GRETA 2 BAK
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bak 120
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6 25 BREAK GAZA BLOCKADE SHIP
// AOC adept at twitter takedown
death and rape threats? her mom?
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https://franifio.substack.com/
https://franifio.substack.com/p/greta-hasnt-changed
Greta Hasn’t Changed
Oct 31, 2025
Is Greta Thunberg different now? Ever since taking action for the people of Palestine she has been called a terrorist, an anti-semite, and someone who left climate justice behind.
10 25 zeteo
Mehdi Hasan is live on Substack now: "'Ask the Editor': On Israel and Its Illegal Detention of Greta Thunberg and the Flotilla Activists"
5 min news meidas vid
this audience should go after. um he has done this in lectures around the world
where he actually puts up these pictures of certain people and in this case he was very against the activist Greta
Thunberg because she's been critical of AI. he was and um against the the activist and writer um Eleazar Uduka
50:16
Udlowski who is um a prominent critic of the tech industry's approach to AI, what
50:22
people might call AI dumerism and um so yeah, it's almost like saying not just
50:29
should the tech industry have a debate about the limits of AI but the people within that debate who are arguing for
LIBTard prep jdv tARGET
REF
The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.
Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently beingchallenged in court.
Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.
The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.
“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.
Inspired by the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
Peter Thiel in Tokyo in 2019. Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images
One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.
Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies ... we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before
Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.
If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.
Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.
Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.
And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).
Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of an El Salvador prison in March. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
Not so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.
Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).
But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”
Mike Huckabee touring Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem in 2008. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images
Elon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.
Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”
Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.
What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.
Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).
End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy
Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.
Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.
If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.
This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.
Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.
Steve Bannon advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.
It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.
At the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).
This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.
Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism”, or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.
Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.
Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan speak during a panel discussion about bitcoin in San Francisco in 2014. Photograph: Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
As the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.
Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.
None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”
The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants
Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.
And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.
The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies, the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)
In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new datacenters calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.
An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.
Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
JD Vance speaks at the Munich Security Conference in February. Photograph: dts News Agency Germany/REX/Shutterstock
His comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.
Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: accordingto Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”). There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.
She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.
Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”
How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.
This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.
Anti-Trump protesters march against the administration in New York in January. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian
That future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”
We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”
To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”
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guk
Weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights, the European court of human rights has ruled.
In a landmark decision on one of three major climate cases, the first such rulings by an international court, the ECHR raised judicial pressure on governments to stop filling the atmosphere with gases that make extreme weather more violent.
The court’s top bench ruled that Switzerland had violated the rights of a group of older Swiss women to family life, but threw out a French mayor’s case against France and that of a group of young Portuguese people against 32 European countries.
“It feels like a mixed result because two of the cases were inadmissible,” said Corina Heri, a law researcher at the University of Zürich. “But actually it’s a huge success.”
The court, which calls itself “the conscience of Europe”, found that Switzerland had failed to comply with its duties to stop climate change. It also set out a path for organisations to bring further cases on behalf of applicants.
The Swiss verdict opens up all 46 members of the Council of Europe to similar cases in national courts that they are likely to lose.
Joie Chowdhury, an attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law campaign group, said the judgment left no doubt that the climate crisis was a human rights crisis. “We expect this ruling to influence climate action and climate litigation across Europe and far beyond,” she said.
The facts of the three cases varied widely, but they all hinged on the question of whether government inaction on climate change violated fundamental human rights. Some of the governments argued that the cases should not be admitted, and that climate policy should be the subject of national governments rather than international courts.
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'Only the beginning': Greta Thunberg reacts to court ruling on Swiss climate inaction – video
The plaintiffs attending the hearing in the court in Strasbourg, some as young as 12, celebrated after a member of a panel of 17 judges read out the verdicts. The climate activist Greta Thunberg joined a gathering outside the court before the hearing to encourage faster action.
Anton Foley, who with Thunberg was representing Aurora, a youth group that filed a climate lawsuit against Sweden, said it was “unjust” that responsibility for stopping the climate crisis fell on young people, and praised the Swiss women for stepping up. “We don’t want to be the hope for the older generation. We want them to do this, because we don’t want to fight this fight.”
Thunberg thanked Rosmarie Wydler-Wälti, co-president of the KlimaSeniorinnen, for what she had done, as they met outside the courtroom.
The KlimaSeniorinnen, a group of 2,400 older Swiss women, told the court that several of their rights were being violated. Because older women are more likely to die in heatwaves – which have become hotter and more common because of fossil fuels – they argued that Switzerland should do its share to stop the planet heating by the Paris agreement target of 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.
The court ruled that Swiss authorities had not acted in time to come up with a good enough strategy to cut emissions. It also found the applicants had not had appropriate access to justice in Switzerland.
But it also rejected the cases of four individual applicants who had joined the KlimaSeniorinnen.
“I’m very happy,” said Nicole Barbry, 70, a member of the KlimaSeniorinnen who had come to Strasbourg. “It’s good that they’re finally listening to us.”
The Portuguese children and young people – who because of their age will see greater climate damage than previous generations – argued that climate-fuelled disasters such as wildfires and smoke threatened their right to life and discriminated against them based on their age.
The court did not admit the case, deciding that the applicants could not bring cases against countries other than Portugal and adding that they had not pursued legal avenues in Portugal against the government.
“Their [the Swiss] win is a win for us, too,” said Sofia Oliveira, a 19-year-old applicant in the Portuguese case. “And a win for everyone.”
The French case, brought by the MEP Damien Carême, argued that France’s failure to do enough to stop climate change violated his rights to life and privacy and family life. Carême filed the case when he was the mayor of Grand-Synthe, a coastal town vulnerable to flooding. The court did not admit the case because Carême no longer lives there.
The ECHR rejects about 90% of all applications it receives as inadmissible but fast-tracked the three climate cases to its top bench because of their urgency. It delayed hearings on six more climate cases to get a result on the rulings on Tuesday.
The rulings will influence three other international courts that are examining the role of government climate policy on human rights.
Charlotte Blattner, a researcher at the University of Berne who specialises in climate law, said the court had delivered a bold judgment in favour of a viable future. “The nature and gravity of the threat of climate change – and the urgency to effectively respond to it – require that governments can and will have to be held accountable for their lack of adequate action,” she said.
The court said that keeping global heating to 1.5C was a key part of protecting human rights, rather than the higher 2C limit that courts had used for rulings on cases in Germany and the Netherlands.
Gerry Liston, a lawyer for the Portuguese children, said the recognition that Switzerland’s policies were not science-based was “by far” the most significant aspect of the ruling. “No European government’s climate policies are aligned with anything near 1.5C, so it will be clear to those working on climate litigation in those countries that there is now a clear basis to bring a case in their national courts.”
ggl 4 24
Thunberg and 600 other young activists in a group called Aurora sued the Swedish state in November, claiming it had to do more to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) in order to live up to the European Convention on Human Rights.Mar 21, 2023
Greta Thunberg, climate activists greenlighted to sue Sweden
Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com › news › greta-thunberg-cli...
Greta Thunberg, climate activists get court nod to sue ...
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com › world › europe › greta-thun...
Mar 21, 2023 — Thunberg, and 600 other young activists in a group called Aurora, sued the Swedish state in November, claiming it had to do more to limit global ...
Swedish court OKs activists to sue state over climate policy
AP News
https://apnews.com › article › sweden-climate-lawsuit-a...
Mar 21, 2023 — ... , including Greta Thunberg, to file a lawsuit against the Swedish state for what they say is insufficient action on the climate.
Greta Thunberg defiant after court fines her
CBS News
https://www.cbsnews.com › World
Jul 24, 2023 — A Swedish court on Monday fined climate activist Greta Thunberg for disobeying police during an environmental protest at an oil facility ...
U.K. Judge Acquits Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Over ...
Time Magazine
https://time.com › World › United Kingdom
Feb 2, 2024 — LONDON — Climate activist Greta Thunberg was acquitted Friday of refusing to follow a police order to leave a protest blocking the entrance ...
'Now we sue the state': Greta Thunberg joins activists in ...
Euronews.com
https://www.euronews.com › Green › Climate
Mar 22, 2023 — Environmental activists, including Greta Thunberg, are suing the Swedish state for insufficient action on the climate crisis.
UK court dismisses case against Greta Thunberg over ...
Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com › news › uk-court-dismisses-...
Feb 2, 2024 — Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been cleared of a public order offence over a protest outside an oil and gas conference last year, ...
Judge throws out case against Greta Thunberg and other ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › environment › feb › ju...
Feb 2, 2024 — Greta Thunberg and four others charged with public order offences over a protest in London have been cleared after a judge ruled that they had ...
Court Rules Greta Thunberg, Others Can Sue Sweden for ' ...
Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org › News › sweden
Mar 21, 2023 — The country's climate action "constitutes a violation of human rights," argues one Swedish group.
Greta Thunberg says remember 'the real enemy' as oil ...
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com › business › environment › gre...
Feb 2, 2024 — Greta Thunberg said on Thursday people should remember who "the real enemy is" after she and four other environmental activists appeared in ...
Emma Thompson and Greta Thunberg among critics of ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › business › apr › public-...
Apr 1, 2024 — The writer and chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, one of the signatories, said the lawsuit “beggars belief”. “Shell boasts constantly of its ...
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cop 28 note recycled BS: global elite
Marc Morano
Weekly update ⋅ December 8, 2023
Marc Morano: China is getting a pass | Fox News Video
Fox News
Climate Depot's Marc Morano discusses John Kerry's remarks at the U.N. COP28 climate conference in Dubai on 'The Ingraham Angle.'
ingraham, extra AC units kerry jetsetter india does not care what we think new plants permitted end global coal production, china 1/2 of production open 1 plant/wk; getting cty to cut back on naty gas lead the world in reducing emissions; greta will protest german plant but not in china; on x ingra how much does greta fam make?; li jets from mansion to mansion kite surfing ridiculous; 17m$ budget pvt jet potentate unelected; hillary says --- killing, studies show coal kills more? ej climate fund keep africa locked in poverty, then crush US decree global dictatorship vs trump 99 perent drop in 20 yrs? kery and hillary never fact checked; green reset summit; keruy not senate confirmed, how is that ok? US must take tougher approach on tech to China, says US House committee
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Thunberg joins 630+ youth activists in climate lawsuit against Sweden
Published on November 26th, 2022 | by Julia Conley
Climate leader Greta Thunberg was among 636 young adults and children who submitted a class-action lawsuit against the Swedish government at a district court in Stockholm on Friday, arguing that the country’s right-wing leaders are failing to obey the Swedish constitution as they continue allowing planet-heating fossil fuel extraction. By Julia Conley Common Dreams About 2,000 […]
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arrested twice?! 20 hurt coal town 1 23
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female thus obligated /opportunity to attack?
https://www.mediamatters.org/candace-owens/candace-owens-says-greta-thunberg-need-exorcism
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yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com
Andrew Tate
@Cobratate
Hello
@GretaThunberg
I have 33 cars.
My Bugatti has a w16 8.0L quad turbo.
My TWO Ferrari 812 competizione have 6.5L v12s.
This is just the start.
Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/internet-misogynist-and-alleged-rapist-andrew-tate-no-stranger-climate-change
no lnx twt
Internet misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate is no stranger to climate change conspiracy theories
Tate’s recent attacks on Greta Thunberg track with his anti-science and anti-woman views
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER
PUBLISHED 01/09/23
On December 27, just a month after returning to Twitter following a five-year ban, misogynist influencer Andrew Tate attempted to pick a fight with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Her response is now one of the most-liked tweets ever.
Two days later, after an incoherent response video from Tate, he and his brother were arrested in Romania for charges of sex trafficking and rape — reportedly at least his second arrest for alleged rape since 2015. The latest arrest and the online feud are not related, despite initial speculation, but the entire exchange left many people wondering about Tate’s background and what may have been behind his outburst at the climate activist.
In addition to spreading narrow-minded and often violent ideas about masculinity, Tate has a history of buying into climate conspiracy theories and has made contradictory statements about climate change, sometimes altogether denying its impacts. He has also repeatedly targeted Thunberg in his content.
Andrew Tate has adopted right-wing rhetoric about climate change policy and solutions
Both Tate and his brother have rambled about the climate crisis and “the green agenda” during interviews, livestreams, and in their own content. Tate calls climate action a creation of “the matrix,” which has long been an important cultural reference for the online far right. For Tate, climate policy is seemingly a tool for people behind “the new world order” who “want more control” and aim to enslave the public. This is strikingly similar to the globalist cabal at the center of the Great Reset conspiracy theory often discussed by other right-wing media influencers and climate deniers.
Tate has gone back and forth between whether he thinks climate change is a legitimate issue. In a 2019 interview with 21 Studios, a media company dedicated to “abolishing the feminist establishment,” he said, “I don’t care about global warming. Is it happening? Maybe, don’t give a shit.” Last July, he insisted, “I’m not saying climate change isn’t real, I’m not saying that climate isn’t important, I’m not saying the world is not important.” But regardless of how much Tate truly cares about climate change, he has repeatedly and publicly attacked and mischaracterized any viable solutions.
Tate has parroted misinformation sparked by big government paranoia and promoted by the likes of Fox News. In an October 2022 interview, he falsely claimed that lithium batteries for electric cars are “doing more damage to the environment than a fucking petrol engine could ever do,” and said that “the people who are in charge of the world” will force the masses to adopt electric vehicles in order to control them. During the same interview, he also claimed that environmental policies are being used as a “Trojan horse” that will force people to stop eating meat.
The matrix is often central to Tate’s climate commentary. “All of these things that the matrix purports, it’s all fucking bullshit because the people who are actually fucking involved and purporting it are not concerned by it on any level,” he insisted last October. In a June interview, Tate claimed that “every single multimillion- and billionaire buy a house on the beach” despite supposedly rising sea levels because “this green agenda they’re pushing has nothing to do with the environment. … It’s all to do with control.” Climate adaptation and mitigation efforts, Tate claims, would turn people into “peasants” or “slaves.”
Over the summer of 2022, Tate commented on protests that occurred in the Netherlands over emissions cuts. During a livestream with other YouTubers, he contended that “the matrix” was bankrupting farmers in order to buy up all of their land. “Every single movement on the planet to some degree has been corrupted by the people who are in charge of the world aiming to get more and more power from the populace,” he said. In the same livestream, Tate claimed that “the matrix sits there and decides we want Greta all over the news now, because we want to talk about the climate, and then what we want to do is put taxes up because of the climate.” Moving to outright climate denial, he concluded that “no one’s going to give a shit because we know the sea level ain’t going to rise. … ‘Climate change’ is new world order bullshit.”
Not only has Tate been a source of climate change misinformation, he has fantasized about violence against climate protesters at a time those engaging in nonviolent direct action are facing increased threats and governments are attempting to suppress peaceful protest over the climate crisis.
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In a TikTok video posted in June 2022, Tate described a hypothetical scenario and suggested he would run over Extinction Rebellion protesters in his Aston Martin, saying: “Yeah, I’ll show you an extinction.”
His brother, Tristan Tate, has echoed the sentiment about Just Stop Oil activists. “Hope I’m not at the front of that line … and close enough to see you stuck in my car,” he said in a video. “And I feel like everyone in England should adopt the exact same attitude.”
Tate is just the latest right-wing media influencer targeting Greta Thunberg
Since her rise to fame in 2019, Thunberg’s activism has attracted the ire of angry men and right-wing media figures who accused her of being both a Marxist pawn, a propagandist, and a victim of child abuse. Fox News blamed Thunberg for Europe’s energy crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. YouTuber Dave Rubin and Dinesh D’Souza have even likened her to a Nazi. Other right-wing media influencers have mocked her autism diagnosis, called her psychotic and mentally ill, and even advocated for violence against her.
She has also been the target of sexual harassment. In 2020, when Thunberg was 17, employees at a Canadian oil company created and circulated a cartoon sticker of her being sexually assaulted.
It’s no surprise that Tate has been triggered by an influential young woman who is outspoken about the climate crisis and its intersection with gender inequality, has demanded change and accountability from world leaders, and has inspired other women and girls to become involved in issues they care about. For his part, Tate has repeatedly insisted that women are generally incompetent, that they are property, and that society will function successfully only if they are confined to the roles of wife and mother. Tate’s content often features his sports cars and his grift, Hustler University, claims to help young men get rich and “escape the matrix,” while Thunberg has supported an overall shift away from gas-powered cars toward electric vehicles and alternative transportation options and highlighted the ecological consequences of capitalism, consumerism, and unfettered economic growth.
Climate denial will continue to attract more niche right-wing influencers like Tate
Andrew Tate is yet another example of a right-wing culture warrior foraying into climate change denial in order to fully immerse followers in a paranoid and cynical worldview that is detached from nuance and reality. If Tate felt that taking up the issue publicly would benefit his influence over the far-right online fever swamps, even though it arguably backfired this time, others who share his views will continue to emulate him.
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many fox blame her for putin invasion ukraine:
GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): But the left prefers to fuel a war instead of a country. And the absurd is we have been instructed by the media, the Democrats for decades that energy is a moral issue. As far as the planet goes -- coal, fracking, fossil fuels -- these are immoral things. These are crimes against the environment. And yet, it's okay to buy the dirty oil from a war machine. So, it shows you that the moral stances of these people who had been telling us for decades how much better they were than us -- us evil right-wingers in our pickup trucks, in our gas-guzzling SUVs -- they're actually the most immoral people, because they were phonies and they were liars.
But there is an amazing -- Russia played us for the longest time. They love that we denigrated our energy prowess. They loved that we bought the idea that nuclear power was bad and that solar was good, and that Greta was a hero because that made us more reliant on Russian oil, and now,Iran's oilbecause we're sitting -- we were convinced, probably through the help of Russia, that our fuel industry was bad. So, now you look at Ukraine, there are fingerprints there of thehard green movementbecauseRussia used the green movement to play us and preserve their own power by selling oil.
JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): Yeah, they funded all those campaigns: "Anti-fracking, anti-nuclear." They did it.
GUTFELD: Yes.
MARTHA MACCALLUM (CO-HOST):Yes.
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Fox News' Greg Gutfeld defends Republicans for heckling Joe Biden as he spoke about his dead son
03/02/22
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Fox News host puts blame on Greta Thunberg for the Ukrainian invasion: “Maybe she'll drop solar panels down into Kyiv to save people”
02/28/22
KATIE PAVLICH (CO-HOST): Greg, isn't this the reason we are in this situation in the first place, because they can't get themselves off of Russian oil because European countries and the United States are fine with -- they say we're not gonna drill here, but we'll still get oil from somewhere else.
GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): I've been waiting for this segment for days. This is the irony of letting children like Greta Thunberg take up shelf space in your brain. Think about all of the adults that took her opinion over the – over the progress made in fracking or drilling or the necessity of coal in nearly every country. But – you know -- no, no, no no. "How dare you?" Remember that! "How dare you?" We all sat there, oh, maybe she'll drop solar panels down into Kyiv to save people. It's not going to happen.
China and Russia must have been laughing at uswhen we were allowed to be lectured on world affairs by a 14-year-old. Oil is a world affair, energy is a world affair, fuel's a world affair. We got to wake up, we also got to get back into the nuclear world – the anti-nuke ideology put us in a hole for many decades. It's probably the greenest fuel that we will ever see. The sooner we get back to nuclear, the sooner we – we were almost energy independent, remember the good old days?
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Fox News' Gutfeld blames inflation on “wokeism and virtue signaling”
02/11/22 5:43 PM EST
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https://newrepublic.com/article/154879/misogyny-climate-deniers
no lnx
Martin Gelin/August 28, 2019
The Misogyny of Climate Deniers
Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much? Researchers have some troubling answers to that question.
Teenage activist Greta Thunberg (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images)
Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have difficulty sticking to the blasé tone when it comes to a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden.
Lomborg has repeatedly mocked and criticized Greta Thunberg, the prominent young activist who has been sailing across the Atlantic to attend the UN’s Youth Climate Summit and other meetings in the U.S. In June, he tweeted out a cartoon that implied Greta was only useful to climate activists because being young made her unassailable—in four years, it joked, she’d be replaced with someone younger still. Earlier in the year, he’d asked why the World Economic Forum was listening to her at all, and approvingly shared a Quillette article which called Thunberg a fanatic and “absolutist” and which argued adults had a duty to correct her childlike naiveté.
And Lomborg’s on the more civil end of Thunberg’s critics. In April, while tweeting that her policies were “unrealistic” and “costly,” he added that, “of course, she should be treated respectfully, just like all participants in the climate debate.” Several of his followers didn’t seem to care for the caveat, attacking Thunberg with comments about her age and mental health in replies.
As Thunberg approached America, she was followed by a tsunami of male rage. On her first day of sailing, a multi-millionaire Brexit activist tweeted that he wished a freak accident would destroy her boat. A conservative Australian columnist called her a “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement,” while the British far-right activist David Vance attacked the “sheer petulance of this arrogant child.”
In the U.S., former Trump staffer Steve Milloy recently called Thunberg a “teenage puppet,” and claimed that “the world laughs at this Greta charade,” while a widely shared far-right meme showed Trump tipping The Statue of Liberty to crush her boat. We can expect a surge of similar attacks in the U.S. as she arrives in New York this week.
While these examples might feel like mere coincidence to some, the idea that white men would lead the attacks on Greta Thunberg is consistent with a growing body of research linking gender reactionaries to climate-denialism—some of the research coming from Thunberg’s own country. Researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, which recently launched the world’s first academic research center to study climate denialism, have for years been examining a link between climate deniers and the anti-feminist far-right.
In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”
The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.
Climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy.”
“There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment” Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.
The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.
These findings align with similar ones in the United States, where there is a massive gender gap in views on climate change, and many men perceive climate activism as inherently feminine, according to research published in 2017. “In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female,” marketing professors Aaron R. Brough and James E.B. Wilkie explained at Scientific American. “In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment,” they write.
In the past year, young women such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. and Thunberg in Europe have become the global faces of climate activism, often with tremendous political impact. In the United States, Ocasio-Cortez has helped transform what was once considered a bit of fringe rhetoric—the Green New Deal—into a topic of regular conversation. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a recent poll, one out of three Germans said that Thunberg has changed their views on climate change.
The rise of Thunberg and Ocasio-Cortez has generated a predictable backlash among conservative men. In the U.S., Ocasio-Cortez has become an obsession on right-wing media. Fox News mentioned her an average of 76 times a day during her first month in Congress. Now, Greta Thunberg is becoming a similar target for European nationalists. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party seems to have coordinated their attacks on Thunberg with the right-wing European Institute for Climate and Energy think tank.
Climate change used to be a bipartisan concern, the first Bush senior presidency famously promising to tackle global warming. But as conservative male mockery of Thunberg and others shows, climate politics has quickly become the next big battle in the culture war—on a global scale.
As conservative parties become increasingly tied to nationalism, and misogynist rhetoric dominates the far-right, Hultman and his fellow researchers at Chalmers University worry that the ties between climate skeptics and misogyny will strengthen. What was once a practical problem, with general agreement on the facts, has become a matter of identity. And fear of change is powerful motivation.
This article has been updated with specifics on Lomborg’s writings on Thunberg, as well as the removal of a reference to an April 24 tweet by Lomborg. The tweet referred to the author of an article defending Thunberg—not to Thunberg herself, as this story originally stated.
Martin Gelin @M_Gelin
Martin Gelin is a journalist based in New York.
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an 921 no lnx twt
Climate inaction leaves majority of young people believing humanity is 'doomed'
Julia Conley and Common Dreams September 15, 2021
Amidst a sharp increase in deadly wildfires and flooding, increasingly violent storms, and extreme heat, new research published Tuesday found that refusal by governments to act on the climate emergency is causing a widespread sense of hopelessness and eco-anxiety in teenagers and young adults worldwide.
The global advocacy group Avaaz joined researchers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and five other universities to survey 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25—the first large-scale eco-anxiety survey of its kind—and discovered that majorities of the respondents were fearful for the lives and livelihoods of their families and the future of the planet.
As Luisa Neubauer, a 25-year-old leader of the global Fridays for Future movement in Germany, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, while the climate extremes caused by the planetary emergency are frightening, inaction by world leaders "is too much to handle, too much to accept."
"Government is pushing us in front of a bus,"Neubauer told the outlet.
The mental health professionals who conducted the study spoke with young people in 10 countries including Nigeria, the Philippines, India, the U.K., and the U.S., finding that respondents in both wealthy countries and the Global South are facing "feelings of anger, fear, and powerlessness" as the climate crisis directly causes at least one famine, deadly flash flooding, and wildfires in multiple regions.
Nearly half of respondents said their worries about the climate crisis negatively affect their daily life and their ability to function, and more than half told the experts they feel humanity is "doomed."
Four in 10 said they would hesitate to have children in the future due to the state of the planet, while three-quarters of respondents described their futures as "frightening."
Avaaz reported that one of the most "shocking" findings was how respondents described their feelings about government inaction, including more than half who said they feel policymakers "are betraying them."
"If this isn't a wake up call for world leaders, what is?" asked Avaaz.
Young people in the cyclone-ravages Philippines and Brazil, where deforestation—driven by President Jair Bolsonaro's government—has become increasingly destructive in recent years, showed the most anxiety of the countries surveyed. More than nine in 10 respondents said they were frightened about the future. Caroline Hickman, lead author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Tuesday, cautioned adults against telling young people it is up to them to save the future of the planet. "Thinking the way to cure eco-anxiety is eco-action isn't right," Hickman told Thomson Reuters, adding that what will solve the climate crisis is decisive action by world governments.
The survey "shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change. The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments," Hickman told the BBC. "Governments need to listen to the science and not pathologize young people who feel anxious."
The survey results were released less than two months ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26), where policymakers will meet in Glasgow to discuss commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, provide climate mitigation support for frontline communities across the globe, and rapidly transition to an emissions-free energy system.
Young people are "doing everything we can" to push for climate action, Neubauer told Thomson Reuters, "but that won't be enough."
"We won't fix it" through the Fridays for Future movement, she added. "We need everyone there." no lnx
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medaite
no lnx
‘Children of the Corn Level Scary’: Political Pundits Respond to Greta Thunberg’s Fiery UN Speech
By Charlie Nash Sep 23rd, 2019, 1:45 pm
1337 Comments
Political pundits took to Twitter, Monday, to air their thoughts on 16-year-old environmentalist Greta Thunberg‘s fiery speech before the United Nations.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words … entire ecosystems are collapsing, we are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” declared Thunberg during her speech to world leaders. “You are failing us… Young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”
Ryan Saavedra, a reporter for Ben Shapiro‘s Daily Wire, described the speech as “absolute madness,” while conservative commentator and former RedState CEO Erick Erickson claimed Thunberg and her supporters are “going to move quickly to violence to overthrow democratic governments.”
This speech by far-left activist Greta Thunberg is absolute madness pic.twitter.com/RFyIPZlajQ
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 23, 2019
Children of the Corn level scary here. They’re going to move quickly to violence to overthrow democratic governments. https://t.co/6Hia5xcC6z
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 23, 2019
Washington Examiner writer Tiana Lowe published an article accusing Thunberg’s parents of “child abuse,” which was in turn shared by Turning Point USA’s Chief Creative Officer Benny Johnson, who referred to Thunberg as “David Hogg 2” in reference to Stoneman Douglas school shooting survivor and activist David Hogg.
This Greta Thunberg thing is child abuse https://t.co/R8ePnW06vQ
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) September 23, 2019
David Hogg 2 pic.twitter.com/mXVBnKTj4X
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) September 23, 2019
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk branded the 16-year-old “ANTIFA climate activist Greta Von Thunburg,” while Buck Sexton, host of the Buck Sexton Show, criticized CNN for enabling her “propaganda.”
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The same people who say we can’t criticize 16-year old ANTIFA climate activist Greta Von Thunburg
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…Spent months shamelessly attacking the Covington Catholic High School kids—just because they supported our president
??
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 23, 2019
does CNN have any thoughts on her message?
or is the entire network content to provide this young woman with a massive global platform without any context, counterpoint or fact checking?
Any of its "facts first" anchors or pundits want to weigh in on this speech?
Propaganda. https://t.co/be714t0RbA
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) September 23, 2019
Those in Thunberg’s defense included actress Rose McGowan, CNN’s Ana Navarro and W. Kamau Bell, HuffPost Senior Politics Reporter Jennifer Bendery, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and California State Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks.
Greta Thunberg speaks a chilling truth. Thank you for helping to wake us up, I’m so sorry our generation hurt yours pic.twitter.com/mBeANdnMgm
— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) September 23, 2019
We are all Greta.
pic.twitter.com/FE4ucXuzcd
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) September 23, 2019
.@GretaThunberg makes it plain about climate change. This should be an embarrassment to every politician in DC. SHOULD BE, but probably won't be because ?????? & ??????. pic.twitter.com/i7lcUYNVRr
— W. Kamau Bell (@wkamaubell) September 23, 2019
Greta Thunberg's remarks today to world leaders at #UNGA were as passionate as I've seen her. Just straight fire.
"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you." https://t.co/uZRq7daRRO
— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) September 23, 2019
Listen to Greta Thunberg:
"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?" pic.twitter.com/IKBpRIIOoi
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) September 23, 2019
The world has found its shero, and her name is @GretaThunberg. #howdareyou pic.twitter.com/x1ivMd0oA9
— Buffy Wicks (@BuffyWicks) September 23, 2019
On Sunday, convicted felon and author Dinesh D’Souza, who was pardoned by President Donald Trump last year, compared Thunberg to Nazi propaganda.
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2x?
https://www.mediamatters.org/dinesh-dsouza/right-wing-media-launch-unhinged-attacks-greta-thunberg
no lnx
Right-wing media launch unhinged attacks on Greta Thunberg
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY ZACHARY PLEAT
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM TED MACDONALD & ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED 09/24/19 1:43 PM EDT
Right-wing media figures -- many of whom deny the evidence of human-caused climate change -- have been making deranged attacks on Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg in recent weeks and after she addressed the United Nations.
On Monday, Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles attacked Thunberg on the Fox News program The Story with Martha MacCallum as a “mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents.” The segment was widely covered by news outlets after the other guest, Christopher Hahn, immediately shamed Knowles for his “despicable” comment. Although the Fox show’s anchor failed to object to Knowles’ attack as it happened, the network later apologized to Thunberg for his “disgraceful” comment.
Fox also told The Hollywood Reporter that it likely won’t book Knowles as a guest on its shows again, but many other conservatives have made unhinged attacks on Thunberg in recent weeks as well. Some conservatives have advocated using violence against her; others have likened her to Nazi leaders and propaganda; and more, like Knowles, have denied her agency by smearing her as “mentally ill” and/or controlled by others. Notably, shortly after Knowles used his Fox News appearance to attack Thunberg, Fox host Laura Ingraham broadcast a segment that compared the climate activist to an evil character from the horror film Children of the Corn.
Here are some of right-wing media figures’ worst attacks:
Conservative blogger Stephen Miller: “Tase and arrest her.”
Breitbart.com editor John Nolte: “I can’t tell if Greta needs a spanking or a psychological intervention … Probably both.”
Conspiracy theorist website Infowars and Alex Jones: “Watch Greta Thunberg channel Hitler In Hate-Filled Rant.”
Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza compared Thunberg to “Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks” who “were often used in Nazi propaganda. An old Goebbels technique!”
Far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos shared an image on Telegram suggesting Thunberg has fetal alcohol syndrome.
Milo Yiannapoulos sharing an image of Greta Thunberg on Telegram
Pro-Trump social media figure Logan Cook, known online as Carpe Donktum, edited a video of Thunberg’s speech in the style of a Nazi rally and posted it to YouTube in a video titled “Mein Climate Change.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk lamented that “we can’t criticize 16-year old ANTIFA climate activist Greta Von Thunburg.”
Far-right “The_Donald” subreddit: Thunberg is “like a Nazi but kinda tarded.”
Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson: Thunberg is an “annoying, foreign, communist propagandist.”
Climate denier Marc Morano: Thunberg is “causing and instilling fear in millions of kids around the world.”
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CitationFrom the September 23 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Grabien founder Tom Elliott: Thunberg’s speech is “what brainwashing looks like.”
Media Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor: Thunberg is “being taken advantage of by liberals.”
Pro-Trump Twitter troll Amy Mek: Thunberg is a “creation of powerful Marxists, Soros-backed NGO's, Al Gore, and more.”
American Greatness senior contributor Julie Kelly: Thunberg is acting like “a hostage attempting to please her captors.”
[The Global Climate Strike] is the latest stunt orchestrated by the international climate cabal and yet another example of how the Left shamelessly exploits and manipulates children to propagandize any cause. (Think of the high school students in Parkland, Florida.) But this time, the climate cabal is using a special-needs teenager from Sweden to indoctrinate more children and adults with climate change dogma.
Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old from Stockholm—which is ironic because the teen exhibits many traits associated with a hostage attempting to please her captors.
In a way, Thunberg is not the face of a climate crisis but an alarming example of how the climate cabal has needlessly terrified two generations of young people. The emotional, physical, and intellectual damage wrought by the climate change movement now is coming into clear view and it’s an outcome that should enrage every parent.
Climate denier Steve Milloy: “Greta the Climate Puppet leads a twisted cult.”
Conservative author Ann Coulter: Thunberg is a “human shield” of the left.
National Review Editor Rich Lowry: Thunberg is “a pawn being used by adults for their own interests.”
Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty parties can’t be found at Turtle Bay. A 16-year-old from Sweden, Thunberg thundered, “I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean,” which would have been easy enough to achieve, beginning with not taking two weeks to sail across the Atlantic last month in a jet-travel-eschewing publicity stunt.
Greta Thunberg is the leading edge of a youth movement against climate change — including a global “climate strike” last week — that is being promoted and celebrated by adults who find it useful for their own purposes.
Kids are powerful pawns. The catchphrase “for the children” has a seductive political appeal, while kids offer their adult supporters a handy two-step. The same people who say, “The world must heed this 16-year-old girl” will turn around and say to anyone who pushes back, “How dare you criticize a 16-year-old girl?”
Pro-Trump commentator Candace Owens: “One day, #GretaThunberg will realize that she is a victim of child abuse, not climate change. … The Left is stooping to new lows with this blatant example of child exploitation.”
Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh: “Greta Thunberg Is A Child Abuse Victim.”
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old girl selected by the media to be the poster child of climate alarmism, gave another hysterical speech on Monday. This time, at the U.N., she declared that the Earth is undergoing a “mass extinction" which, she warns, probably cannot be averted.
“How dare you," the distraught teen cried. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood." On one level, I can relate to this sentiment because it's exactly what I said after watching the “Lion King" remake. On another level, as a parent, I find this girl very hard to watch. It is obvious that she really believes her delusional doomsday fantasies. That is because they are not her fantasies — she is merely repeating what she has been told by adults who know better.
…
But what we're being told is that an obsessive, mentally troubled young girl came to believe — mistakenly — that the apocalypse is upon us. Rather than calm these terrible fears, and redirect her in a healthier direction, the adults in her life have only encouraged her paranoia. And now the media is only too happy to exploit her fear in order to stoke even more fear. Creating fear with fear. That is the media's specialty.
This is child abuse. If any grown up in Thunberg's life really cared about her psychological and emotional well-being, they would sit her down and explain that climate change is not going to destroy human civilization. Yes, the climate is changing. Climates tend to do that. But whatever role humans play in that process, and to whatever degree, it is not going to result in the end of all life as we know it.
National Review Senior Editor Jay Nordlinger: “I've never liked it when little girls are manipulated for politics.”
Right-wing website PragerU: Thunberg is just a “terrified kid” victimized by “leftists.”
Infowars-affiliated conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson: Thunberg is a “child human shield” being used for “hysterical propaganda.”
The Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi: “Adults have spent a year creating” Thunberg.
Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived.
In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster. This is a tragedy.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg lectured the world. And maybe she’s right. We’ve failed her by raising a generation of pagans who’ve filled the vacuum left by the absence of faith, not with rationality, but with a cultish worship of Mother Earth and the state. Although, to be fair, the Bible-thumping evangelical’s moral certitude is nothing but a rickety edifice compared to the moral conviction of a Greta Thunberg.
It’s not, of course, her fault. Adults have spent a year creating a 16-year-old because her soundbites comport with their belief system. It was “something about her raw honesty around a message of blunt-force fear [that] turned this girl from invisible to global,” says CNN in a news report about a child with a narrow, age-appropriate, grasp of the world.
It should be noted that “blunt-force fear” is indeed the correct way to describe the concerted misinformation that Thunberg has likely been subjected to since nursery school. There probably isn’t a public school in America that hasn’t plied the panic-stricken talk of environmental disaster in their auditoriums over and over again.
Pro-Trump comedian Terrence Williams: “Why exploit children?”
IN THIS ARTICLE
Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh-D_Souza-MMFA-Tag.png
Charlie Kirk
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Rich Lowry
285 COMMENTS
Related
Fox News guest calls climate activist Greta Thunberg “a mentally ill child”
09/23/19 8:17 PM EDT
Laura Ingraham compares Greta Thunberg and youth climate activists to Stephen King's “Children of the Corn”
09/23/19 10:50 PM EDT
Fox guest attacks climate activist Greta Thunberg: “She is causing and instilling fear in millions of kids around the world”
09/23/19 9:12 AM EDT
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https://www.drillednews.com/post/why-is-news-coverage-leaving-out-the-fossil-fuel-funding-of-the-anti-greta
[pix]
Journalists are creating a false equivalence between environmental activist Greta Thunberg and a 19-year-old German Youtuber named Naomi Seibt, without including information about the fossil fuel ties of the group funding her.
Seibt recently joined the Heartland Institute, a think tank with documented fossil fuel industry funding, and is scheduled to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., this week.
The coverage of Seibt, which has appeared in outlets including The Washington Post and The Independent, has focused on her “skepticism” while failing to note her fossil fuel ties, which are not limited to the funding connection. Several of her talking points are demonstrably false, decades-old talking points cooked up by the fossil fuel industry itself.
When mainstream media outlets generally considered to be credible leave out such details, subsequent pieces in smaller outlets tend to follow their framing, which can allow disinformation topropagate more quickly.
The Washington Post, which was the first American media outlet to cover Seibt, described her as “like Greta...blond, eloquent and European.” Thunberg is a brunette, but the more important difference between her and Seibt is that she cites scientific studies, while many of Seibt’s points on climate come from industry, not science.
The Post's story stated that the Heartland Institute is “funded largely by anonymous donors” without mentioning any of the known donors, some of which are fossil fuel companies or trade groups that represent the industry.
When the Post story came out, Seibt had about 50,000 YouTube followers, a relatively small audience for the platform. In the days since, she has gained more than 10,000 more.
During a recentinvestigation by German outlets CORRECTIV and Frontal21, Heartland director James Taylor told undercover journalists that much of the organization's money is funneled through the dark money group Donors Trust, which has ties to Charles Koch.
“Donors Trust is now directing between two-thirds and three-quarters of its budget to Heartland to support its climate-skeptical positions," Taylor told the undercover reporters.
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry trade group whose members include ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, also gave $75,000 to the Heartland Institute in 2017.
The Post story also quoted Graham Brookie, who directs the Digital Forensic Research Lab, an arm of the nonprofit Atlantic Council. Brookie said the ideology Seibt presents “is not outright disinformation," but that it does "bear resemblance to a model we use called the 4d’s — dismiss the message, distort the facts, distract the audience, and express dismay at the whole thing.”
The Post's story did not mention that the Atlantic Council is funded by ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Chevron, Shell, and BP.
In response to a request for comment, The Washington Post’s Molly Gannon said only, “Our story speaks for itself.”
Other news outlets seem to have copied the omission. The Guardian, The Independent, France24, the Daily Mail, Mediaite, Mic, and MassLive all published follow-on stories that did not mention the Heartland Institute’s financial backing from the fossil fuel industry.
The Heartland Institute seems to be trying to look like it has the youth on its side. So it has found a Gen Z surrogate who can parrot decades-old fossil fuel talking points, and earned major press coverage that frames her as a figure who compares to Thunberg, while completely leaving out the group's obvious, and documented, oil and gas industry connections.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/were-staring-into-the-abyss-unhinged-trump-rally-in-colorado-highlights-stakes-of-2020-election/
20k only half could get in? vs bernie 11k? preview of 2020? bash greta time man of year
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Climate activist Greta Thunberg told the World Economic Forum that governments should divest from fossil fuels given the catastrophe of the climate crisis. In response, United States Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sneered at her activism and told her to go study economics. Just one problem: Thunberg was right.
Mnuchin’s own government released a National Climate Assessment in 2018 that said that climate change, if left unaddressed, would cost the U.S. economy $500 billion per year. A massive new report by the Bank for International Settlements also has linked climate change to a possible financial crisis. Furthermore, actual economist Gernot Wagner told The Washington Post that Mnuchin is completely wrong about Economics 101, using a delightful analogy about rabbits on a communal meadow.
Right-wing media sites were thrilled at Mnuchin’s attack, with some suggesting that Thunberg had a mind full of mush and others saying that people like her should be seen and not heard. In short: it was the standard information-free bullying that you would expect.
Mnuchin then dropped by CNBC's Squawk Box to discuss his remarks. What ensued was a cavalcade of lies and climate denial.
The softball CNBC interview had Mnuchin throwing out a number of right-wing talking points on climate change and generally showing that he has no understanding of the issue. Co-anchor Joe Kernan just egged him on, even suggesting that climate alarmism was driving increasing discussions of the climate crisis.
In fact, the entire conversation seemed to take place in a universe where climate change is not an urgent problem, where Australia is not on fire, where ocean life is not dying, and where the United States is not repeatedly hit with climate-fueled catastrophes like wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. The only voice of reason in the discussion was co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin, who used JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon of all people as a counterpoint to what Mnuchin was saying. The media should be touting what experts say, not what bank CEOs are saying.
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djt mnu condescenion may backfire? they feel davos a safe space for assholry/denial? or she is such a threat must be swatted down?
new 120 an
Foreclosure King’ Steve Mnuchin tells Greta Thunberg to go study economics
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-why-climate-change-has-become-a-lightning-rod-for-business-and-finance-leaders-report/
no lnx
Here’s why climate change has become a ‘lightning rod for business and finance leaders’: report
Written by Alex Henderson January 24, 2020
Countless articles have focused on the environmental and safety aspects of climate change, especially in liberal and progressive publications. But Dino Rabouin and Amy Harder, in an article published by Axios on January 24, discuss and analyze climate change from a business standpoint — explaining that climate change has “suddenly become a lightning rod for business and finance leaders around the world.”
Drawing on data Axios received from the High Lantern Group, Rabouin and Harder report that climate change “generated the highest degree of public pressure on corporations by activists, policymakers and journalists” in 2019 — which was a 77% increase from 2018.
High Lantern’s data, according to Rabouin and Harder, “includes analysis of more than 6 million tweets.” Rob Gluck, managing partner for High Lantern, notes that “the vast majority of relevant public actors” are “using (Twitter) to communicate.”
“In recent months,” Rabouin and Harder observe, “the world’s foremost economic institutions have advocated for policies cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This trend is driven by a confluence of factors, including more extreme weather and greater public pressure.”
Institutions that have been discussing climate change, Rabouin and Harder point out, include “major central banks” as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). In a research paper released on January 20, BIS warned that climate change could cause “potentially extremely financially disruptive events that could be behind the next systemic financial crisis.”
According to BIS, “This complex collective action problem requires coordinating actions among many players, including governments, the private sector, civil society and the international community.”
IMF head Kristalina Georgieva, in a speech last week, asserted that the IMF “ought to begin to build standards for disclosure of climate risks” — and that includes “mandatory disclosure standards.”
Journalist Josh Holland addressed climate change’s financial costs in a September 2019 article for The Nation, stressing that a Green New Deal wouldn’t be nearly as costly as the effects of climate change. Holland noted that in a 2015 report, the Economist Intelligence Unit warned that “the asset management industry — and thus the wider community of investors of all sizes — is facing the prospect of significant losses from the effects of climate change.”
Rabouin and Harder also note that “BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, says it’s making climate change a pillar of its investment strategy, and even Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are calling for a price on carbon emissions.”
The Axios reporters emphasize, however, that “all this rhetoric should be scrutinized carefully and often” because “talking about supporting policies addressing climate change is quite different from actually doing something about it.”
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djt mnu condescenion may backfire? they feel davos a safe space for assholery/denial? or she is such a threat must be swatted down? plus woman uppity is irresistable target?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/foreclosure-king-steve-mnuchin-tells-greta-thunberg-to-go-study-economics/
no lnx
‘Foreclosure King’ Steve Mnuchin tells Greta Thunberg to go study economics
Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams January 23, 2020
During press briefing Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, former Goldman Sachs banker and current U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissed Greta Thunberg’s call for complete divestment from fossil fuels and condescendingly told the 17-year-old climate activist to go study economics.
“Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I’m confused,” Mnuchin said. “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.”
Critics immediately hit back at Mnuchin’s suggestion that one need have a degree in economics to understand the severity of the climate emergency and the steps necessary to avert global catastrophe.
“Here’s what Mnuchin learned from economics studies: as the ‘foreclosure king,’ he ran a company that booted elderly residents from their homes due to onerous loans and technicalities,” tweeted Miller Center fellow Chris Lu, referring to Mnuchin’s destructive tenure as CEO of OneWest Bank.
Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein pointed to the thousands of academics who have echoed Thunberg’s call for fossil fuel divestment:
Naomi Klein
@NaomiAKlein
Somebody should tell Mnuchin about the hundreds of Harvard faculty members - and thousands at other universities - who have called for fossil fuel divestment too. https://harvardfacultydivest.com/ https://twitter.com/AP/status/1220294681663287296 …
Faculty Petition for Fossil Fuel Divestment
For a Fossil Free Endowment
harvardfacultydivest.com
The Associated Press
?
@AP
U.S. Treasury chief says it's ''a joke''' when asked about climate activist Greta Thunberg's recommendation that the public and private sectors should divest from fossil fuels. He says she can't give economic advice until she gets a college degree. http://apne.ws/Px1YqDW
Other critics piled on:
Peter Daou
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@peterdaou
Look at #Mnuchin, this smug clown. #GretaThunberg has more integrity and wisdom in her pinky toe than a thousand Mnuchins.
These Trump cronies are wretched people, truly.https://www.thedailybeast.com/mnuchin-patronizes-greta-thunberg-saying-go-study-economics-then-well-talk …
Mnuchin Patronizes Greta Thunberg: Go Study Economics, Then We’ll Talk
The Treasury secretary was asked if he should listen to teen climate-change activist’s advice on divesting from fossil fuels.
thedailybeast.com
David Dayen
@ddayen
Steve Mnuchin thinks Greta Thunberg needs an economic education, where she can take courses like "strip-mining Sears assets 103" and "forging signatures to take homes away from people 204" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/davos-2020-mnuchin-criticizes-thunberg-says-she-should-study-economics-at-college.html …
Mnuchin says Thunberg can tell us what to do 'after she goes and studies economics in college'
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sharply criticized the financial credentials of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg on Thursday.
cnbc.com
Mnuchin’s swipe at Thunberg came after the Swedish activist warned Tuesday in a speech to the World Economic Forum that global elites are “fueling the flames” of the climate crisis “by the hour.”
“We demand at this year’s World Economic Forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions, and governments: Immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction. Immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies. And immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels,” said Thunberg. “We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030, or even 2021. We want this done now.”
Anticipating attacks from elites like Mnuchin, Thunberg added: “It may seem like we’re asking for a lot. And you will of course say that we are naïve. But this is just the very minimum amount of effort that is needed to start the rapid sustainable transition.”
“So either you do this or you’re going to have to explain to your children why you are giving up on the 1.5-degree target,” said Thunberg. “Giving up without even trying. Well I’m here to tell you that, unlike you, my generation will not give up without a fight.”
new 120 an
Foreclosure King’ Steve Mnuchin tells Greta Thunberg to go study economics
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120 ew
Ashutosh Pandey
Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is returning to the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the 2020 World Economic Forum with a strong and clear message: put an end to the fossil fuel "madness."
Thunberg's missive is aimed at, among others, U.S. President Donald Trump, who in the past has mocked the Swedish environmental campaigner, saying she has an "anger management problem." Trump, who is among the most prominent climate change skeptics, is returning to Davos after giving it a miss in 2019 due to a government shutdown.
It's the first time Trump and Thunberg would be present at the same event since last year's United Nations climate change summit in New York, where the teenager could be seen staring down the U.S. president as the two briefly crossed paths.
Later, Thunberg — named TIME magazine's Person of the Year 2019 — told the BBC that she "wouldn't have wasted [her] time" talking to Trump about the climate crisis at the UN event.
"Honestly, I don't think I would have said anything because obviously he's not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me," she said.
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'State of Emergency'
Thunberg, who famously told Davos participants last year that "our house is on fire," has, however, found support among the organizers of the World Economic Forum, including its81-year-old founder Klaus Schwab, who said the world is facing "a state of emergency."
"We do not want to reach the tipping point of irreversibility on climate change," Schwab told reporters on Tuesday. "We do not want the next generations to inherit a world which becomes ever more hostile and ever less habitable —just think of the wildfires in Australia," he said.
An annual risks survey published by the WEF on Wednesday put climate and other environmental threats ahead of risks posed by geopolitical tensions and cyberattacks. It's the first time that the survey found the top five long-term risks were all environmental, from extreme weather events to businesses and governments failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Stakeholder Capitalism
Sustainability is the main theme at this year's Davos meeting, taking place at a time the world is grappling with global warming which is threatening to become worse because of growing divisions among nations and businesses on how to tackle it.
The meeting, which will see over 50 heads of state and government, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, descend on the Alpine resort, seeks to give concrete meaning to "stakeholder capitalism" — a concept that businesses should serve the interests of all society rather than simply their shareholders.
"Business has now to fully embrace stakeholder capitalism, which means not only maximizing profits, but use their capabilities and resources in cooperation with governments and civil society to address the key issues of this decade," Schwab said. "They have to actively contribute to a more cohesive and sustainable world."
Davos 2020 by the Numbers
- About 3,000 participants from nearly 120 countries. One in four participants is a woman
- 53 heads of state and government
- Nearly 1,700 business leaders, including CEOs from 8 of the 10 most valuable companies in the world
- Over 350 sessions and workshops
- 88% of the cars used by the WEF are electric or hybrid
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/greta-thunberg-and-20-youth-climate-activists-call-on-davos-attendees-to-abandon-the-fossil-fuel-economy/
no lnx
Greta Thunberg and 20 youth climate activists call on Davos attendees to ‘abandon the fossil fuel economy’
Written by Roxanne Cooper January 11, 2020
As climate groups launched a new campaign targeting Wall Street’s funding of the dirty energy industry and school strikers took part in weekly #FridaysForFuture protests across the globe, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and 20 fellow youth activists published an op-ed calling on world leaders to “abandon the fossil fuel economy.”
“History has not shown thecorporate world’s willingness to hold themselves accountable. So it falls on us, the children, to do that.”
—youth climate activists
Business and government leaders will come together in Davos, Switzerland later this month for the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum. This year’s theme is “stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world.” Thunberg and her co-authors explain in the Guardian that “young climate activists and school strikers from around the world will be present to put pressure on these leaders.”
“We demand that at this year’s forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions, and governments immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies, and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels,” the op-ed declares. “We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even 2021, we want this done now—as in right now.”
The youth activists point out that despite the “climate and environmental emergency,” banks have collectively poured at least $1.9 trillion into the fossil fuel industry since global governments adopted the Paris climate agreement in December 2015, according to an analysis from the Rainforest Action Network and other advocacy groups.
“The world of finance has a responsibility to the planet, the people, and all other species living on it. In fact, it ought to be in every company and stakeholder’s interest to make sure the planet they live on will thrive,” says the op-ed. “But history has not shown the corporate world’s willingness to hold themselves accountable. So it falls on us, the children, to do that.”
“Anything less than immediately ceasing these investments in the fossil fuel industry would be a betrayal of life itself,” the op-ed concludes. “Today’s business as usual is turning into a crime against humanity. We demand that leaders play their part in putting an end to this madness. Our future is at stake, let that be their investment.”
Thunberg’s co-authors are Jean Hinchliffe, Australia; Danielle Ferreira de Assis, Brazil; Joel Enrique Peña Panichine, Chile; Robin Jullian, France; Luisa Neubauer, Germany; Licipriya Kangujam, India; David Wicker, Italy; Julia Haddad, Lebanon; Oladosu Adenike, Nigeria; Iqbal Badruddin, Pakistan; Arshak Makichyan, Russia; Holly Gillibrand, Scotland; Alejandro Martínez, Spain; Isabelle Axelsson, Sweden; Sophia Axelsson, Sweden; Ell Jarl, Sweden; Mina Pohankova, Sweden; Linus Dolder, Switzerland; Vanessa Nakate, Uganda; and Tokata Iron Eyes, the United States.
The op-ed was welcomed as “incredible” and a “barnburner” by adult climate leaders.
“Brilliant article by youth strikers from around the world,” tweeted the U.K. grassroots movement Labour for a Green New Deal. “We need to ditch fossil fuels immediately and build a new economy for people and planet. The ruling classes will never do it, so it’s up to us.”
Some organizers of Stop the Money Pipeline—which officially launched at Jane Fonda’s final #FireDrillFriday event on Capitol Hill—noted that the op-ed’s message aligned with theirs. As Common Dreams reported Thursday, the new campaign demands that banks, insurers, and asset managers cut ties with the fossil fuel companies that are wrecking the planet.
Moira Birss, finance campaign director at Amazon Watch, shared Stop the Money Pipeline’s website and the op-ed from youth activists in a series of tweets Friday:
Author and activist Bill McKibben, who co-founded the environmental group 350.org, was among a small group ofStop the Money Pipeline organizers arrested Friday for occupying a D.C. branch of JPMorgan Chase, one of the campaign’s top targets.
McKibben pointed to the op-ed in a Twitter thread about the Chase action:
“The world has two power centers, political and financial,” McKibben said in a statement Friday. “And we have to go after both if we have any hope of slowing down the pace of global heating.”
“Now truly, it is daunting to take on the sort of central pillars of global capital… These people are huge and strong and powerful,” McKibben said on the most recent Fire Drill Friday teach-in, which was livestreamed on Facebook Thursday night.
“On the other hand,” he added, “if we can get them to begin to bend, the effects will be rapid and global because all the money in the world is concentrated in a few places.”
===
==
desmog map of attackers, incl rebel media, heartland gwpf
https://www.desmog.co.uk/**2019/09/15**/attacks-greta-thunberg-right-wing-free-market-network
many lnx
“Freak yachting accidents do happen…”
That was how British businessman, Trump ally, and Brexit bankroller Arron Banks responded to the news that Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who inspired the school climate strikes movement, was sailing to America to attend the UN Climate Action Summit. His scorn was not unique.
Many people have already spilled thousands of words of commentary explaining how personal attacks on Greta — often lobbed by old white men, sometimes mocking her Aspergers — are unacceptable. But understanding where those attackers come from, ideologically and professionally, casts an important light on some of their dark statements.
That’s because a large subsection of the commentariat driving the abuse of Greta is part of an established network of radical free-marketeer lobby groups — a network that has firm ties to the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science denial.
European Attacks
Greta first shot to prominence in Europe, and that’s where the earliest mudslinging emerged.
Banks’ tweet was one of the most high-profile. He is among the most prominent funders of Brexit, with long-standing ties to the UK Independence Party and its former leader Nigel Farage. UKIP’s politician, Neil Hamilton, was one of the first to be called out for posting what was perceived by many as a bullying tweet directed at Greta, who is 16 years old.
Arron Banks
@Arron_banks
Freak yachting accidents do happen in August ... https://twitter.com/CarolineLucas/status/1161656057023934464 …
Caroline Lucas
?
@CarolineLucas
Bon voyage to @GretaThunberg for her 2-week zero-carbon trip by sail across the North Atlantic
She’s carrying the vital message to the UN that time is running out to address the #ClimateEmergency
View image on Twitter
Farage has now set up a new outfit, the Brexit Party, also bankrolled by Banks.The party has 29 members in the European Parliament, many of them climate science deniers, thanks to winning 30 percent of the vote in May’s elections.
While resisting calls to form an official alliance, the Brexit Party MEPs join other far-right populist parties in Brussels, including Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the Front National) and Alternative for Germany (AfD). All are united in their hatred for Greta. Two National Rally MPs recently boycotted her visit to France, and AfD representatives have made coordinated attacks on social media.
Those aggressions were orchestrated by the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) — an organisation known for co-sponsoring events with U.S. free-market think tank, the Heartland Institute.
Trans-Atlantic Potshots
It’s perhaps unsurprising to find that many of the U.S. commentators verbally assaulting Greta also have ties to the Heartland Institute, given the organisation’s Big Oil funding and long-history of promoting climate science denial.
The institute’s website published a long blog post by one of its ‘policy experts’, Gregory Wrightstone, who attempted to refute many of Thunberg’s arguments for climate action. “It is time for her to go back to school to learn what she doesn’t know and to unlearn so much of what she has been taught,” he concluded.
Read more of DeSmog's coverage of the global school strikes for climate
Many other critics of Greta in the U.S. are tied to another of Heartland’s funders, the Koch family, owners of the U.S.’s largest private energy company.
Marc Morano, communications director of campaign group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and a regular speaker at Heartland Institute events, has a long history of spreading misinformation about climate change.
He was also one of the loudest critics of Greta’s visit to the U.S., appearing on Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media to describe the young activist as “bait” to entrap critics of climate policy. Levant was an intern at the Charles Koch Foundation and later worked for the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.
Morano’s arguments were echoed on CFACT’s website by Joe Bastardi, a meteorologist who worked for AccuWeather, a private forecasting company that in the 1990s was involved with the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) — a now-defunct fossil fuel industry front group that strongly opposed global greenhouse gas reduction policies.
CFACT has received significant donations from oil companies including Exxon and Chevron, as well as oil billionaire Richard Scaife.
One of Greta’s most prominent critics has been Steve Milloy, a self-styled “pioneer” fighting against “faulty scientific data used to advance special, and often hidden, agendas.” Milloy is, among other things, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
Steve Milloy
@JunkScience
When you've resorted to a teenage puppet for your public policy argument... you've lost.
Climate bedwetters... the world laughs at this Greta charade. https://twitter.com/Independent/status/1160121105467760641 …
The Independent
?
@Independent
Greta Thunberg urges people to to 'unite behind the science' in powerful climate change speech
Embedded video
The CEI’s director of energy and environment, Myron Ebell, was part of of President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, and is infamous for making regular media appearances spreading oft-debunked misinformation on climate change.
CEI has raised millions of dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry, including ExxonMobil, and the Koch family foundations.
Back to Brexit
The Koch network’s influence isn’t confined to the U.S. media. One of the most vicious attacks on the teenage climate activist has come from Brendan O’Neill, editor of the Koch-funded website Spiked. He wrote of Greta:
“This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg.”
O’Neill’s comments were “proof” that O’Neill and many others who write on Spiked’s platform had “run out of ideas”, according to Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty.
One such regular contributor is James Delingpole, who now predominantly writes for the alt-right website Breitbart. One of his latest articles describes Greta as the “Patron Saint of the Age of Stupid”.
Delingpole’sarticles frequently cite the UK’s premier climate misinformation outlet, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Like Breitbart, the Conservative Woman website, edited by GWPF-director Kathy Gyngell, also hosts multiple articles assailing Greta. Breitbart was formerly run by Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.
Check out DeSmog's special series: The New Climate Activism
Which brings us back to Arron Banks.
Bannon played a key role in the early days of the Brexit campaign spearheaded by Banks and Farage. Bannon was also a director of Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy embroiled in a scandal over the use of big data during the Brexit referendum and which was involved with Banks and Farage’s Leave.EU group.
The Brexit Party is at the forefront of efforts to lobby for the UK to leave the European Union with no deal on October 31. That eventuality would possibly open the door for mass deregulation of the UK’s markets, a shredding of the UK’s environmental protections, and a fire sale of national assets for favoured U.S. companies — causes close to the hearts of all the groups behind the individuals attacking Greta.
==
extensive list of quotes
https://www.mediamatters.org/dinesh-dsouza/right-wing-media-launch-unhinged-attacks-greta-thunberg
9/24/19
Right-wing media figures -- many of whom deny the evidence of human-caused climate change -- have been making deranged attacks on Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg in recent weeks and after she addressed the United Nations.
On Monday, Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles attacked Thunberg on the Fox News program The Story with Martha MacCallum as a “mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents.” The segment was widely covered by news outlets after the other guest, Christopher Hahn, immediately shamed Knowles for his “despicable” comment. Although the Fox show’s anchor failed to object to Knowles’ attack as it happened, the network later apologized to Thunberg for his “disgraceful” comment.
Fox also told The Hollywood Reporter that it likely won’t book Knowles as a guest on its shows again, but many other conservatives have made unhinged attacks on Thunberg in recent weeks as well. Some conservatives have advocated using violence against her; others have likened her to Nazi leaders and propaganda; and more, like Knowles, have denied her agency by smearing her as “mentally ill” and/or controlled by others. Notably, shortly after Knowles used his Fox News appearance to attack Thunberg, Fox host Laura Ingraham broadcast a segment that compared the climate activist to an evil character from the horror film Children of the Corn.
Here are some of right-wing media figures’ worst attacks:
Conservative blogger Stephen Miller: “Tase and arrest her.”
Breitbart.com editor John Nolte: “I can’t tell if Greta needs a spanking or a psychological intervention … Probably both.”
Conspiracy theorist website Infowars and Alex Jones: “Watch Greta Thunberg channel Hitler In Hate-Filled Rant.”
Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza compared Thunberg to “Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks” who “were often used in Nazi propaganda. An old Goebbels technique!”
Far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos shared an image on Telegram suggesting Thunberg has fetal alcohol syndrome.
[graf some sort of facial analysis?]
pro-Trump social media figure Logan Cook, known online as Carpe Donktum, edited a video of Thunberg’s speech in the style of a Nazi rally and posted it to YouTube in a video titled “Mein Climate Change.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk lamented that “we can’t criticize 16-year old ANTIFA climate activist Greta Von Thunburg.”
Far-right “The_Donald” subreddit: Thunberg is “like a Nazi but kinda tarded.”
Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson: Thunberg is an “annoying, foreign, communist propagandist.”
Climate denier Marc Morano: Thunberg is “causing and instilling fear in millions of kids around the world."
[graf?]
grabien founder Tom Elliott: Thunberg’s speech is “what brainwashing looks like.”
Media Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor: Thunberg is “being taken advantage of by liberals.”
Pro-Trump Twitter troll Amy Mek: Thunberg is a “creation of powerful Marxists, Soros-backed NGO's, Al Gore, and more.”
American Greatness senior contributor Julie Kelly: Thunberg is acting like “a hostage attempting to please her captors.”
[The Global Climate Strike] is the latest stunt orchestrated by the international climate cabal and yet another example of how the Left shamelessly exploits and manipulates children to propagandize any cause. (Think of the high school students in Parkland, Florida.) But this time, the climate cabal is using a special-needs teenager from Sweden to indoctrinate more children and adults with climate change dogma.
Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old from Stockholm—which is ironic because the teen exhibits many traits associated with a hostage attempting to please her captors.
In a way, Thunberg is not the face of a climate crisis but an alarming example of how the climate cabal has needlessly terrified two generations of young people. The emotional, physical, and intellectual damage wrought by the climate change movement now is coming into clear view and it’s an outcome that should enrage every parent.
Climate denier Steve Milloy: “Greta the Climate Puppet leads a twisted cult.”
Conservative author Ann Coulter: Thunberg is a “human shield” of the left.
National Review Editor Rich Lowry: Thunberg is “a pawn being used by adults for their own interests.”
Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty parties can’t be found at Turtle Bay. A 16-year-old from Sweden, Thunberg thundered, “I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean,” which would have been easy enough to achieve, beginning with not taking two weeks to sail across the Atlantic last month in a jet-travel-eschewing publicity stunt.
Greta Thunberg is the leading edge of a youth movement against climate change — including a global “climate strike” last week — that is being promoted and celebrated by adults who find it useful for their own purposes.
Kids are powerful pawns. The catchphrase “for the children” has a seductive political appeal, while kids offer their adult supporters a handy two-step. The same people who say, “The world must heed this 16-year-old girl” will turn around and say to anyone who pushes back, “How dare you criticize a 16-year-old girl?”
Pro-Trump commentator Candace Owens: “One day, #GretaThunberg will realize that she is a victim of child abuse, not climate change. … The Left is stooping to new lows with this blatant example of child exploitation.”
Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh: “Greta Thunberg Is A Child Abuse Victim.”
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old girl selected by the media to be the poster child of climate alarmism, gave another hysterical speech on Monday. This time, at the U.N., she declared that the Earth is undergoing a “mass extinction" which, she warns, probably cannot be averted.
“How dare you," the distraught teen cried. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood." On one level, I can relate to this sentiment because it's exactly what I said after watching the “Lion King" remake. On another level, as a parent, I find this girl very hard to watch. It is obvious that she really believes her delusional doomsday fantasies. That is because they are not her fantasies — she is merely repeating what she has been told by adults who know better.
…
But what we're being told is that an obsessive, mentally troubled young girl came to believe — mistakenly — that the apocalypse is upon us. Rather than calm these terrible fears, and redirect her in a healthier direction, the adults in her life have only encouraged her paranoia. And now the media is only too happy to exploit her fear in order to stoke even more fear. Creating fear with fear. That is the media's specialty.
This is child abuse. If any grown up in Thunberg's life really cared about her psychological and emotional well-being, they would sit her down and explain that climate change is not going to destroy human civilization. Yes, the climate is changing. Climates tend to do that. But whatever role humans play in that process, and to whatever degree, it is not going to result in the end of all life as we know it.
National Review Senior Editor Jay Nordlinger: “I've never liked it when little girls are manipulated for politics.”
Right-wing website PragerU: Thunberg is just a “terrified kid” victimized by “leftists.”
Infowars-affiliated conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson: Thunberg is a “child human shield” being used for “hysterical propaganda.”
The Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi: “Adults have spent a year creating” Thunberg.
Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived.
In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster. This is a tragedy.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg lectured the world. And maybe she’s right. We’ve failed her by raising a generation of pagans who’ve filled the vacuum left by the absence of faith, not with rationality, but with a cultish worship of Mother Earth and the state. Although, to be fair, the Bible-thumping evangelical’s moral certitude is nothing but a rickety edifice compared to the moral conviction of a Greta Thunberg.
It’s not, of course, her fault. Adults have spent a year creating a 16-year-old because her soundbites comport with their belief system. It was “something about her raw honesty around a message of blunt-force fear [that] turned this girl from invisible to global,” says CNN in a news report about a child with a narrow, age-appropriate, grasp of the world.
It should be noted that “blunt-force fear” is indeed the correct way to describe the concerted misinformation that Thunberg has likely been subjected to since nursery school. There probably isn’t a public school in America that hasn’t plied the panic-stricken talk of environmental disaster in their auditoriums over and over again.
Pro-Trump comedian Terrence Williams: “Why exploit children?”
==
DEC 12, 2019
Greta Thunberg Slams COP25, Says Response to Climate Crisis Is “Clever Accounting and Creative PR”
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-supporters-cry-bitter-tears-after-time-names-greta-thunberg-person-of-the-year/
no lnx
Trump supporters cry bitter tears after Time names Greta Thunberg ‘Person of the Year’ [djt runner up last yr?]
Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story December 11, 2019
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year — and Trump supporters are deeply unhappy about it.
Thunberg, whose advocacy for real action on climate change has drawn rebukes from conservative political figures including President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, was described by Time in its profile as delivering “a simple truth in a fateful moment” in the debate over how to reduce greenhouse emissions and prevent catastrophic environmental damage.
Many Trump supporters, however, were very upset that Thunberg was granted an honor that they believed rightly belonged to their favorite president — and some insinuated she was merely a “puppet” for left-wing financier George Soros.
Check out some reactions below.
The final nail in ?@TIME?’s credibility: https://t.co/vJkKEUv0cz
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) December 11, 2019
She is a puppet…..and hasn’t done anything. She is nothing more than a little girl.
— Anthony DeMarco (@Anthony09468927) December 11, 2019
Hopefully they don’t print this magazine on paper! Can’t promote
A person who wants to save the earth with the destruction of trees
??
Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg is Time’s 2019 Person of the Year https://t.co/tGTs1yPwNn via @nbcnews
— Angel Rivera (@RedWaveArmy1) December 11, 2019
Well one more magazine I will never buy. Person of the year is a 16 year old who does not go to school, has no experience nor education in climate change and is driven by the adults who lead her with their agenda! Shame on you Time.
— Traceitback (@traceitback) December 11, 2019
The #TIMEPersonoftheYear2019. Greta Thornberry. pic.twitter.com/LzcBjtL8kK
— Carmine Sabia (@CarmineSabia) December 11, 2019
this Dog contributed more than the social brat pictured
— Rahul Sengupta (@canonmanrahul) December 11, 2019
She basically does nothing except for her exaggerated emotion towards climate change & she offers no practical solutions for the governments on how to save the Earth. Why is she the person of the year? ?????? pic.twitter.com/CBIxCiMHwm
— Bruce Wayne ?????? (@BruceWayne852) December 11, 2019
Does she go to school?
— SP Ngwenya (@SpNgwenya1) December 11, 2019
Now can she go home?
— GrilledTomatoes (@TomatoesGrilled) December 11, 2019
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Raise your hand if you agree that #TIMEPOY’s childhood has been stolen. #GretaThunberg She knows children have been sold into slavery or starved in Nazi camps, right? Their childhood was stolen. She’s fine.
— Mike Iscovitz (@Fox26Mike) December 11, 2019
==
Delingpole: From Hitler and Stalin to Greta Thunberg — Time Loves to Celebrate Totalitarian Icons
==
No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference[Amazon]
==
https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/greta-thunberg-photo-from-1898_au_5dd62768e4b010f3f1d28740
time traveler
==
10/19
Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia and Meg Vertigan, University of Newcastle
Detractors have dismissed Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg – a Nobel Prize nominee – as mentally ill, hysterical and a millennial weirdo after she pleaded with world officials last week to address the climate crisis.
Here, two researchers explain the stereotypical labels deployed by critics to undermine Thunberg’s call to action, which the activist herself has described as “too loud for people to handle”.
Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame
Greta Thunberg obviously scares some men silly. The bullying of the teenager by conservative middle-aged men has taken on a grim, almost hysterical edge. And some of them are reaching deep into the misogynist’s playbook to divert focus from her message.
It is not a rhetorical accident that critics of Thunberg, nearly 17, almost always call her a “child”. This infantilisation is invariably accompanied by accusations of emotionality, hysteria, mental disturbance, and an inability to think for herself – stereotypically feminine labels which are traditionally used to silence women’s public speech, and undermine their authority.
In Australia, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has called Thunberg “freakishly influential … with many mental disorders”. Sky News commentator Chris Kenny described her as a “hysterical teenager” who needs to be cared for.
Overseas, male commentators have used similar pejorative terms – describing her as a “mentally-ill Swedish child”, unstable and a “millenarian weirdo”. One claimed Thunberg needed a “spanking”; another likened her activism to “medieval witchcraft”.
Obviously these men find Thunberg triggering. But why?
At a deep level, the language of climate denialism is tied up with a form of masculine identity predicated on modern industrial capitalism – specifically, the Promethean idea of the conquest of nature by man, in a world especially made for men.
By attacking industrial capitalism, and its ethos of politics as usual, Thunberg is not only attacking the core beliefs and world view of certain sorts of men, but also their sense of masculine self-worth. Male rage is their knee-jerk response.
Thunberg did not try to be “nice” when she confronted world leaders at the United Nations last week. She did not defer or smile. She did not attempt to make anybody feel comfortable.
US President Donald Trump tweeted: “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” Happiness here aligns itself with conformity, and an unspoken idea that women and children are expected to be docile and complacent.
But in reality, Thunberg is cutting through – rather than displaying – emotionalism. What certain kinds of men do not wish to acknowledge is that asking for action on climate change is entirely rational.
Meg Vertigan, lecturer in English and writing and academic advisor at the University of Newcastle
As Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN climate summit last week reverberates across the world, claims by critics over her mental state are alarming. Thunberg has described herself as having “Asperger’s”, an autism spectrum disorder, and describes it as her “superpower”.
:{
}:
But politicians and broadcasters appear to have confused the disorder with mental illness – a label used throughout history to label and potentially stigmatise “difficult” women who are told they need bed rest, medication or incarceration. Even today, doctors are more likely to diagnose women than men with depression, even when they present with identical symptoms.
:{Advocates for people with autism have pointed out the disorder is not linked to mental illness.
Yet commentator Andrew Bolt wrote of Thunberg, “I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru”.
“She seems chronically attracted to apocalyptic visions, to fear,” he wrote, describing her as “chronically anxious and disturbed”.
Thunberg is ‘not the messiah, she is an extremely anxious girl’, Bolt says.}:
Not-for-profit organisation Beyond Blue defines anxiety as stress or worry which occurs “without any particular reason or cause”. Therefore by diagnosing Thunberg with anxiety, men are pathologising Thunberg’s concern about the environment and dismissing her fears as baseless and the result of mental illness.
History is littered with examples of this. Former Coalition minister George Brandis in 2015 famously called Labor frontbencher Penny Wong “shrill” and “hysterical” after she interjected during his Senate address – implying her comments were due to feminine mental instability.
So too, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested climate change fears were a type of pathology. Following Thunberg’s UN speech he declared that the climate debate subjected children to “needless anxiety” and suggested they needed more “context and perspective” on the issue. “We’ve got to let kids be kids,” he said.
Here, Morrison is implying that Thunberg’s anxiety is somehow contagious. This is offensive to people with anxiety disorders – and offensive to passionate and vocal women.
Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia and Meg Vertigan, Lecturer in English and Writing/ Academic Advisor, University of Newcastle
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
==
Conservative blogger Stephen Miller said, "Tase and arrest her."
==
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-rights-attack-of-greta-thunberg-is-a-tired-exercise-but-serves-its-purpose/
Right-wing media personalities and outlets have aggressively attacked 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg with a worn-out playbook.Dilapidated and decrepit, its pages offer an old formula for bludgeoning young activists who gain popular support by cutting through the rhetoric of right-wing mouthpieces.
A cascading wave of smears against Thunberg erupted after Thunberg’s speech at the United Nations yesterday, where she upbraided the leaders of the world for failing to act to stem the climate crisis. In her scathing remarks at the United Nations Climate Summit, Thunberg admonished world leaders for failing to take meaningful action on the issue of climate change, despite the science being “crystal clear” for decades.
“How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” Thunberg asked world leaders. She added, “You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.”
Thunberg has polling to back her up; in the U.S., a majority of teenagers and young adults believe that the earth’s climate is changing in ways that will harm them, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey taken earlier this year. Reports about the latest climate report from the United Nations seem to confirm those fears and warn that tipping points in the earth’s climate have already been passed and that many severe consequences of climate change are no longer avoidable.
Many around the world have looked to Thunberg as a star communicator on the issue of climate change, which has also branded her as a target of right-wing activists and media. The ire directed at the European teenager often contains little refutation of her message, and instead follows an established strategy for smearing young activists working for progressive causes.
The acts in the play are exhausted. The scenes are as unoriginal as they are disingenuous. Yet, for right-wing leaders, they are nonetheless successful in discrediting youth activists within insular bubbles of reactionary communities online and among aging conservatives.
This ramshackle cottage industry exists at the core of right-wing media, earning buy-in from mainstream conservative thought leaders who seek to discredit progressive activists and movements that gain the support of the American public. As Christian Christensen, professor of journalism at Stockholm University, wrote at Common Dreams:
These attacks have become an industry supposedly rooted in a worldview that worships rights and individual freedoms, but, in actual fact, is rooted in a hatred of activism, principle and dedication. These three elements stand in stark contrast to the values and tactics of those who wish to smear Thunberg and her contemporaries: namely lies, obfuscation and denigration. What scares those who attack Thunberg and the Parkland survivors is not so much the message, but the poise, presence and visibility of young citizens unfazed by their older, jaded, cynical opponents. They are dangerous because they exist and persist.
Depending on which media personality a right-wing consumer listens to, Thunberg is an exploited child or, perhaps, Adolf Hitler himself. For those who paid attention to the smears aimed at Parkland school shooting survivors, the smears sound nearly identical.
One approach popular in establishment conservative media is feigned concern for the young people who enter the political arena coupled with a scolding for those who enabled that entry. In 2018,Todd Starnes wrote for Fox News that Parkland shooting survivors advocating for changes to gun control laws were “propaganda pawns to peddle a fake news narrative”and wrote that it was “shameful that reporters would take advantage of traumatized young people.” Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered the same kind of performative concern during his primetime program last night; Carlson said that powerful people—presumably those seeking action on the climate crisis—are using Thunberg as a “human shield” against criticism.
The same sentiment was expressed by National Review’s Rich Lowry who put it in plain language: “She is a pawn being used by adults for their own interests.” Disgraced columnist Denise McAllister claimed that “lack of maturity is a greater threat to our world than mythical apocalyptic man-made climate change.” Glenn Beck called Thunberg’s parents “monsters.”
There’s a certain irony to such concern-trolling, considering that the right invests millions of dollars in the creation and upkeep of youth-targeted organizations like Turning Point USA, that Fox News hosts interview children who say they support President Trump, or that the religious right buses in thousands of young people—including high-schoolers and middle-schoolers—to Washington, D.C., every year to fill space at the annual March for Life.
The right has also attempted to rope Thunberg into its longstanding smear campaign against billionaire philanthropist George Soros; the Associated Press debunked a photo circulated on social media that was altered to depict Thunberg standing with Soros his arm draped around her shoulder. At The Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft cited only a pro-QAnon social media account to allege that Thunberg was being escorted around events by a Soros-sponsored political operative.
Breitbart’s John Nolte said that Thunberg “needs a spanking or a psychological intervention” and called her fans “Gretards.” Nolte has made similar jabs at other youth activists; in 2018, Nolte compared Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg to the cult leader from Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” and deemed him a “mean-spirited little zealot in over his head.” And just last night, Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham, drawing from the same well, likened Thunberg to the children in the King story, members of a murderous cult who kill all the adults in the town.
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles attacked Thunberg on Fox News last night, calling her a “mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.” (Thunberg describes herself as being on the autism spectrum, calling it her “superpower.”) Fox News apologized for Knowles’ comments and told The Hollywood Reporter that it had no plans to invite Knowles back on its network.
Logan Cook, a meme-maker fancied by the Trump administration who attended the “social media summit” hosted at the White House in July, shared an edited a video of Thunberg’s United Nations speech with an audio track of a speech given by Hitler. Cook’s video is almost identical to similarly styled smears broadcast on Infowars in 2018 that depicted Parkland youth activists as Hitler Youth. Right-wing media outlets, including Breitbart and The Daily Wire, latched on to the same smear of Hogg in 2018, fixating on a portion of Hogg’s speech at the 2018 March for Our Lives rally in which Hogg raised his fist in the air. On Sunday, convicted felon and right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza compared Thunberg’s speech to Nazi Youth propaganda. Dale Hurd at CBN News belittled Thunberg as a “prophetess of doom.”
Justifications for the right’s barrel-scraping often attempt to divert attention from its own dirty job. One retort to those angered by the right’s attacks on Thunberg has been to draw a parallel to the way media and left-of-center people treated the teenagers captured on video displaying bigoted behavior toward an Omaha tribe elder who was playing a drum and singing—an episode in January triggered an all-out propaganda war by the right-wing commentators. But the right’s “whataboutism” argument, in this case, works only in a vacuum, as Amanda Marcotte noted.
...tweet]
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irish times why trigger?
conflunce of groups a real threat, own obsolescence/irrelevance
...Even for someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, some of the criticism levelled at Thunberg is astonishing. It is, simultaneously, the most vicious and the most fatuous kind of playground bullying. The Australian conservative climate change denier Andrew Bolt called her “deeply disturbed” and “freakishly influential” (the use of “freakish”, we can assume, was not incidental.) The former UKIP funder, Arron Banks, tweeted “Freaking yacht accidents do happen in August” (as above.) Brendan O’Neill of Spiked called her a “millenarian weirdo” (nope, still not incidental) in a piece that referred nastily to her “monotone voice” and “the look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes”.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/463056-greta-thunberg-addresses-haters-they-must-simply-feel-so
Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed hate and backlash to the youth-led movement she’s helped spearhead as she encouraged her followers to again strike for the climate crisis.
In a series of tweets just two days after the Nobel Prize candidate gave a speech at the U.N. Climate summit, the 16-year-old said the “haters are as active as ever” — attacking her looks, clothes, behavior and differences.
“They come up with every thinkable lie and conspiracy theory. 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,” Thunberg tweeted.
“Being different is not an illness and the current, best available science is not opinions - it’s facts,” she added.
...Thunberg was criticized by some conservative commentators and even mocked by President Trump, in the wake of her speech and climate strikes by activists worldwide.
“I honestly don’t understand why adults would choose to spend their time mocking and threatening teenagers and children for promoting science, when they could do something good instead. I guess they must simply feel so threatened by us,” Thunberg wrote in her Instagram caption. “But the world is waking up. See you in the streets this Friday!”
Michael Knowles, a conservative host of the Daily Wire podcast, called Thunberg a “mentally ill child,” on Fox News this week, prompting an apology from the network. Knowles said he wasn't attacking Thunberg, but rather "the left for exploiting a mentally ill child."
Thunberg has been open about being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as well as ADHD, and has said her diagnosis has given her insight on her climate activism.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night compared Thunbergand the youth climate activists to the murderous children in Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” novel, saying they’ve been “brainwashed” by adults.
Trump appeared to mock Thunberg, tweeting “she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” in response to Thunberg’s speech at the climate summit hitting world leaders for stealing her future over their inaction on climate change.
Thunberg briefly updated her Twitter bio with Trump’s description.
Thunberg is continuing to call on students across the world to join the “Fridays for future” school strike. She started last year, protesting alone outside the Swedish parliament, which led to global demonstrations.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/laura-ingrahams-own-brother-condemns-monstrous-fox-news-host-for-cruelly-mocking-teen-activists
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Trump later mocked the now world-renowned activist on Twitter, writing, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”
un sued for not uphold rights of children
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/16-year-old-activist-responds-to-critics-who-say-climate-action-is-too-expensive-if-we-can-save-the-banks-we-can-save-the-world/
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sam knight
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-uncanny-power-of-greta-thunbergs-climate-change-rhetoric
new yorker
During the week of Easter, Britain enjoyed—if that is the right word—a break from the intricate torment of Brexit. The country’s politicians disappeared on vacation and, in their absence, genuine public problems, the kinds of things that should be occupying their attention, rushed into view. In Northern Ireland, where political violence is worsening sharply, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist and L.G.B.T. campaigner named Lyra McKee was shot and killed while reporting on a riot in Londonderry. In London, thousands of climate-change protesters blocked Waterloo Bridge, over the River Thames, and Oxford Circus, in the West End, affixing themselves to the undersides of trucks and to a pink boat named for Berta Cáceres, an environmental activist and indigenous leader, who was murdered in Honduras. Slightly more than a thousand Extinction Rebellion activists, between the ages of nineteen and seventy-four, were arrested in eight days. On Easter Monday, a crowd performed a mass die-in at the Natural History Museum, under the skeleton of a blue whale. In a country whose politics have been entirely consumed by the maddening minutiae of leaving the European Union, it was cathartic to see citizens demanding action for a greater cause. In a video message, Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, compared the civil disobedience in London to the civil-rights movement of the sixties and the suffragettes of a century ago. “It is not the first time in history we have seen angry people take to the streets when the injustice has been great enough,” she said.
On Tuesday, as members of Parliament returned to work, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish environmental activist, was in Westminster to address them. Last August, Thunberg stopped attending school in Stockholm and began a protest outside the Swedish Parliament to draw political attention to climate change. Since then, Thunberg’s tactic of going on strike from school—inspired by the response to the Parkland shooting in Florida last year—has been taken up by children in a hundred countries around the world. In deference to her international celebrity, Thunberg was given a nauseatingly polite welcome in England. John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, briefly held up proceedings to mark her arrival in the viewing gallery. Some M.P.s applauded, breaching the custom of not clapping in the chamber. When Thunberg spoke to a meeting of some hundred and fifty journalists, activists, and political staffers, in Portcullis House, where M.P.s have their offices, she was flanked by Ed Miliband, the former Labour Party leader; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary and a prominent Brexiteer; and Caroline Lucas, Britain’s sole Green Party M.P., who had invited her.
Thunberg, who wore purple jeans, blue sneakers, and a pale plaid shirt, did not seem remotely fazed. Carefully unsmiling, she checked that her microphone was on. “Can you hear me?” she asked. “Around the year 2030, ten years, two hundred and fifty-two days, and ten hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Thunberg—along with her younger sister—has been given a diagnosis of autism and A.D.H.D. In interviews, she sometimes ascribes her unusual focus, and her absolute intolerance of adult bullshit on the subject of climate change, to her neurological condition. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told my colleague Masha Gessen. In 2015, the year Thunberg turned twelve, she gave up flying. She travelled to London by train, which took two days. Her voice, which is young and Scandinavian, has a discordant, analytical clarity. Since 2006, when David Cameron, as a reforming Conservative Party-leadership contender, visited the Arctic Circle, Britain’s political establishment has congratulated itself on its commitment to combatting climate change. Thunberg challenged this record, pointing out that, while the United Kingdom’s carbon-dioxide emissions have fallen by thirty-seven per cent since 1990, this figure does not include the effects of aviation, shipping, or trade. “If these numbers are included, the reduction is around ten per cent since 1990—or an average of 0.4 per cent a year,” she said. She described Britain’s eagerness to frack for shale gas, to expand its airports, and to search for dwindling oil and gas reserves in the North Sea as absurd. “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before,” she said. “Like now. And those answers don’t exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.”
The climate-change movement feels powerful today because it is politicians—not the people gluing themselves to trucks—who seem deluded about reality. Thunberg says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us. But the impact of her message does not come only from her regard for the facts. Thunberg is an uncanny, gifted orator. Last week, the day after the fire at Notre-Dame, she told the European Parliament that “cathedral thinking” would be necessary to confront climate change.
Yesterday, Thunberg repeated the phrase. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking,” she said. “We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” In Westminster, Thunberg’s words were shaming. Brexit is pretty much the opposite of cathedral thinking. It is a process in which a formerly great country is tearing itself apart over the best way to belittle itself. No one knew what to say to Thunberg, or how to respond to her exhortations. Her microphone check was another rhetorical device. “Did you hear what I just said?” she asked, in the middle of her speech. The room bellowed, “Yes!” “Is my English O.K.?” The audience laughed. Thunberg’s face flickered, but she did not smile. “Because I’m beginning to wonder.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/calling-for-end-of-war-against-nature-greta-thunbergs-arrival-in-us-brings-swell-of-attention-to-global-climate-strike/
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thugswarm for adults? serengetti
Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence.
Thunberg gained prominence after she began skipping some days of school to protest climate inaction outside Swedish parliament. She spearheaded the school walkouts that saw more than a million children across the globe leaving their classrooms to demand action on global warming.
She has addressed world and U.N. leaders and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Later this month, she'll sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a 60-foot yacht powered by solar panels and underwater turbines on her way to participate in the U.N. climate talks in New York (see related story).
But the success of Thunberg — who describes herself on Twitter as a "16 year old climate activist with Asperger" — remains a sore point for those who reject mainstream climate science and some who have helped shape or encourage the Trump administration's rollback of climate policy.
They frequently point to Thunberg's autism, claim she is used by her parents and compare her call to young people on climate change to "Hitler Youth." They have pointed to her "monotone voice" and framed her as a "millenarian weirdo" with the "look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes."
A recent opinion piece in The New York Times prompted an outcry among climate hawks and Thunberg's allies, who said the newspaper was validating these types of personal attacks on the teenage activist.
Experts say relying on ad hominem attacks has significant collateral damage in that they dissuade people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from speaking publicly. While the language of describing someone as a "puppet" or abused by adults may appear coded, it's clearly a dog whistle that signals her words should be discounted because her mind works differently, said Steve Silberman, author of "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity."
"It's classic autism bashing," he said. "They feel at liberty to do it because autism has been framed as a pathology for decades, so they feel like they don't have to hold back, than just 'other' her, turn her into a freak when she's actually making more sense than 95% of the adults who have addressed this issue for the last 30 years."
Patrick Moore, chairman of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, which promotes the benefits of carbon dioxide, wrote on Twitter that "Greta=Evil." In an interview with E&E News, Moore denied that his numerous mentions of Thunberg's autism in media appearances and on social media were attacks on her disability but that he instead was "comparing her masters to Hitler."
He said that Thunberg's public speeches were written for her, that she was a "puppet" and that she was unable to answer questions in interviews because her ideas were not her own.
"They aren't her ideas," he said. "There's a reason why 16-year-olds don't vote, don't drink, don't drive, don't whatever. At that age, she is not an adult, and therefore she has no right to influence people in a political process."
Moore's group has been increasingly active on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration. CO2 Coalition co-founder Will Happer is now serving on the National Security Council at the White House and spearheaded a shelved plan to conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science. Moore was recently invited by congressional Republicans to downplay an alarming U.N. extinction report.
Earlier this year, Trump enthusiastically tweeted a quote from a Moore performance on Fox News in which Moore said climate science was "fake news" and that more carbon dioxide would be good for humanity.
Moore said he was seeking to show Thunberg "is a full-blown tool of adults."
"She is being abused by her parents, by Al Gore, by society at large that is on side with this ideology as if there is a climate emergency," he said. "What a nonsensical, stupid concept, there is no climate emergency, I think you know, otherwise people would be fleeing from it."
While her critics claim to attack Thunberg for ideas, critiques that mention her personal traits are harmful and reliant on "prejudiced ideas about autistic people," said Zoe Gross, a spokeswoman for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. People are quick to label autistic traits, including tone of voice and facial expressions, as "creepy." She said criticism of Thunberg that highlights the way she speaks, answers questions and displays emotions is clearly an attempt to belittle her.
"Some people may be making assumptions out of ignorance ... but others are explicitly saying that autistic people are not worth listening to," Gross wrote in an email response to questions. "It's upsetting to see any person being belittled because of their disability, especially a child. People with all kinds of disabilities can form and express opinions, speak up for ourselves and others, and become advocates and leaders."
Thunberg's critics include those who have been close to the Trump EPA.
Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump administration's EPA transition team and has pushed to restrict the use of science at the agency, has referred to Thunberg as an "adult-exploited empty-headed child."
"She's ignorant, maniacal and is being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin," he wrote recently on Twitter.
At his congressional hearing, Moore testified alongside Marc Morano, who works for the conservative Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and has a blog that misrepresents and attacks climate science. Morano has been invited by the Trump administration to EPA events weakening the role of science at the agency; he was photographed giving his book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change" to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Morano's blog describes Thunberg as an "autistic prophet." In his Twitter feed, Morano retweets criticisms of her that center on her autism.
"She hasn't been called a mascot. Which; is really what she is. She'll get a Nobel Prize and a wanna-be Ph.d. from Harvard. For being autistic and not going to school," wrote one follower retweeted by Morano.
Conservative media have also begun using Thunberg's character traits in an attempt to minimize her words. A columnist at The Federalist, for instance, recently wrote that Thunberg's struggles with autism while growing up "bred in her an absolutist attitude that is far from attractive." An editor of the right-wing British magazine Spiked, which receives funding from the Koch brothers network,called Thunberg a "weirdo" and wrote that "there is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg."
Andrew Bolt, a Sky News host, recently wrote a column that called Thunberg "deeply disturbed."
"I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru," he wrote. "But Thunberg has something very rare as well: a sense of absolute certainty. She shows not the slightest doubt and forgives not the slightest compromise. This allows followers who are tormented with doubt and burden of freedom to relax into her totalitarian certainty. And in Thunberg's case, that certainty comes from what normally would be seen as a disability."
In the New York Times opinion piece, The Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell called Thunberg a "complicated adolescent."
"Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle," Caldwell wrote. "She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s. Physically, she is diminutive and fresh-faced, comes off as younger than her years, and frequently refers to herself as a 'child' — about the last thing the average 16-year-old would ever do."
Thunberg's autism actually informs her activism and motivates her to speak out against the falsehoods spouted by climate deniers, said Silberman, the author of "NeuroTribes." He said she doesn't pay any attention to the false notion of a "debate" in climate science.
Thunberg speaks like "one of the few people who has woken up out of this fever dream of bullshit that's spread by these right-wing politicians and oil company misinformation," Silberman said.
"Unlike most neurotypical people, she can't just shrug off the fact that of course oil company executives are going to lie and politicians who are beholden to them are going to lie," he said. "She can't abide that, it bothers her almost viscerally."
For her part, Thunberg has said that autism is "not a 'gift'" but that it "CAN be a superpower."
"I've had my fair share of depressions, alienation, anxiety and disorders," she wrote in a Facebook post in April. "But without my diagnosis, I would never have started school striking. Because then I would have been like everyone else."
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-low-will-they-go-climate-deniers-are-getting-personal-to-attack-this-16-year-olds-activism/
kos
One of deniers’ favorite lines, used to justify the fact that basically everyone who isn’t paid by fossil fuels debunks everything they say, is thatif you’re taking flak, you must be close to the target. It comes from World War II, when bomber pilots came under increasingly heavy fire as they approached the German’s most valuable assets.
Judging by that criteria, deniers are feeling downright terrified of 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.
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guk 719
Biggest compliment yet': Greta Thunberg welcomes oil chief's 'greatest threat' label
Activists say comments by Opec head prove world opinion is turning against fossil fuels
Jonathan Watts
@jonathanwatts
Fri 5 Jul 2019 11.13 EDT Last modified on Fri 5 Jul 2019 12.55 EDT
Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg tweeted: ‘Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!’ in response to Mohammed Barkindo’s comments Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Greta Thunberg and other climate activists have said it is a badge of honour that the head of the world’s most powerful oil cartel believes their campaign may be the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry.
The criticism of striking students by the trillion-dollar Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) highlights the growing reputational concerns of oil companies as public protests intensify along with extreme weather.
Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of Opec, said there was a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion against oil, which was “beginning to … dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry”.
He said the pressure was also being felt within the families of Opec officials because their own children “are asking us about their future because … they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry”.
Although he accused the campaigners of misleading people with unscientific arguments, the comments were welcomed by student and divestment campaigners as a sign the oil industry is worried it may be losing the battle for public opinion.
“Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!” tweeted Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish initiator of the school student strike movement, which continues every Friday.
“Brilliant! Proof that we are having an impact and be sure that we will not stop,” said Holly Gillibrand, who was among the first students in the UK to join the global climate strikes.
Opec – which is made up of 14 countries with 80% of the world’s proven oil reserves – is planning to expand production, which is undermining efforts to slow global heating. The backlash is not just from students, Extinction Rebellion activists and climate scientists.
Insurance companies – which have the most to lose from storms, floods, fires and other extreme weather – are increasingly pulling investment from fossil fuel assets. The governor of the Bank of England has warned of growing climate risks to the financial sector.
Earlier this week, the London Stock Exchange reclassified oil and gas companies under a non-renewable energy category that effectively puts them on the wrong side of climate crisis.
Parliaments in three countries – the UK, Canada, France – have declared a climate emergency, as have dozens of municipalities. They include most recently a first major US city, New York, which has previously filed a lawsuit against the five biggest private oil companies.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of wealthy countries, has also taken a more strident tone in calling for government to put a higher price on oil, gas and coal, to end subsidies and to rethink fossil fuel investment.
“Our policies have to be made with our children’s future in mind … short-term decision-making can lock countries into expensive mistakes in financing and developing infrastructure … that will be neither necessary nor profitable in a low-emissions world, they will be stranded assets,” said the OECD secretary general Angel Gurría.
Scientists are also backing a phaseout of fossil fuels as the signs of climate disruption grow more evident.
In the past two weeks, temperature records have been broken in France, Alaska and Cuba; there have been wildfires in Germany, Spain, Sweden and Anchorage; Chennai is among more than a dozen Indian cities running out of water; Russia is experiencing historic floods; Mexico experienced freak hailstorm that left Guadalajara streets more than a metre deep in ice; while the Chinese meteorological agency said records had been broken at 40 weather stations.
While Opec continues to insist oil is not responsible for climate chaos, campaigners feel they are finally winning the argument.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, which has led a series of divestment and anti-pipeline campaigns in recent decades, said the fossil fuel companies were finally losing their social licence.
“By this point, most people realise that the oil companies lied for decades about global warming – they are this generation’s version of the tobacco companies. And it’s clearly affecting their ability to raise capital, to recruit employees and so on. People set out to cost them their social licence, and it’s working. Whether it’s working fast enough – that’s another question.”
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/07/class-0000-campaign-denounces-cowardly-censorship-student-call-climate-action
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/07/challenging-us-all-confront-realities-climate-crisis-greta-thunberg-and-fridays
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new 519
guk no lnx
US schools accused of censoring climate crisis message in graduation speeches
This article is more than 1 month old
Students say authorities have barred them from reading a text that warns of ‘catastrophic climate change’ for being too political
Oliver Milman
@olliemilman
Fri 7 Jun 2019 07.00 BST Last modified on Thu 20 Jun 2019 16.03 BST
Protesters participate in a global climate strike outside the White House in Washington DC, on 24 May.
Schools and colleges across the US have been accused of censoring students who have attempted to use their graduation speeches to speak out on the unfolding climate crisis.
A youth-led movement called Class of 0000 is encouraging students to read out a prepared text at their graduation ceremonies that warns of “catastrophic climate change” and tells elected leaders to “have plan to get to zero emissions, or get zero of our votes”.
Teen activists face US government in crucial hearing over climate trial
Read more
More than 350 students set to speak at ceremonies as valedictorians, or in other roles, have pledged to read the message, but many have complained that educational authorities have barred them from doing so as the global climate emergency is deemed too political to mention.
In the US education system, a valedictorian is typically a student with the highest academic performance in the class. This student delivers a farewell speech for the class at its graduation.
Emily Shal, an 18-year-old senior class president, felt that her school considered that the climate message was “too controversial” for her graduation speech. Shal had read the speech at a talent show before the graduation ceremony and said she still received backlash from school authorities.
“The administration were very mad, they were pissed,” said Shal, who attends Whittier Tech high school in Haverhill, Massachusetts. “Everyone was telling me I was in trouble. They now consider me rogue and rebellious. I was really worried about repercussions.”
Worried that she would be dragged off stage if she made the climate speech, Shal decided to apologize and comply with the demand not to mention climate change at the ceremony last week. She said a large majority of her classmates consider climate a “huge topic” that needs to be addressed.
“The school thinks it is a political issue that shouldn’t be brought up,” she said. “My freedom of speech was definitely taken away. We are tearing down our home, the Earth, and it should be our No 1 concern in the world. But it’s not.”
Whittier Tech said: “We are saddened that our former student felt that she would not have Whittier’s support in speaking about a subject she is clearly passionate about. She does and she would have.
“Whittier Tech does not benefit from discouraging students from freely expressing their opinions on relevant, worldly topics. We do not participate in such discouragement.”
Jessica Lopez, another 18-year-old senior, was told by the principal of Health Sciences high and middle college in San Diego that she shouldn’t mention climate change as it’s political and instead “should be celebrating our achievements” in a more traditional graduation speech.
Lopez said she was surprised as her school is “friendly and innovative” and previously allowed students to take part in a walkout to protest school shootings.
“It’s shocking to me that we could voice our opinions then, but are silenced when we want to talk about climate change,” she said. “I was very upset and felt like I didn’t want to go up there and be a hypocrite. It’s created a lot of tension between the class and the administration.”
In lieu of her planned speech, Lopez and most of her class plan to don badges that say “No Planet B” for the ceremony.
“A lot of adults blame our generation for being sensitive but we have to deal with the problems they have caused,” Lopez said. “It’s really frustrating. We are vocal about climate change because no one else is going to do anything about it. On this issue, it feels like the adults are the children.”
In other incidents, two students at Albany high school in California said their attempts to get climate change mentioned in graduation speeches were rebuffed. One, Tamara Valenzuela, used social media to attack the decision.
A separate student, Saisantosh Tiruchinapalli from Arizona, was told he could mention the importance of voting but not climate change.
The climate crisis has become a deeply polarized issue in the US, to the point that recent polling shows it divides voters even more than issues such as abortion and gun control.
A growing youth climate moment has sought to break the political deadlock in the wake of a series of dire warnings from scientists over the flooding, wildfires, drought and societal unrest that global heating is spurring.
Many of the US students planning to speak out say they were inspired by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager who inspired an international wave of school strikes over the climate crisis.
Meanwhile, the Sunrise Movement, one of the US groups that helped organize the Class of 0000 initiative, has been driven by youth activists and has been at the forefront of championing the Green New Deal, a plan to rapidly decarbonize the US economy.
• This article was amended on 13 June 2019 to clarify that Albany high school students were not told to drop climate change from graduation speeches, though no speeches containing the Class of 0000 message were selected. It was further amended on 20 June 2019 to clarify comments from Emily Shal and to add a response from the
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CalSTRS, the largest public teachers’ pension fund in the country, currently invests over $6 billionin the fossil fuel industry—an investment that is both immoral and financially under-performing. Divesting this fund from fossil fuels will improve teachers’ retirement income, and send a huge message to global financial markets that fossil fuel investments are no longer acceptable. Reinvesting those funds in the clean energy economy will give our kids’ futures a fighting chance.
So this year #YourTeacherHasHomework. We want teachers to tell CalSTRS to divest from fossil fuels; and we want teachers to tell their union chapter to pass a resolution for CalSTRS to divest.
What You Can Do to Help
- Contact your teachers’ union and ask it to endorse a resolution to divest CalSTRS.
- Add your voice to the thousands who have already urged CalSTRS to divest: Sign our petition
- Want to gather petition signatures? Download Blank Petition
- Want to contact the Board directly? Send a personal message to the CalSTRS Board at board@calstrs.com
https://fossilfreeca.org/campaigns/#CalSTRS
May 8th, Fossil Free California teamed up with students from Youth vs. Apocalypse and Earth Guardians to bring our message straight to CalSTRS—divest from fossil fuels! More than 20 students skipped school that day to tell the CalSTRS Investment Committee to stop investing in the destruction of their future.
CalSTRS was so taken aback that they attempted to censor the youths' testimony by refusing to record it on their video live-stream. That didn't stop the word from getting out, however, as several radio stations covered the event, including KPFA: listen here.
Inspired by this success, the students have promised to return to CalSTRS' meetings in July and September, and FFCA has hired a part-time organizer to make sure that many more students join us at these next meeting
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Scientists at the United Nations’ intergovernmental body focusing on biodiversity sounded alarms earlier this month with its report on the looming potential extinction of one million species—but few heard their calls, according to a German newspaper report.
Deutsche Welle reported Thursday that partially because the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released its report on what it called nature’s “unprecedented” decline on the same day that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had their first child, news reports on the study’s grave implications were few and far between.