The woke Left’s lionization of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg continues.
On Sunday, two Swedish lawmakers nominated Thunberg for the Nobel Peace Prize, earning the activist her second nomination after she had been a favorite to win the award last year (she did not). The pair of liberal legislators said that Thunberg deserves the award for “work[ing] hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis,” according to the Associated Press.
This is madness. Thunberg is certainly a passionate and impressive young person, but she hasn’t accomplished anything to advance real solutions to climate change. Meanwhile, adults around her have literally terrified her about the future. She is also now missing out on her education — an education that she must believe superfluous, given the end-of-times message she has been deployed to preach.
Thunberg deserves pity, not a Nobel Peace Prize.
It isn’t fair to judge Thunberg by adult standards, but she arguably did the cause of climate change a serious disservice with her left-wing, alarmist rhetoric at the United Nations. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she scolded the body melodramatically. “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!” That last line has become the subject of all the memes you can imagine.
With this kind of climate change alarmism, Thunberg echoes far-left Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has claimed that we’re all going to die unless we achieve zero carbon emissions within 12 years. Well, sorry, but in that case, we’re all dead anyway.
Actual climate scientists have refuted this hysteria, with one even calling it “bullshit” in comments made to Axios. It’s, of course, correct that climate change poses a threat in the long run, but it’s simply not true that we’re on the verge of “mass extinction.” No one is being helped by this fact-free fearmongering.
Thunberg’s activism has also produced essentially zero actual results, as she admits. Why alarmism without achievement is somehow worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize is beyond me.
Awarding Thunberg a Nobel would actually be an insult to other young winners, such as Malala Yousafzai, an extraordinary young Pakistani woman who was shot by the Taliban and then became an internationally-renowned women’s rights and education advocate. To suggest that Thunberg has somehow matched Malala’s accomplishments would be to make progressive ideology into an achievement. It defies rationality. I have views too and a platform to share them. I’m also relatively young — can I get a prize?
If anything, Thunberg deserves our compassion and pity, not an award. She’s a deeply troubled young person, who is clearly being exploited by liberal activists who do not have her interests at heart.
My Washington Examiner colleague Tiana Lowe has documented Thunberg’s struggles:
Now tell me, does it seem healthy to place a child with this many mental illnesses under the spotlight of public scrutiny, with a sole focus on the very phenomenon and associated alarmism that triggered her in the first place?
As Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill provocatively wrote, “It isn’t the planet that needs saving — it’s Greta. She needs to be saved from the death cult of eco-alarmism.”
Her story is indeed heart-wrenching, and it has been truly tragic to watch progressives exploit Thunberg to advance their not-so-subtly socialist “green” agenda. Shame on anyone who would validate this exploitation with one of the world’s most famous prizes.
