Opinion

The Problem With Greta Thunberg’s

Climate Activism
Her radical approach is at odds with democracy.

By Christopher Caldwell
Mr. Caldwell is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in
Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.”
 Aug. 2, 2019

The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, second from right, at a
session of the French National Assembly in July.Credit...Stephane De
Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Climate activists in Western Europe had already been radicalizing for some time
when record heat engulfed the Continent last month. The high reached 109 degrees
in Paris two Thursdays ago. Yet many environmentalists have come to believe
that extreme weather alone will never spur Europeans to give up fossil fuels. Nor will
talking about it. Provocations and disruption are needed.

The problem is not that Europeans think like Americans, 13 percent of

whom say human activity is “not responsible at all” for global warming. Europeans
are less cynical about official accounts of climate change that come from the United
Nations and various universities. The problem, rather, is that Europeans act like
Americans, holding tight to their driving and consuming habits.

Climate activists have therefore changed their emphasis. No more eliciting pieties by
explaining what happens when carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million.
Better to use the specter of imminent self-extinction to rally the public behind
actions like banning cars from city centers and halting new oil exploration.

This new focus may have the virtue of conveying urgency. But it is going to bring the
climate protesters into conflict with democracy, whether they realize it or not.

The symbol of this transformation is the Swedish high school student Greta
Thunberg, who describes herself to her 800,000-plus Twitter followers as a “16-year-
old climate activist with Asperger.” Late last summer she began skipping school on
Fridays and traveling to Sweden’s Parliament, the Riksdag, where she handed out
fliers informing adults, in crude language, that she was doing this because they were
ruining her future.

Classmates joined her. Students in other European capitals imitated her. “Fridays for
Future,” as the protests came to be called, turned Ms. Thunberg into the first world
political leader born this century. They have been hailed by Green parties across the
Continent, many of which won impressive victories in May’s European elections.

Ms. Thunberg believes people should act, not argue. That, perhaps, is why she is
planning to travel to next month’s United Nations global warming summit in New
York by sailboat, not airplane. It is not that Ms. Thunberg does not care about
climate data; indeed, she cites the annual reports of the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as if they were gospel. It is just that she
is done debating.

Her politics rests on two things. First is simplification. “The climate crisis already has
been solved,” she said at a TED Talk in Stockholm this year. “We already have all the
facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.” Second is sowing
panic, as she explained at the World Economic Forum in Davos last winter.

Normally Ms. Thunberg would be unqualified to debate in a democratic forum. Since

a 16-year-old is not a legally responsible adult, she cannot be robustly criticized and,
even leaving aside her self-description as autistic, Ms. Thunberg is a complicated
adolescent. Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle. 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.

Kids her age have not seen much of life. Her worldview might be unrealistic, her
priorities out of balance. But in our time, and in her cause, that seems to be a plus.
People have had enough of balance and perspective. They want single-minded
devotion to the task at hand.

This Ms. Thunberg provides. That climate change be understood as an “emergency”

is her first objective. Increasingly, authorities share it. The week of the heat wave,
according to The Economist, the Met Office, the British meteorological agency, was
trying to speed up its “attribution studies” so that it can link incidents of extreme
weather to global warming before the public’s attention drifts. This is a political, not
a meteorological, goal. There are also calls to politicize language: In May, The
Guardian announced it would use the term “climate crisis” rather than “climate
change” in its articles, and “global heating” rather than “global warming.”

Alliances between institutional authorities and activists like Ms. Thunberg often
backfire. With questions of global warming, the problems of credibility are already
large, even without fresh incitements to politicization. Sometime after the age of 16,
most people learn that not even the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change are above self-interest and human error.

It is also hard to say what a real, non-utopian low-carbon politics would look like,
once the public got involved in legislating and regulating. Contrary to the
assumptions of many of Ms. Thunberg’s admirers, it might resemble contemporary
populist agendas more than the world imagined by the United Nations’ modelers and
the governance experts of Davos. Protectionism could be in: If you establish a system
of carbon pricing, countries that don’t practice it are “dumping,” and their imports
must be excluded. Immigration could be out: It is difficult to see how any kind of
long-term mass immigration is consistent with a desire to lower Europe’s carbon
output.

And that is before we even broach the question of what kind of civilization we want,
and at what level of technological complexity. On a planet of eight billion people, it is
not just destination weddings that require considerable expenditure of energy. So
does food. So does clean drinking water. So does communication.

Increasingly, climate agitators want action, not distraction. That often requires
demonizing anyone who stands in the way. In July the climate editor of the Dutch
newspaper NRC Handelsblad complained that Paris’s declaration of a “climate state
of emergency” on July 9 had not been accompanied by a ban on automobile traffic in
Paris or by a dimming of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. In Germany the word
“Flugscham” is one of the last year’s more interesting coinages. It means not fear of
flying but shame of flying, and of the pollution it brings about. The German
economist Niko Paech urges shaming people for booking cruises and driving S.U.V.s,
too.

Behind the new boldness of climate activists is the assumption that ordinary
Europeans’ good intentions are sincere and their inaction is hypocritical. It could be
the other way around. Whatever the case, Europeans’ slowness to act on the climate
cannot simply be dismissed as “denial.” Those who read the United Nations reports
and tut-tut but fail to take to the streets might be less resolute — but they might
simply disagree, or have other priorities.
Democracy often calls for waiting and seeing. Patience may be democracy’s cardinal
virtue. Climate change is a serious issue. But to say, “We can’t wait,” is to invite a
problem just as grave.