Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to New York Times, the Greta effect is bypassing climate skeptics and reaching everyone who matters.
How the Climate Kids Are Short-Circuiting Right-Wing Media
Young people like Greta Thunberg are participating in the culture wars while also managing to float above the fray.
By Charlie Warzel
Mr. Warzel is an Opinion writer at large.
Sept. 26, 2019The kids aren’t just all right they’re scrambling the brains of their political enemies.
…Ms. Thunberg has been the primary target of this vitriol. On Saturday, the pro-Trump media figure Dinesh D’Souza likened Ms. Thunberg to models in Nazi propaganda. Videos of her speeches have been edited to replace her voice with Adolf Hitler’s. On Fox News on Monday evening, the Daily Wire pundit Michael Knowles called Ms. Thunberg who is open about being on the autism spectrum “a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents.” (Fox News issued an apology and called the comment disgraceful.)
…
She does not allow her message that the youth of the world have been betrayed by past generations’ inaction on climate change to be co-opted by fawning lawmakers, and she dismisses their praise for her as a tragic role reversal that forces her to be the adult in a room of well-dressed children. And she seems keenly aware that her rivals’ critiques are merely efforts to divert her attention. It seems they will cross every possible line to avert the focus, since they are so desperate not to talk about the climate and ecological crisis, she wrote of her haters on Twitter on Wednesday.
The usual tactics of the right-wing media break down in the face of this type of resolve. While outrage campaigns intended to work the refs and appeal to fears of appearing partisan may work with lawmakers or companies in Silicon Valley, the youth climate movement appears wholly unmoved. While the levers for climate progress proposed by solutions like a Green New Deal are undoubtedly political, the broader movement’s desire an inhabitable earth for all is far from partisan. The stakes, as the movement sees it, are too high to focus attention on the trolls. And the pressure, from conservative pundits and Breitbart contributors, doesn’t just get dismissed, it goes unnoticed.…
In other words, it’s not that the right can’t attack the climate kids because of their age. Rather, it’s that because of their age, the right’s attacks feel especially feeble.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/opinion/climate-change-greta-thunberg.html
The factor Charlie is ignoring is the Greta effect only works on people who already believe climate change is a problem. I doubt Charlie has met anyone in his personal circle who doesn’t believe Greta is a new Joan of Arc. Perhaps he thinks criticism of Greta and climate skepticism is a right wing fabrication, unrepresentative of society as a whole.
In my opinion Greta is a polarizing figure, who does nothing to build bipartisan support for climate action. She energises believers, but horrifies skeptics, who are reminded of society’s failure to protect a vulnerable child every time she appears on the media.
‘While the levers for climate progress proposed by solutions like a Green New Deal’
Solutions? Wut?
‘The broader movement’s desire an inhabitable earth for all is far from partisan.’
If you don’t support the children – they are our future – you are for an uninhabitable earth.
‘The stakes, as the movement sees it, are too high to focus attention on the trolls.’
He doesn’t know what ‘troll’ means.
‘In other words, it’s not that the right can’t attack the climate kids because of their age. Rather, it’s that because of their age, the right’s attacks feel especially feeble.’
See what he did there? Their age is relevant*, but secondary. The right attacks her ideas. Warzel wants you to believe that the only complaint is their age.
*Their age explains their childishness.
Of course the original trolls were in Swedish folklore.
To the extent that 16 year-old Greta Thunberg is forcing AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Prince Charles and other prominent CAGW mouthpieces to ride in the back of the bus, that is a good thing.
One can understand a young fool – wisdom usually comes from years of life experience. However an old fool is far worse – they have learnt nothing despite looking at the world for many years and are incapable of educating a young impressionable fool.
From the BBC today:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49855980
I read that shortly after Greta sued 5 countries for “carbon crimes”, many world leaders turned against Greta.
How dare they!
Only countries where her abusers has a financial interest (ok, i know, it isn’t abuse it it’s done by leftists).
How does it ends? Gret awill be driven insto suicide, than all online critics will be blamed.
[Greta had] a public meltdown. And of course the politicians applauded it – perversely, they love nothing more than being told how awful they are by a petrified, disorientated girl.
…
Who did this to Greta? Who turned a bright and curious 16-year-old schoolgirl into a prophet of horror, into a young woman who admits to feeling terror and who believes the Earth is on fire? Adults did. The green-infused educational, political and cultural elites did. The people who have been feeding kids a narrative of eco-fear for years did this. Their secular Armageddonism, their wilful exaggeration of every problem mankind faces, their marshalling of the politics of fear to try to force people to change their allegedly wicked, eco-harmful behaviour – all of this has convinced many young people that the future is dark, mankind is doomed, and there is no point even going to school, far less planning one’s life, because we will all be dead soon. They did this to Greta, and to others, and it is unforgivable.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/24/save-greta/
“Greta Thunberg is only the spearhead of a growing movement that, let me assure you, will soon sweep the world, because “THE DANGER IS REAL.” And true to her spirit, they will brook no compromise. . .
As the situation becomes increasingly desperate in the eyes of radicalized reformers, the danger of extreme actions, including bouts of terrorism, becomes increasingly more likely. With fire in their eyes and teeth filed razor sharp, cadres of organizations like Extinction Rebellion will soon constitute a veritable army of thought police, a quasi gestapo of right-minded inquisitors ready to stop at nothing until all “deniers” are silenced, and the oil, coal and gas industries, not to mention the plastic industry – and let’s not forget all those burping cows – are shut down for good. And their actions will be justified. Because, according to “the science,” half measures will not be sufficient. . .
After years of puzzling over this extremely perplexing issue I’ve gradually come to the realization that we are on the cusp of a period of world history unlike any other. Indeed, we are entering an era of mind-bending uncanniness fueled by a toxic mix of sheer hysteria and helplessness. Impossible demands will be made that will universally be regarded as necessary, a double-bind worthy of a Derrida essay or a Zen koan. To be blunt, we will be expected to destroy our world in order to save it.” From “Existential Threat: Facing the Climate Change Abyss.”
Available via Amazon.com
Watching the news clips of all the kids at the protests, I noticed how many of these children just said: Do Something! Anything! As if charging a tax is going to change the weather. If I were DJT, I would say OK, we are going to really do something, and we are going to really develop 5th generation nuclear energy along with hardening the grid both in capacity and in resilience. That would really be doing something, and which is probably what we really need to do anyway at some point in the future. The older and wiser skeptics need to not only seize the narrative, but also the agenda.
“Daily Wire pundit Michael Knowles called Ms. Thunberg who is open about being on the autism spectrum “a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents”
So ? It is the truth…..The liberal left can’t seem to handle reality….
The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg
How is it possible for you to be so easily tricked by something so simple as a story, because you are tricked? Well, it all comes down to one core thing and that is emotional investment. The more emotionally invested you are in anything in your life, the less critical and the less objectively observant you become.” — David JP Phillips, We Don’t Have Time board of directors, “The Magical Science of Storytelling”
…
Tagged in Rentzhog’s “lonely girl” tweet were five twitter accounts: Greta Thunberg, Zero Hour (youth movement), Jamie Margolin (the teenage founder of Zero Hour), Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, and the People’s Climate Strike twitter account (in the identical font and aesthetics as 350.org). [These groups will be touched upon briefly later in this series.]
Rentzhog is the founder of Laika (a prominent Swedish communications consultancy firm providing services to the financial industry, recently acquired by FundByMe). He was appointed as chair of the think tank Global Utmaning (Global Challenge in English) on May 24, 2018, and serves on the board of FundedByMe. Rentzhog is a member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Organization Leaders, where he is part of the European Climate Policy Task Force. He received his training in March 2017 by former US Vice President Al Gore in Denver, USA, and again in June 2018, in Berlin.
Founded in 2006, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project is a partner of We Don’t Have Time.
http://www.theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
Fretslider – that link goes to very interesting and rather scary stuff. In my working life as a professional academic (I know…) I have worked around some of the literature which blames multinational companies for most of the world’s ills. It’s a complex subject, and there is a lot of left-wing silliness and misinformation, but there is no denying that multinational companies are major players in the world economy, and that the outcomes of that economy are not always satisfactory for all – multinationals are an easy target for the expression of the dissatisfaction du jour. In the last couple of decades I have begun to ask whether we might treat the big NGOs (WWF, Greenpeace, UN***, and the like) with similar suspicion. My interest in this was broadly to encourage students (and colleagues) to re-evaluate any negative opinions they might have of profit-making companies, in the light of the power and ruthlessness of the NGOs, and to stop giving those NGOs a kind of moral free-ride into hearts and minds. The link that you provide gives another line on this, one that I had not seen so clearly expressed before – that is, that the NGOs are just another expression of the wicked multinationals of the military industrial complex, and that really sophisticated left-wingers can hate them as well. Mostly bollocks, but interesting none the less. Thank you for the pointer.
“multinational companies are major players in the world economy, and that the outcomes of that economy are not always satisfactory for all”
Why would they be? Why should they be?
Typical left-wing tactic — use emotional manipulation rather that fact-based argument.
Had her and a bunch of kids in ‘Kids are Coming’ sweatshirts performing at the AFL Grand Final which has become a platform for leftist elites nowadays when all we want is the contest.(sadly there was only one quarter of it this year). The most telling thing about the gyrating kids if you could call young adolescents that was they largely had fat sedentary bums and looked as well nourished as the team leader-
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/news/musicnews/the-kids-are-coming-is-tones-and-i-at-most-confident/11465216
Not exactly your under-consumptionists leading the charge by the looks.
Greta Thunberg has no education in any of the physics required to understand climate variables; she can have no knowledge of climate change other than what she’s acquired from popular media and agenda-driven personal handlers. I’d bet she has no familiarity with the Laws of Thermodynamics, or anything else required for that understanding. She will have never seen or understood the mathematics of a climate simulator (I no longer call them ‘models’) and has no realization that Mann appended an apple onto the end of a crooked string of oranges (which he fraudulently straightened into a shaft by eliminating the MWP and the LIA) and then claimed ‘See, the end of the stick is RED!’ She will have never plotted a GISS temperature record, and (like David Suzuki) doesn’t know what it (or HADCRUT) is.
If she was of average intelligence (there is a high probability that she is not and is incapable of ever understanding the requirements stated above) her opinion of climate change would be worth no more than one 7.6 billionth of world opinion on the subject; it would take special education for her to have more than average value to her opinion, and the simple fact that she thinks her opinion is valuable without that knowledge is a testament to a lack of sufficient intelligence to realize her own limitations. In other words, allowing for less-than-average intelligence, sadly the practical relevance of her opinion on the subject approaches, and possibly equals, zero.
And yet she is the present darling of (many of) the world’s leaders, UN, and MSM. My view is that the irrelevance of her opinion serves as a definition of the modern-day relevance of the UN as it makes time to give her audience. The same goes for media, and our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Those who admire her define themselves as being of inferior intelligence and self-identify as required to ‘look up’ to her. This is one of the strangest cultural phenomena that has happened in my lifetime.
Donald Trump appears to have treated her commensurately with her relevance to the topic; he ignored her.
Greta Thunberg is professional child actress.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10361418/
From indb: “Personal Quote: What’s the point in educating ourselves and learning the facts when the people in power refuse to listen, to be educated and pay attention to the facts?”
Yes Greta dear, everybody hopes to be educated by the uneducated. Do you?
Look on the bright side.
For decades ruling elites of EU, USA, Australia, Japan, … have been scaring the majority of people that doomsday is comming – all just to increase taxes and channel subsidies, etc. into the pockets of their supporters. Obviously, they have not achieved even a bit of what they pontificated about, namely, reduce emissions of CO2.
Now comes this mentally challenged hysterical kid (wih all the help from shortsighted politicians and media) and screams panic, “You have not done anything to prevent anthropogenic global warming!”. And the elites cannot say “That’s OK, we haven’t reduced emissions of CO2 because there is no need, AGW was just an excuse!” So how do they dodge this one?
Assuming that IPCC predictions were correct – even some more rational warmists realise that there is nothing to be done: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending.
The media are giving the highest ratings to this latest movie: The Incredible Sulk.
By the time we reach her supposed end of the world time, she will already likely be dead of suicide. She has mental problems and this is just going to make them worse.
Way to go parents!
Somehow, I just can’t see a future where the young, “save the planet,” movement will have an impact on anything other than the core agitators (screwing up their own future by not bothering to prepare themselves for it).
As soon as the lesser-involved youth realize what they would have to give up, they will quickly conclude that adaptation might be preferable to prevention. And over time, when they realize no significant adaptation has been needed, they’ll forget about it completely.
Eric Worral,
You say of comments by Charlie Warzel,
“Perhaps he thinks criticism of Greta and climate skepticism is a right wing fabrication, unrepresentative of society as a whole.
In my opinion Greta is a polarizing figure, who does nothing to build bipartisan support for climate action. She energises believers, but horrifies skeptics, who are reminded of society’s failure to protect a vulnerable child every time she appears on the media.”
I completely and wholeheartedly agree.
But, of course, I speak as a climate skeptic who is a left-wing socialist of the traditional British kind.
Richard
Good read , the tragedy of Greta Thunberg
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/09/27/the_tragedy_of_greta_thunberg_141351.html
What right-wing media? Even Fox is only fake right.
Correct. They let SOME conservative people speak and OMG THEY ARE WORSE THAN HITLER!
The Left wants NO OPPOSITION. They want no debate. They represent orthodoxy; all others have no right or reason to speak.
Dear Greta,
You believe to hold universal knowledge and enough of it to steer the world’s destiny. Fair enough. Let’s just assume you’re the main character a cognitive miracle that unravels in front of our eyes.
Yes Greta Dear, you dictate the destiny of billions of people. Presumably you’re a genius.
We have an interesting offer. What about starting small, in the realm of 150 persons?
Here’s the deal. We will walk away and let your best ideological supporters board a nice white fully serviceable plane.
Compared with how you empower yourself to steer billions, it should be a piece of cake to take your exhaled peers to the next bright future conference.
It’s real easy. Talk a bit, or in your case, argue/yell over the radio, push a few buttons, move some levers. Let your pet unicorns do what they do best.
Afterwards, I guarantee you, it’ll be a far better world.
In 1992 David Suzuki’s daughter Severn, then 12 years old, gave a speech that sounds a lot like Greta Thunberg’s.
https://twitter.com/GeodanNew/status/1177332615403180036
What right-wing media?
After relaying that police was thankful to demonstrators for abiding with peaceful demonstration… -when media, police and establishment supports a bunch of teens led by some fabricated icon piper, should this count as a “demonstration” or as propaganda?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/global-climate-strike-kids-1.5300850
Well the CBC continues the Greta-mania. Nicole Mortillaro, writes: “Climate lessons from the classroom spill into the streets”.
Indeed, if this is what is taught in the classroom, there is legitimate worries about the level of teaching in Canadian schools!
Illuminating.
No reasoning, just pure fear: is that what teachers teach in Canadian classrooms?
Mortillaro adds another coat:
No doubt, their knowledge contributed to Resplandy’s withdrawal by Nature…
And Mortillaro to conclude in pure abdication of any journalistic standards:
We do not underestimate children and how much they might or not know at 9. Taking example on how the climate issue is handled and trusting journalistic accounts of it, we suggest that our Health Ministry shall bypass health care providers to relieve our Province’s 91,000 waiting list for surgeries, and ask next doors 16 y old to perform all cardiac procedures, tumor removals and brain surgeries. And that should include treatments to CBC journalists and politicians alike.
Let’s see who will volunteer first…
I wish NYT had identified some of the “right wing media”. I’d like to read them.
P.J. O’Rourke — ‘Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.’