The leaders of France, Germany, and Australia turned on teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg after she castigated them on the world stage for not taking enough action to avert what she calls a “mass extinction.”
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel distanced themselves from Thunberg over her speech to the United Nations and the legal complaint Thunberg filed accusing France and Germany of a lack of action on climate change. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison faulted Thunberg for subjecting Australian children to “needless anxiety.”
“They’ve got enough things to be anxious about,” Morrison said of his own daughters. “We’ve got to let kids be kids. We can’t have them growing up as mushrooms, but we’ve got to get a bit of context into this.”
Thunberg, 16, has become the face of the global alarmist environmental movement. In her speech to the UN, she accused world leaders of destroying her “dreams” and her “childhood” with “empty words.”
“People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Thunberg said.
Thunberg and 15 other child climate alarmists filed a formal complaint with the United Nations accusing nations including Germany, France, Brazil, and Turkey of violating children’s rights by taking insufficient action to address global warming. The children’s complaint did not include China and India, the world’s biggest polluters.
Macron, who had previously sided with Thunberg’s movement, criticized the youth for taking a radical and antagonistic position.
French ecology minister Brune Poirson also criticized Thunberg for creating divisions that may prove irreparable.
Merkel, who has said that Thunberg’s movement “drove” Germany to take environmental action, took a subtler approach to criticize the teenage climate activist.
Macron, Merkel, and Morrison are not the first to criticize climate alarmists. The chief of the World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, told a Finnish magazine in early September that climate extremists and “doomsters” are attacking mainstream scientists in a bid to shift them toward a radical view of climate change.
Taalas pointed out that climate extremists are selectively picking out facts from the reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“The IPCC reports have been read in a similar way to the Bible: you try to find certain pieces or sections from which you try to justify your extreme views. This resembles religious extremism,” Taalas said.
According to Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, "Europe's political leaders are increasingly concerned about losing their climate agenda to eco-fanatics and extremists."
"Greta's apocalyptic mass movement is turning millions of young French, German, and European children and teenagers against their own governments, their institutions, and their countries, turning them into a resentful, angry mob," Peiser wrote in an email to The Epoch Times.
"Officials and politicians are beginning to speak out because they fear they may lose control over this increasingly dangerous tiger they thought they could ride forever."