Greta Thunberg, the Swedish child prodigy who preached the “climate emergency,” became Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019. She is now 18 years old and has left the house of her parent-managers, living in her own apartment in Stockholm, mostly with the lights off. She cried to Wolf Blitzer, the United Nations, and the New York Times, but the world did not end on time. This is good for us but bad for Greta’s career.
Greta was once diagnosed with an anxiety disorder called “selective muting,” but she is not going quietly. The Scandi Cassandra has lately emerged from her carbon-neutral cocoon in a performative N95 mask, but her prophecies of doom no longer resonate. The media have already delivered her message, and they are now selectively muting her. Other more novel emergencies have eclipsed her tremulous bleatings: COVID, the recession that is not a recession, the price of food and gas, the war in Ukraine, and whether Martha Stewart is really dating Pete Davidson.
One of the many sorrows of COVID was that Greta was unable to perform daft stunts such as sailing across the Atlantic on an eco-friendly yacht while live-tweeting her visits to the chemical toilet. She was the Johnny Knoxville of the climate apocalypse. The last time people were entertained so thoroughly as the ship went down, it was by the orchestra on the Titanic. But, like any other ex-child star, Greta needs a new routine before she becomes an ex-star. She is not on TikTok.
Worse, Greta has gone off message. Like Miley Cyrus and other survivors of the Mickey Mouse Club, Greta grew up in public and now confuses radical gestures with freedom or maturity. She has addressed protests by the eco-Marxist group Extinction Rebellion, whose members glue themselves to trains, roads, and, this summer in London, the frames of paintings by Van Gogh and John Constable.
Three years ago, the media encouraged Greta to bypass the voters and demand climate action from their elected leaders. But when world leaders converged in Glasgow for the COP26 summit in October 2021, Greta called it “a farce” and joined an Extinction Rebellion protest outside a bank in the City of London. In June, when the European Parliament recategorized natural gas as a form of green energy, Greta called it “greenwashing.”
Worst of all, Greta has bitten the hand that fed her fame. The Greta-mania of 2019 was promoted to fight the media’s real “emergency,” the Trump presidency. Now, however, President Joe Biden is begging the Saudis to send more oil, and the diminutive doomster has the temerity to criticize him for it. The leader of the children’s crusade has become a heretic.
Last December, when the Washington Post asked whether she was inspired by Biden or any other world leaders, she replied, “If you call him a leader. I mean, it’s strange that people think of Joe Biden as a leader for the climate when you see what his administration is doing.” And while the Biden administration would like us to forget the mess it left in Afghanistan, Greta exhorts us to defend women’s rights against the Taliban.
“We are trying to find a solution to a crisis that we don’t understand,” she says. As she should have noticed when she addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2020, the official explanation and solution are now installed as governing doctrines across the West: The explanation uses Greta’s apocalyptic imagery to override democracy, to avert, we are told, an ever-imminent but somehow ever-deferred catastrophe, while the solution is what the WEF means by the “Great Reset”: corporatism with a green veneer. She wasn’t at Davos this year.
This scorching dry summer should have been the perfect launchpad for Greta 2.0. But Greta has served her purpose, the priming of public opinion, so she can now be dropped. Her climate crisis is now someone else’s corporate opportunity, an anti-democratic carve-up between politicians and energy companies. This makes her an inconvenient truth-teller — not about the end of the world but about the way we live today and how our world will be run tomorrow.
The end of the world is always nigh because our personal and familiar worlds are always ending. The filthy, crowded planet spins on regardless. The sea levels rise, the polar bears cling to melting chunks of iceberg, Gaia’s howls of pain fall unheard in an empty universe, and rich white Westerners who have lost their belief in anything other than the fear of death demand that their governments fix the weather. And the fix is in, whether you like it or not.
Dominic Green is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.
