Tu devrais t'intéresser aux prémices du personnage Greta Thunberg et aux intérêts qui gravitaient autour d'elle pour mieux comprendre cette critique. Elle a, au moins au départ, clairement été instrumentalisée, elle l'admettait elle-même dans un post facebook, ce qui est d'ailleurs tout à son honneur. Depuis elle indique s'être distanciée de cet entourage du début mais ça explique un peu les interrogations qu'on peut avoir sur le sujet.
Edit : un article relativement fouillé sur la question (je vous fais un copier-coller vu que c'est en accès payant)
Citation:
Greta Thunberg and the plot to forge a climate warrior
The teenage activist Greta Thunberg wants nothing more than to change the world. The shadowy cabal behind her has other goals
Dominic Green
Sunday August 18 2019, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Greta Thunberg’s great American adventure has begun. Last Wednesday, she set sail from Plymouth like the pilgrims did, her Mayflower a zero-carbon but very expensive racing yacht; her goal not religious liberty but a camera-rich turn at the UN’s climate change conference in New York.
Meanwhile, on dry land, GQ magazine recently appointed Greta its “game changer of the year”, with a cover image in which the teenager, whether she realises it or not, strikes a stern, finger-pointing pose reminiscent of Lord Kitchener’s First World War recruiting poster and tells Britain’s feckless carbon-emitters: “To do your best is no longer good enough.”
Greta is just an ordinary 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl whose fiery visions have convinced the parliaments of Britain and Ireland to declare a “climate emergency”. Her parents, Svante Thunberg and Malena Ernman, an actor and opera singer respectively, are just an ordinary pair of parent-managers who want to save the planet. Query their motives and you risk being accused of “climate denial”, or of bullying a vulnerable child with Asperger’s syndrome.
However, the Greta phenomenon has also involved green lobbyists, PR hustlers, eco-academics and a think tank founded by a wealthy former minister in Sweden’s Social Democratic government with links to the country’s energy companies. These companies are preparing for the biggest bonanza of government contracts in history: the greening of the western economies. Greta, whether she and her parents know it or not, is the face of their political strategy.
The family’s story is that Greta launched a one-girl “school strike” at the Swedish parliament on the morning of August 20 last year. Ingmar Rentzhog, the founder of a social media platform, We Don’t Have Time, happened to be passing. Inspired, Rentzhog posted Greta’s photograph on his own Facebook page. By late afternoon, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter had Greta’s story and face on its website. The rest is viral.
But this isn’t the full story. In emails, Rentzhog told me that he “met Greta for the first time” at the parliament and “did not know Greta or Greta’s parents” before then. Yet in the same emails, the media entrepreneur admitted to having met Greta’s mother “3-4 months before everything started” — in early May last year, when he and Malena shared a stage at a Stockholm conference called the Climate Parliament.
Nor did Rentzhog stumble on Greta’s protest by accident. He now admits to having been informed “the week before [via] a mailing list from a climate activist” named Bo Thoren.
Rebecca Weidmo Uvell, an independent journalist, has obtained an earlier email that reveals Thoren, the leader of a group called Fossil Free Dalsland, was searching for fresh green faces.
In February last year, he invited a group of environmental activists, academics and politicians to plan “how we can involve and get help from young people to increase the pace of the transition to a sustainable society”. In May that year, after Greta won second prize in an environmental writing competition run by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Thoren approached all the competition winners with a plan for a “school strike” modelled on the walkouts by pupils after the shootings at a high school in Parkland, Florida, a few months before.
“But no one was interested,” Greta’s mother claimed, “so Greta decided to do it for herself.”
Fortunately, Greta’s decision coincided with the publication of Scenes from the Heart, her parents’ memoir of how working to save the planet had saved their family. Unfortunately, Malena omitted to tell her publisher that Rentzhog had commandeered Greta’s stunt.
“We had a problem,” recalled Malena’s editor, Jonas Axelsson. “Journalists asked if it was promotion for the book. It wasn’t at all. It was a nightmare.”
It was, however, a dream for Rentzhog. He combined Thoren’s plan, Malena’s musical fame, Greta’s uncanny charisma and his social media platform’s mailing list. And that turned Greta into a viral celebrity.
“I have not invented Greta,” Rentzhog insisted, “but I helped to spread her action to an international audience.”
Trained by former US vice-president Al Gore’s environmental group, the Climate Reality Project, Rentzhog set up We Don’t Have Time in late 2017 to “hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change” by leveraging “the power of social media”.
He and his chief operating officer, David Olsson, have backgrounds in finance, not environmental activism: Rentzhog as the founder of Laika Consulting, an investment relations company, and Olsson with Svenska Bostadsfonden, one of Sweden’s biggest property funds, whose board Rentzhog joined in June 2017. The platform’s investors included Gustav Stenbeck, whose family control Kinnevik, one of Sweden’s largest investment corporations.
In May last year, Rentzhog became the chairman and Olsson a board member of a think tank called Global Utmaning (Global Challenge). Its founder, Kristina Persson, is an heir to an industrial fortune. A career trade unionist and former Social Democratic Party politician, she was the Swedish government’s “minister for the future” between 2014 and 2016. She is also a former deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank and a “new-ager” who has talked about being reincarnated and communicating with the dead.
Petter Skogar, the president of Sweden’s biggest employers’ association, is also on Global Challenge’s 10-person board. So is Anders Wijkman, a former co-president of the Club of Rome, former chairman of the environmental objectives committee and a recipient last February of Thoren’s call for youth mobilisation.
Among Global Challenge’s senior advisers is Catharina Nystedt Ringborg, a former chief executive of Swedish Water, an adviser to the International Energy Agency and a former vice-president of the Swedish-Swiss energy giant ABB. Ringborg is also a member of Sustainable Energy Angels, a green energy venture capital firm, the members of which are a Who’s Who of the Swedish energy sector. Its president and the chairman of its investment committee are former ABB personnel, as are four of its 17 members.
So, when Greta met Rentzhog, he was the salaried chairman of a private think tank owned by a former Social Democrat minister with a background in the energy sector. His board was stacked with powerful sectoral interests, including career Social Democrat politicians, union leaders, and lobbyists with links to Brussels. And his board’s vice-chairwoman, Ringborg, was a member of one of Sweden’s most powerful green energy investment groups.
Greta and her parents probably did not know this — and Rentzhog seems to have wanted to keep it that way. On September 2 last year, just after Rentzhog claimed to have stumbled on Greta protesting outside parliament, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper ran a long opinion piece on the need to force the greening of the global economy by “bottom-up” action against national governments, including “broad social mobilisation . . . reminiscent of what takes place in communities threatened by war”.
Greta’s mother was one of nine signatories, as were Persson and three other Global Challenge board members, though they cited other affiliations. Only Rentzhog admitted that he was associated with Global Challenge.
An English edition of the article identifies Rentzhog and Wijkman as its authors. Rentzhog claims that “many of us involved in Global Challenge were also involved” in writing it. He admitted to me by email that he showed Malena “the article and the other signatures, but not their titles for Global Challenge”.
Greta’s father, Svante, who now devotes himself to managing his daughter’s career, declined requests for an interview and refused to respond to a detailed list of written questions about Rentzhog and Global Challenge. Instead, he issued a three-paragraph statement through an intermediary, saying that “neither I nor Greta feel qualified to answer” questions about Rentzhog’s business connections and when the family might have known about them.
Svante also claims that “we have never worked with” Rentzhog’s social media platform or Global Challenge. Yet Greta served on the We Don’t Have Time advisory board between last November and January this year, and Malena signed a letter with four Global Challenge board members. When I asked Rentzhog if he had introduced Greta and her parents to other Global Challenge board members, he replied: “I don’t know. Maybe I did, but if Svante says no, maybe it was not connected.”
Svante refuses to answer questions about whether he and Greta have met members of the Global Challenge board. But Wijkman remembers.
Wijkman used to lead the Club of Rome, whose alarmist 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, has become a cornerstone of the “climate emergency” campaign. Last December, We Don’t Have Time and Global Challenge launched the Club of Rome’s latest vision of apocalypse, the Climate Emergency Plan. Greta, Rentzhog told me, was invited to the launch event, but was unable to attend as she was already booked to deliver a TED Talk.
The Climate Emergency Plan’s talking points are Greta’s talking points. “Around the year 2030, in 10 years, 252 days and 10 hours,” the Scandinavian Cassandra told British parliamentarians in April, “we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it.” The only way to save ourselves is to follow the Climate Emergency Plan and green the global energy business through massive government investment and emergency legislation.
Wijkman sees Greta as vital to pushing the “climate emergency” strategy on Europe’s political class. “We had many scientists and climate researchers who have been speaking in terms of emergency for a number of years,” he told me. “But it is only now, in the past couple of months, that the concept of emergency has been more or less accepted.”
He said Greta has been “instrumental” to this breakthrough. “Young people seemed not to pay much attention only half a year ago, but now obviously they do. So she has been a lightning rod or catalyst of this.”
Has Rentzhog been essential to Greta’s rise? “Yes, yes,” said Wijkman, though he finds it hard to quantify to what degree. “I don’t know how much he’s been influential. I think that Greta and her father and mother are quite skilled.”
Svante claims his daughter “acts independently of any organisation or individual”. Yet Wijkman says Greta has “good advisers”, such as climate change professor Kevin Anderson. Anderson claims only to “discuss” Greta’s ideas and “correct” her manuscripts, but Wijkman is certain he does more. “I know that he has given her a lot of advice in terms of substance,” he said.
In January, Rentzhog and We Don’t Have Time used Greta’s face and story in promotional materials for a new venture’s share issue. Rentzhog claimed the family knew, but Greta and her parents insisted they did not. They announced their association with Rentzhog was over — a curious statement, considering that Svante claims they had never associated with him in the first place.
Greta’s new press agent, Daniel Donner, works from the office of a Brussels lobby group, the European Climate Foundation. Still, We Don’t Have Time retweet Greta as if nothing has changed. In a way, nothing has. Whatever Greta or her parents know or think, her eco-mob increases the likelihood of legislation and investment that will make colossal profits for those such as Global Challenge, We Don’t Have Time and Sustainable Energy Angels, as well as for the British and American lobbyists and corporations clambering aboard her campaign.
For energy titans in Sweden, as elsewhere, saving the planet means government contracts to print the green stuff. Green energy lobbyists are using populist scare tactics and a children’s crusade to bypass elected representatives. But the destination is technocracy, not democracy; profit, not redistribution. Greta, a child of woke capitalism, is being used to ease the transition to green corporatism.
This is an edited version of a story that first appeared in Standpoint magazine
Perso, je la crois tout à fait sincère dans son engagement mais il est néanmoins légitime de se poser la question de son entourage.
