Climate icon Greta Thunberg has taken yet another prize for her woke climate activism, banking the one million euro Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity for her “contributions to mitigation and adaptation to climate change.”
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was established in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1956 “to improve the quality of life through art, charity, science and education” but 2020 marks its first ever Prize for Humanity, an award created to stimulate climate change activism.
According to its website, the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity “distinguishes innovative pathways with high impact potential to assist in processes of mitigation and/or adaptation to climate change, one of the greatest threats to this century and with devastating consequences for the well-being of current and future generations and for the economy and our natural ecosystems.”
The foundation shares the widespread conviction that humanity “is facing an unprecedented climate crisis,” which is “clearly visible in the ever-increasing frequency of heat waves and droughts, the rise in seawater temperatures, melting glaciers and extreme weather events.”
The 17-year-old Ms. Thunberg was already named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2019, joining a series of notable figures including Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939), and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979). Thunberg was launched into the public limelight thanks to her Fridays for Future movement, whereby students are encouraged to skip school every Friday in order to protest climate change.
Thunberg also received broad acclaim from the international Left for her public scolding of world leaders at the United Nations last September.
“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones,” Thunberg said at the U.N. General Assembly. “People are suffering. 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 fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?”
She also testified before congress:
Soon after, a series of contrite contenders for the Democrat Presidential nomination began falling over themselves to praise the young activist for her prophetic words.
Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, and Kamala Harris all joined in the Greta love-fest, with Harris confessing that we are “failing our nation’s youth.”
The Maryknoll missionaries, a Catholic religious order, went so far as to compare Thunberg to the Virgin Mary.
“Christians getting their knickers all in a twist over the passionate, articulate & knowledgeable witness of Greta Thunberg because of her age seem to overlook the age of the Virgin Mary at the time of the Annunciation,” the group wrote on Twitter.
On receiving the award Monday, Thunberg immediately promised to donate the money to organizations devoted to combatting climate change, such as the SOS Amazonia Campaign the Stop Ecocide Foundation.
According to the progressive website Lynxotic, the award to Ms. Thunberg may reflect an effort to return attention to climate change, momentarily stolen by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Though fewer headlines have been seen relating to current events surrounding the climate crisis, they are sure to return as the problem is far from over,” the site declares.
“Temperatures worldwide continue to shock and break records. Greta Thunberg putting her fame and award proceeds to good use is a bright spot on the horizon during an admittedly difficult year for our planet and species.”