Greta’s got a brand new groove.
Greta Thunberg, the youthful activist, has turned her attention away from the issue of climate and replaced it with the wholly unrelated Issue of Our Time: Israel vs. Gaza. The Swedish darling of the nongovernmental organization sphere, whose likeness has adorned a San Francisco skyscraper since 2019, garnered praise from progressives for her involvement in October with a flotilla attempting to bring aid into Gaza despite an ongoing war.
And while Thunberg has more recently been back on the climate train in a Venice dye-in stunt that earned scorn from Italian authorities, her devotion to the Palestinian, er, environment remains solid, and the stuff of the same tour of Europe’s boot that landed her in hot Venetian water.
No one can accuse Thunberg of an inability to multitask.
In a similar pivot from an even more household name, tech magnate Bill Gates has chilled on the far-off climate change black pill and is now emphasizing good, old-fashioned economic and human development in the grounded, short-term reality.
“It’s kind of this pragmatic view of somebody who’s, you know, trying to maximize the money and the innovation that goes to help in these poor countries,” Gates told reporters, in summing up the memorandum that provoked criticism from Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, among others. Sachs claimed that Gates’s pitting of climate against human needs was erroneous and that the memo was “pointless.” Alas, Gates commands greater clout than Sachs in the boomer influencer pecking order. So when the Microsoft co-founder merely bloviates, we listen.
Gates’s mild and recent decline in interest in curbing emissions, in favor of drug development to tackle malaria and other Global South ailments, tracks a pragmatic turn in public opinion at large. A 2024 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey on youth opinion found a turn away from abstract, long-term concerns such as the environment and toward proverbial bread-and-butter issues such as inflation. An in-depth Swedish Rasmussen survey showed likewise and revealed 2022 as the pivotal year wherein young people broke with the issue dear to Al Gore’s heart in favor of concern over geopolitical conflict. Things had “gotten real” with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. By the end of the following year, as we now know well, the Middle East would be back on the agenda in a way not seen since the junior Bush era.
“In 2017, equality and feminism topped the list,” the Rasmussen deep dive expounds. “Two years later, in 2019, climate and environment had taken over first place — an issue that maintained its dominance until 2022; but when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the conditions changed.”
The arc of the last decade has moved us from “MeToo” to “Extinction Rebellion” to actual rebellion — with a pit stop in “Black Lives Matter” between the latter two.
The results for the uberprogressive nation of Sweden are echoed in surveys of the broader European Union’s young and old alike. The EU’s own survey shows climate and environment trailing all other issues, including migration, economy, and defense.
National Review’s Andrew Follett observes that a similar sea change, so to speak, on attitudes toward climate action has taken hold stateside, with the 18-34-year-old demographic seeing marked declines in pursuing environmental passion projects. And what of Gen Xers and boomers?
“2025 Gallup polling found that a clear plurality of Americans, 41 percent, say that the media ‘generally exaggerates’ the seriousness of global warming – a notable uptick from the 33 percent who agreed with that statement in 2018,” Follett writes. “This is largely driven by Republicans and independents, 78 percent and 41 percent of whom agree that global warming has been exaggerated.”
Unfortunately, there is little indication that the public is turning on any specific, erroneous claims made by climate activists. Canadian writer Joseph Heath, in what he calls “highbrow misinformation,” calls out a tendency by the intelligentsia to pound the table on right-wing mis- and disinformation but overlook the same capacity for error on the Left. In taking the British Guardian to task for consistently downplaying how much carbon emissions stem from state-owned enterprises as opposed to private corporations, among other examples of fake news on this topic, he claims that what distinguishes highbrow is its relative plausible deniability.
“I call this sort of thing ‘highbrow’ misinformation not just because of the social class and self-regard of those who believe it, but also because of the relatively sophisticated way that it is propagated,” Heath explains. “Often one will find the accurate claim buried deep in the text but framed in a way that leads most readers to misinterpret it.”
A companion piece to Heath includes philosopher Dan Williams’s article on the same theme of elite misinformation, titled most straightforwardly, On Highbrow Disinformation.
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As the midway mark of the 2020s has seen Earth Day-style politics yield to both the atavistic vexations of standing armies or terrorism and futuristic concerns such as artificial intelligence and robotics, it remains to be seen if the lagging indicators of elderly corporate statesmen and leading indicators of Generation Z agitation will continue to simultaneously signal a waning interest in the health of Mother Nature.
The chant of 2026’s young progressives may well be, “Gaza over Gaia!”
Dain Fitzgerald is a writer and “podtuber” in Diamond Springs, California, in the beautiful Gold Country of El Dorado County. His Substack is @mupetblast.
