s power brokers.

As it is, her thinking and rhetoric have not developed or matured since she was 16. She has if anything become more strident and extreme. The elites who once courted her are looking the other way. The journalist Anne McElvoy remarked, shrewdly: “In truth, (Anglosphere) media never figured out how to handle Greta T; whether it was OK to engage in a tough argument with her or not.” She observed that there is a “large uncomfortable silence” around Thunberg now, other than among the devotees. No longer special by virtue of her age, Thunberg has become just another activist ranting about Palestine and capitalism, albeit one with millions of social media followers. That’s a shame, since she clearly has brains, charisma and courage. But she was failed by those who fawned over her.

The world responded to Thunberg, as a teenager, in two ways. It insulted and abused her, and it showered her in praise. The first was obviously wrong but the second was harmful in a subtler way. It taught Thunberg and her fans that the best route to influence and status is to be extreme and unyielding. That can sometimes be true but it rarely works for long. Activist organisations like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil get famous and then flame out before they can mature into the kind of pressure group that changes the world. Their tactics can be bafflingly self-destructive. When you don’t engage with challenges to your own ideas you don’t get any smarter.

Perhaps there’s a wider lesson here. There is far less generational conflict than there used to be. The days in which parents and kids held each other’s preferences and beliefs in mutual contempt are long gone, a relic of the late twentieth century. This is partly because teenagers have become better behaved, less likely to drink or smoke or get pregnant. It’s also because today’s parents, particularly those who are middle-class and on the left, are eager to please and indeed emulate their children. If their kids are into Black Lives Matter, trans rights and Taylor Swift, then they must be too.

That is sweet, in a way, but its result is a stunted ability, among Thunberg’s peers, to listen to or even hear anyone who sees the world slightly differently than they do. There is a whole cohort of progressives who are only at ease waving placards and chanting slogans, and who can’t see the point in discussion or negotiation of any kind. "'We'll be watching you,' Thunberg warned. When you grow up watching your elders either abuse or blindly agree with you, it’s hardly surprising you learn that those are the only two options.

After the jump: a note on my favourite current affairs podcast, an amazing photograph of a venerable rock star in his youth, and a rattle bag of juicy links, including chart of the week, quote of the week, the mysteries of quantum mechanics and film editing and Mozart.