On 20 September, filmmakers Cybele Malinowski, Charlie Ford and Amy Low
created a makeshift set at the global climate strike event held in
Sydney, Australia. They interviewed 18 passionate young people from
different backgrounds about why the event matters. The result is an
intimate, raw and formidable series capturing the thoughts, fears and
hopes of Australia’s next generation.
Young people like Greta Thunberg are participating in the culture wars while also managing to float above the fray.
Greta Thunberg was the keynote speaker at the climate protest in New York on Friday.Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
The kids aren’t just all right — they’re scrambling the brains of their political enemies.
Last Friday, millions of people, many of them children and teenagers, took to the streets during the Global Climate Strike, a protest inspired by Fridays for Future, the international youth effort started by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The protesters’ call for broad action to combat global warming was powerful, as was the message sent by their numbers: Dynamic, frustrated young people are instilling in the climate movement a new urgency.
Online, the climate kids’ impact can be measured in a different way — by how they’re short-circuiting the right-wing media ecosystem that’s partly responsible for the spread of climate skepticism. Since Friday’s strike, pro-Trump media and conservative cable news pundits have devoted significant resources to turning the children of the climate movement into Public Enemy No. 1.
Over the weekend, Alan Jones, an Australian broadcaster for Sky News, delivered a monologue calling the climate-striking youth “selfish, badly educated, virtue-signaling little turds.” Mr. Jones finished by reading a letter arguing that children concerned about climate change should “wake up, grow up and shut up until you’re sure of the facts before protesting.” The rant echoed other criticisms of the protest from the right. “I wish I could inject that letter into my veins,” a blogger for the conservative site RedState wrote.
Ms. Thunberg has been the primary target of this vitriol. On Saturday, the pro-Trump media figure Dinesh D’Souza likened Ms. Thunberg to models in Nazi propaganda. Videos of her speeches have been edited to replace her voice with Adolf Hitler’s. On Fox News on Monday evening, the Daily Wire pundit Michael Knowles called Ms. Thunberg — who is open about being on the autism spectrum — “a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents.” (Fox News issued an apology and called the comment “disgraceful.”)
A few hours later, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham likened her to children from the horror film “Children of the Corn.” A Breitbart contributor wrote that she deserved “a spanking or a psychological intervention.” And she’s attracted the ire of President Trump on Twitter — a jab with which Ms. Thunberg had some fun.
To be clear: battling Fox News and subtweeting the president are hardly the youth climate movement’s main goal. Still, it’s a notable case study in the limits of the right’s ability to wage an information war across the media.
Much like the Parkland students, who proved to be a formidable opposition to the pro-Trump media apparatus that accused them of being crisis actors, Ms. Thunberg and the climate kids seem immune to the usual tactics of right-wing media. As newcomers, they’re mostly impervious to the right’s tool of personal attacks. They don’t have the baggage of voting records or deep financial ties to political organizations.
This doesn’t mean their enemies aren’t trying — this week, a pro-Trump blog feebly attempted to tie Ms. Thunberg to the billionaire George Soros, who has been the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Online, far-right trolls are mounting an effort to harass the young women of the climate movement. Some of the onslaught is believed to be inauthentic — 5,000 tweets by suspected bots have mentioned Ms. Thunberg, according to BuzzFeed News. Similarly, toxic pro-Trump communities have zeroed in on teenage climate protesters. As of this writing, three of the top 25 posts from Reddit’s The_Donald forum in the last week were direct attacks on Ms. Thunberg. And yet, the usual smears don’t seem to stick.
Growing up online doesn’t hurt either. In 2018, I wrote that a strength of the Parkland students was being “effectively born onto the internet and innately capable of waging an information war.” The activists of the climate youth movement are no different — they’re battle-hardened by the internet and they’ve found a way to turn online organizing into mobilization on the streets.
Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School participating in the March for Our Lives protest in Parkland, Fla., last year. Saul Martinez for The New York Times
Perhaps most important is their instinctive understanding of attention and how to wield it as both a weapon and a tool. They understand how to attract attention: Their protests feature meme-able signs to capture interest across social media. Their events — from global strikes to sit-ins in the House speaker’s hallway — are tailored to garner media coverage. They also know how to spot enemies looking to divert attention and to ignore or dismiss them.
Simply put, they don’t seem to care what adults, skeptics, deniers and crusty politicians think of them. And they waste very little of their time, energy and focus work-shopping their message or bulletproofing it against criticism. They simply pay their enemies no attention. They’re participating in the culture wars while also managing to float above the fray.
None in the movement embody this like Ms. Thunberg, who suffers no fools in her unsparing and blunt statements to diplomats and members of Congress alike. Some of this may be the result of age, what Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic describes as the “unique moral position of being a teenager,” in which “she can see the world through an ‘adult’ moral lens” but “unlike an actual adult, she bears almost no conscious blame for this dismal state.”
She does not allow her message — that the youth of the world have been betrayed by past generations’ inaction on climate change — to be co-opted by fawning lawmakers, and she dismisses their praise for her as a tragic role reversal that forces her to be the adult in a room of well-dressed children. And she seems keenly aware that her rivals’ critiques are merely efforts to divert her attention. “It seems they will cross every possible line to avert the focus, since they are so desperate not to talk about the climate and ecological crisis,” she wrote of her “haters” on Twitter on Wednesday.
The usual tactics of the right-wing media break down in the face of this type of resolve. While outrage campaigns intended to work the refs and appeal to fears of appearing partisan may work with lawmakers or companies in Silicon Valley, the youth climate movement appears wholly unmoved. While the levers for climate progress proposed by solutions like a Green New Deal are undoubtedly political, the broader movement’s desire — an inhabitable earth for all — is far from partisan. The stakes, as the movement sees it, are too high to focus attention on the trolls. And the pressure, from conservative pundits and Breitbart contributors, doesn’t just get dismissed, it goes unnoticed.
Faced with a political enemy that pays it no attention, the right is palpably frustrated. They argue that children have become, as a headline on an essay by Commentary’s Noah Rothman put it, “Child Soldiers in the Culture wars,” are insulated against criticism because of their age and innocence. “How do you respond to statements like that?” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said recently of Ms. Thunberg’s forthright speeches. “The truth is you can’t respond. And of course, that’s the point.”
But as the past week shows, the right is perfectly willing to attack the children. Instead, the problem is that, as Mr. Carlson seems to realize, there’s just not a very resonant counter message for a youth movement to protect the planet. Polling also suggests that there’s an increasingly shrinking pool of conservative listeners for it, with a majority of Republicans under age 45 now identifying as concerned about climate change. And so it feels increasingly likely that, when it comes to climate, the right-wing media, which is skewed toward an aging Republican audience, may simply be obsolete.
In other words, it’s not that the right can’t attack the climate kids because of their age. Rather, it’s that because of their age, the right’s attacks feel especially feeble.
Hundreds of thousands of young protesters on the streets.
A Swedish teenager shaming the world's elders for failing to act on
climate change. A two-way blizzard of contempt played out on the
internet.
After the climate debate erupted this week, it appeared
there was a gaping chasm opening between the generations, something
probably not seen in Australia since the anti-Vietnam War movement of
the late 1960s. But like so much in this highly charged debate, the
reality is more nuanced.
Greta Thunberg: "If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you." AP
After
travelling to the United States by boat rather than plane, to avoid
carbon emissions, Greta Thunberg captured international headlines with
her fiery speech at the United Nations climate summit in New York.
"How
dare you!" she said. "You are failing us. But the young people are
starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations
are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never
forgive you."
It was a confrontational performance. And one which divided opinion among the older generation at which it was directed.
For some, the message was highly effective as Thunberg's admonition
cut through. They applauded her bravery and efforts to combat inertia on
climate change. Others questioned the students’ perceived idealism and
naivety and mocked Thunberg online.
Some business executives were
particularly critical of Thunberg's claim that “we are at the beginning
of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales
of endless economic growth".
Climate activist Greta Thunberg,
in an emotional speech at the United Nations chided world leaders with
the repeated phrase, "how dare you?"
Climate activist Greta Thunberg, in an emotional speech at the United Nations chided world leaders with the repeated phrase, "how dare you?"
Bernard
Arnault, chairman and chief executive of luxury giant LVMH, reportedly
told an event this week that although Thunberg was a "dynamic girl",
this was "catastrophism". He said economic growth had lifted many out of
poverty and should be pursued alongside solutions for climate change.
Prime
Minister Scott Morrison's response was to warn against fuelling
“needless anxiety” among Australian children, whereas Atlassian
co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes encouraged his employees to join the
strike.
The idea that adults are destroying a world that their children will
inhabit certainly cut through for Bernadette and Mark Lyden.
Adult responsibility
The
Tamworth couple, whose 12-year-old daughter Lucy was instrumental in
organising the School Strike 4 Climate in the rural northern NSW town
last week, say the idea of a moral obligation to do more for their
children is more compelling that any scientific and economic arguments.
“We’ve
always pretty much had everything that we’ve ever wanted, and now, late
in the day, we’ve realised our children are not going to have the same
lives that we had – and that’s why things have changed for us,” says
Mark.
The couple say they aren't "typical greenies" and hope that other
"ordinary middle-class people who never really thought about these
issues", like them, would join the cause.
Mark, a solicitor, says
he was surprised when his clients began wanting him to write contract
clauses that took long-term climatic conditions into account.
“That
was the first thing that really shocked me about all of this, that
people at a business level were starting to factor this into the way
that they conducted their business,” he says.
Bernadette says
their daughter, with no siblings her age, had been privy to “adult
conversations” for a long time and took an interest in them.
"We’ve
always been interested in topical politics and local issues as well. So
she’s been exposed to a wide variety of issues," she says.
Discussions about climate change are sometimes playing out in vastly different realms
The
debate over climate change has been highly political in Australia, with
one of the biggest issues being the fate of the Adani coal mine in
Queensland. At the May federal election, a backlash against the
anti-Adani protests swung votes towards the Morrison government. Since
then, Queensland's Labor state government has swung its support in
favour of the coal industry and federal Labor is reviewing its emissions
reduction target.
Where the Lydens might be having robust
political discussions around the dinner table, an increasing challenge
for civic discourse has been that discussions about climate change are
sometimes playing out in vastly different realms.
When users on
social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram interact with
certain posts and topics, they are algorithmically served up similar
content types. This mechanism has the capacity to drive people into
different worlds where discussions about climate change are based on
vastly divergent "facts" and assumptions about what is at stake.
For students, winning hearts and minds has meant speaking to people outside their echo chambers.
Politics and coal
School
Strike 4 Climate national organiser Varsha Yajman, 17, says such
engagement is crucial if they want to negotiate with politicians over
their core demands: no new coal, oil and gas projects, including the
Adani mine; 100 per cent renewable energy generation and exports by
2030; and funding towards a just transition and job creation for all
fossil-fuel workers and communities.
They are tailoring their
communications strategy to be as relevant as possible to each platform
and target audience. Yajman, who has just finished year 12 at Gosford
High School, says it is all about reaching older demographics, and a
promotional video for the strike deliberately included more about the
economic aspects of a transition.
She says the organisers rely
heavily on Instagram to reach other teenagers, posting everything from
shots of the previous strike in March, with engaging captions, to short
moving videos known as “boomerangs”. The organisers also used TikTok, a
video-sharing platform popular with younger teenagers.
"With
Instagram it was more about having that bit of colour pop, or making it
like a social event, where everyone is fighting for something that they
are passionate about. On Facebook, our content was a bit more specific
about the cause, and about speaking to adults to get them to
understand," Yajman says.
She has seen both a push and pull this week when it comes to attracting older generations to her cause.
"I
think that there were 350,000 people who showed up across Australia
[last week] shows that different generations are starting to come
together, but at the same time, Scott Morrison didn't even go to the
climate summit at the UN. So there is that divide," Yajman says.
She
cites a positive and instructive meeting with NSW Energy and
Environment Minister Matt Kean, who listened to the students and then
talked through some practical considerations about tranferring to
renewables. In contrast, former NSW Liberal leader Peter Collins went on
ABC’s The Drum to lambast the young climate change activists
over how coal will be replaced as an export commodity or energy source
in Australia.
Immediately after Thunberg's widely broadcast “How
dare you", in which the 16-year-old challenged world leaders on their
inaction around climate, Queensland politician George Christensen
attracted widespread criticism for changing his Facebook page’s cover
photo to a picture of the teenager with a red cross over her mouth,
declaring his social media page a “Greta Free Zone”.
But whether
you agree or disagree, Thunberg has become the face of a movement of
young people protesting against inaction on climate change. They have
put an issue of global political, economic and ecological importance
firmly back on the agenda.
