A Norwegian newspaper editor and the country’s Climate Minister have both criticised Swedish climate activist Great Thunberg for her recent rhetoric, saying she behaves in an anti-democratic manner.
Kjetil B. Alstadheim, the political editor of the Aftenposten — Norway’s highest-circulation newspaper — slammed Thunberg for creating polarization on the topic of climate change, saying “She risks leading them into something authoritarian, anti-democratic and downright dangerous. Her rhetoric is just a ploy away from incitement to something beyond civil disobedience.”
On Friday, Thunberg addressed a rally in Glasgow during the COP26 climate summit saying, “The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.”
Thunberg added that the summit was simply “business as usual” and that those attending were looking to “create loopholes to benefit themselves.”
“Greta Thunberg and activists are needed to push from the outside. There is no need for a Greta Thunberg who only spreads contempt and hopelessness,” Alstadheim wrote in an op-ed last Friday.
Norwegian broadcaster NRK notes that Alstadheim is not the only one to criticise the popular climate activist, with Norway’s Climate Minister Espen Barth Eide also criticising Thunberg’s words, claiming rhetoric stating politics has no meaning is “slightly dangerous.”
“I believe that the strong and sensible commitment to make something happen must be converted into political action – not to reject the whole idea of democratic political change”, Eide said.
Thunberg also stated that western countries owed a “historical debt” to countries in the Global South to dramatically reduce carbon emissions due to the history of colonialism, stating, “The climate and ecological crisis, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. It is directly tied to other crises and injustices that date back to colonialism and beyond.”
She was not the only climate activist speaking of radical rhetoric at the COP26 conference. Far-left activists told Breitbart London that the problem of climate change required a “socialist revolution” while others expressed a desire to abolish capitalism.
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