When she addressed the 2019 UN Climate Action summit in New York, Greta Thunberg, then just fifteen years old, was already an internationally recognised figure. “You all come to us young people for hope… How dare you!” she declaimed, scolding world leaders like an Old Testament prophet. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words!”

It was a powerful performance (albeit one that has since become the subject of online satire). She was named Time’s Person of the Year, and hailed as the voice of her generation.

But Thunberg’s activist focus has now moved on to other topics—as evidenced by her recent participation in a “freedom flotilla” to Gaza, which ended ingloriously when Israeli officials boarded Thunberg’s “selfie yacht” (as Israel derisively called it) and sent her packing. The whole stunt had an embarrassing quality to it; and emphasised the degree to which adulthood has erased Thunberg’s charm.

In a 2018 TED Talk, Thunberg said she didn’t want to become a climate scientist because “the climate crisis has already been solved,” and so “all we have to do is to wake up and change.” Also: “We can’t change the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.”

This kind of sententious rhetoric would (or at least should) be seen as embarrassing if spoken by any educated adult. Yet Thunberg’s vapid pronouncements were seen as positively inspiring, because she was a teenaged girl speaking (it seemed) sincerely from the heart.

Now that she’s in her twenties, that excuse is no longer applicable, even if her supporters still imagine her locked in time as a sacred earth child (a secularised adaptation of that universal religious myth by which a boy or girl of unparalleled purity delivers salvation to an impure world). Her recent foibles serve as a cautionary tale regarding the dangers of mission creep among radicalised activists, and the unwholesome veneration of their hallowed saviour figures.

Thunberg was raised in the world of performing arts. Her father, Svante Thunberg, is an actor and producer named for an ancestral cousin who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Her mother, Malena Emman, is an opera singer whose career brought the family to Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Barcelona; with summers spent in Glyndebourne, Salzburg, and Aix-en-Provence.

A sensitive child, Thunberg was reportedly traumatised at age eleven when her primary school teacher showed a video about climate change that depicted starving polar bears and flooded cities. After that, Emman reports, Greta cried constantly: “She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.” (Thunberg chose to eat again, once her doctors and parents threatened her with hospitalisation and drip-feeding.)

While Thunberg is clearly terrorised by her fixations, they also fuel her apocalyptic fervour

Psychiatrists diagnosed the child with high-functioning autism (also known as Asperger syndrome), obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, and selective mutism. Thunberg refers to these conditions as “superpowers” because they give her the ability to concentrate obsessively.

Put another way: While Thunberg is clearly terrorised by her fixations, they also fuel her apocalyptic fervour. “I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic,” she told the World Economic Forum (WEF). “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day... I want you to act as if the house was on fire—because it is.”

Greta’s public activism began on 2 August 2018, when she skipped school on the first day of grade nine. Parking herself outside the Swedish parliament with a sign marked “School Strike for the Climate,” she handed out flyers that read, “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.”

Thunberg wasn’t the first young person to engage prominently in climate activism. Among her predecessors was Canadian Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who spoke at the 1992 UN climate conference in Rio de Janeiro when she was just twelve. At fifteen, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez addressed the UN General Assembly in English, Spanish, and Nathuatl. And by age fourteen, Jaimie Margolin, a Hillary Clinton intern, had already co-founded the activist group This is Zero Hour and organised its Youth March on Washington.

Self-Harm Versus the Greater Good: Greta Thunberg and Child Activism

A workplace strike shows company owners and management that workers are able to harm them economically. A school strike, on the other hand, constitutes a form of self-harm, undertaken to attract adult attention.

QuillettePaulina Neuding

Context helps explain Thunberg’s unique success. The spring and summer of 2018 were freakishly hot and dry throughout Europe. There were dozens of forest fires in Sweden alone. These factors presumably exacerbated her anxiety. Depression feeds off a feeling of helplessness; and asserting agency over one’s life is a key to improving one’s mental health. By picketing the Swedish parliament, Thunberg channelled her fear into action. And her improved mental health was reportedly the reason her formerly sceptical father began supporting her public advocacy.

Sweden was also in the middle of an election campaign at the time. We Don’t Have Time, a Swedish organisation that’s billed itself as the world’s largest media platform for climate action, reported Greta’s strike on its first day. And within a week, Thunberg was being interviewed by Sweden’s national television channel and major daily newspapers. Two party leaders dropped by for a chat. Classmates skipped school to join the action. Even a teacher followed suit.

Mocking Thunberg was seen as taboo: Aside from providing other “superpowers,” her autism protected her from criticism.

Overnight, word of the local media frenzy spread to other European nations, and Thunberg’s protest became an international viral sensation. Global warming had been in the news, in some form, for over fifty years; but every issue needs real-life characters and sub-plots to attract public interest. Thunberg was perfect for the role: an earnest and articulate pint-sized truant (4’-11”) who boldly recited jeremiads at strangers. Mocking Thunberg was seen as taboo: Aside from providing other “superpowers,” her autism protected her from criticism.

Western politicians took note. If they weren’t able or willing to do more on the climate file, they could at least be seen as positioning themselves on the side of angels. In a little over a year, Thunberg was invited to address the WEF, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Austrian World summit, the New York and Montreal Global Climate Strikes, the UN’s Climate Action Summit, a mass rally at Germany’s Brandenburg Gates, and the British and European parliaments. No scientist or policy expert could have attracted this much attention.

To Thunberg’s credit, she refused to allow politicians to use her to green-wash their failures. During his 2019 re-election campaign, Justin Trudeau, then Canada’s peacocking prime minister, arranged to have a photo-op with the young activist. But afterward, somewhat hilariously, she told the media, “He, of course, is not doing enough.” Thunberg had a similarly brusque message while scolding British parliamentarians for their own climate inaction.

But for all Thunberg’s laurels, it’s unclear if her hectoring has actually helped the climate-activist cause—as her slogans do little to cast light on the complex policy choices that “doing enough” (as she puts it) would entail.

How can we mitigate the ecological damage from the mining and processing of the toxic materials required to produce electric-vehicle batteries? Or the destruction of wildlife habitats and human communities that often go hand-in-hand with large-scale hydro projects (a question that should be of more than passing importance to those, such as Thunberg, who preach “decolonisation” and Indigenous land rights). What is the net climate cost of biofuels? How should poor countries be compensated for losing the fossil fuels they’d been counting on as a means to industrialise their economies? How do we deal with the danger of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants? Protesting parliaments and excoriating politicians doesn’t help answer these questions.

One suspects that Thunberg isn’t as interested in identifying real-world policy solutions as she is in rituals of condemnation. For years now, she’s stridently repeated variations on the claim that the world is ending, and that everything needs to be done about it, all at once. While she’s right to call out the empty rhetoric on display at global climate conferences, Thunberg has become a major generator of empty rhetoric herself. For many of her followers, her protests have come to function primarily as exercises in self-valorisation and rage therapy.

Thunberg’s defenders would say that her legacy is reflected in the generation of young people whom she’s helped to mobilise. In a 2021 paper entitled The Greta Thunberg Effect, researchers concluded that “those who are more familiar with Greta Thunberg have a stronger sense of collective efficacy—the belief that, through working together with like-minded others, they can reduce global warming—and in turn have higher intentions of taking collective actions to reduce global warming.” 

On the other hand, I’d argue that the stunts and absolutist slogans that Thunberg promotes have, in some ways, made concrete action more difficult. That’s because they’ve come to seem off-putting and even cultish—especially when activists destroy art, deface private property, or block traffic in misguided efforts to raise awareness.

These counterproductive exercises in “direct action” aren’t mere tactical errors. They reflect a more basic misunderstanding of civil disobedience.

During the 1960s and 1970s, civil-rights activists typically took a universalist approach to politics—appealing to public empathy as a means to build bridges and create understanding. And they helped each other, even while maintaining their own objectives. The Gay Liberation Front, for instance, raised money for the Black Panthers. In turn, the Panthers’ leader, Huey Newton, supported gay liberation and women’s liberation. Similarly, Jewish groups applied their historical understanding of discrimination to help lead the fight for women’s rights (as with Betty Friedan), gay rights (Larry Kramer), and black voting rights, with some even giving their lives as Freedom Riders.

By contrast, Thunberg’s generation of activists came of age during the era of intersectionality, a doctrine that serves to sub-divide human oppression by skin colour, sex, gender identity, religion, and numerous other more arcane categories. Since the oppression-related trauma of each group is presented as being unfathomable to others, the idea of humanitarian universalism preached by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights giants has been rejected. 

In keeping with the slogan, “nothing about us without us” (which was popularised by disability activists in the 1990s), social-justice groups formed by different intersectional constituencies now demand that the parochial concerns of every sub-category be addressed before the group as a whole can move forward. This is why groups supporting, say, trans rights, will now inject boilerplate language about Palestinian rights and anti-racism into their manifestos (and vice-versa). This isn’t the organic spirit of universalist solidarity observed during the civil-rights era, but rather a collectively constructed purity spiral.

To cite a case study that played out in my own Toronto neighbourhood: Nine years ago, the city’s Pride organisation invited Black Lives Matter to lead its annual parade. BLM accepted the offer, then hijacked the event by staging a sit-in during the event, refusing to move until Pride organisers signed a list of nine demands that included more funding for organisations representing people of colour, the banning of police floats and information booths at Pride, and increasing “representation amongst Pride Toronto staffing/hiring” for “Black trans women, Black queer people, Indigenous folk, and others from vulnerable communities.”

The demands were signed under duress—and then revoked the following day. Following much outrage, the Pride board then reversed course again, and apologised “emphatically and unreservedly for its role in deepening the divisions in our community, for a history of anti-blackness, and repeated marginalisation of the marginalised within our community that our organisation has continued.” (Readers will not be surprised to learn that activists found fault with the apology and installed a more intersectionally doctrinaire board at the first opportunity.)

These unfortunate tendencies in modern social-justice activism provide context for Thunberg’s recent photo-op cruise to Gaza. According to Thunberg: “If you as a climate activist don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist. You cannot claim to fight for climate justice if you ignore the suffering of all colonised and marginalised people today.”

Rather than lead a broad-based movement to confront an apocalyptic climate catastrophe, Thunberg has chosen to cast out would-be supporters—regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum—who happen to believe in Israel’s right to exist. Her apocalyptic puritanism was once limited to the climate domain. Now, she has two litmus tests that supporters must pass. Simple principles of arithmetic dictate that, as her membership conditions multiply, her corps of followers will shrink.

Thunberg claimed she’d been “kidnapped” by Israel. And her supporters say she was “risking her life” on the Gaza jaunt—as if she were a heroine on par with Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the face by the Taliban for advocating for women’s and girls’ education in Afghanistan; or Ruby Bridges and other black children who defied death threats to break school segregation in the American South. As one wag observed, Thunberg is the first hostage victim in history whose kidnappers’ only demand was that she leave.

Leftists rightly admired the courage of the black and gay civil rights protesters who faced beatings, killings, and jail for their beliefs—as well as young men who burned their draft cards during the Vietnam War, the Chinese students at Tiananmen Square, and the Indians who lay on railway tracks to secure their country’s independence. We admire civil disobedience when protesters put something on the line. But Thunberg clearly does not belong in this category.

Members of Thunberg’s flotilla were given a choice by Israeli officials: Sign a document agreeing to be deported, or be transferred to jail to await a judicial hearing. One can respect Thunberg’s fellow activists who lived their principles and chose jail. But Thunberg herself bailed out. After receiving a week of international attention and accolades (quick, name one other person on her boat), Thunberg took that plane ride home, explaining, “Why would I want to stay in an Israeli prison more than necessary?”

Climate change is real, and addressing it should be a global priority. But a constructive discussion about how to accomplish that can’t be led by attention seekers who tie their brand to whatever dubious social-justice cause célèbre happens to be trending on Bluesky—and then demand that everyone else immediately do likewise. It’s time for Thunberg’s fellow travellers to acknowledge that her usefulness to their movement ended a long time ago.