Young Greta Thunberg has been doted on and praised by the left and the media; her melodramatic speeches and catchy “How dare you” quote drawing liberals to her side like bees to honey. The 16-year-old has been lauded and applauded, named Person of the Year 2019 by Time Magazine, had a mural painted in her honor, and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. To the right, she’s just an angry young girl who is getting promoted to hero status for doing virtually nothing but throw tantrums. Now, however, there is new hope for the climate skeptics in what some are referring to as the anti-Greta: 19-year-old Naomi Seibt from Germany.
Although Seibt does not like to be referred to as “anti-Greta,” she is the calm to the Swedish girl’s chaos. Where Thunberg says, “I want you to panic,” Seibt responds with: “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.” The younger activist cries out warnings of a “climate crisis” while the elder warns about “climate change alarmism.” Miss Thunberg encourages the younger generation to protest on “Fridays for Future” while Seibt responds with “I would like that young people are not made to fear the future or to believe that the older generations are destroying the planet, that the animals are dying out or that nature is dying.”
The German activist is not getting nearly the positive press as young Thunberg, although she has been just as active in her crusade to calm the nerves rather than to incite panic among the masses, especially the children. While Greta was crying and throwing blame at the United nations’ COP25 conference in December in Madrid, Spain, Naomi was giving the keynote at the Heartland’s Climate Realist Forum just a few miles away.
The Heartland Institute was so taken with Seibt’s steady and informative videos, they even featured her in a video titled: Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: Whom Should We Trust? “Greta Thunberg took the world by storm with her doomsday climate predictions,” the video’s description reads. “Naomi Seibt, a rising star, advocates for proper scientific discourse over climate change. Who seems like the more reasonable advocate to you?”
Seibt said she does not like the brand “climate denier” and that it is “a despicably anti-human ideology … especially as a German, it is so rude to refer to someone as a climate denier because obviously there is a connection to the term ‘holocaust denier,’ which carries a lot of weight in Germany.”
Instead of spreading doomsday panic, Seibt creates informative videos with a message of hope:
“Today climate change science really is not science at all. The goal [of climate scientists] is to shame humanity. Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably anti-human ideology and we are told to look down at our achievements with guilt, with shame and disgust, and not even take into account the many major benefits we have achieved by using fossil fuels as our main energy source.”
Anti-Greta said she doesn’t like to be referred to with that term because “it suggests I am an indoctrinated puppet myself.” Instead she likes to use free speech to encourage people to think for themselves and not be led by the mass hysteria being perpetrated by the left. This message is clear in her video “I Want You to think”:
“I’ve got very good news for you. The world is not ending because of climate change. In fact, 12 years from now we will still be around, casually taking photos on our iPhone 18s, tweeting about the current president on Twitter and ranting about the latest celebrity gossip.”
“However, we are currently being force-fed a very dystopian agenda of climate alarmism that tells us that we as humans are destroying the planet. And that the young people, especially, have no future – that the animals are dying, that we are ruining nature.”
Climate alarmists are quick to judge the German activist. The Heartland Institute has been accused of telling the public, many moons ago, that smoking wasn’t as dangerous as it is. It was also brought out that, last year, Seibt talked about an attack on a synagogue that killed two people just outside the temple. She said Jews were considered “at the top” of groups who were oppressed and “ordinary Germans” were at the bottom while Muslims were somewhere in the middle.
The chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed, was quick to attack her words. “It is clear that she is articulating – no matter how inarticulately – age-old tropes of Jewish power and white grievance: the idea that Jews are a privileged class and that white people are oppressed by them.”
Seibt was questioned by German reporters, who asked if she thought her remarks were antisemitic, which is how she is now being labeled. “If someone perceives [my remarks] as meaning something different, well, then of course I cannot influence this perception,” she answered.
She is also being taken to task for claiming Stefan Molyneux as an inspiration for her “views that were outside the mainstream.” Molyneux is considered an alt-right activist from Canada, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center described as an “alleged cult leader who amplifies scientific racism, eugenics and white supremacism.”
Kert Davie, the founder of the Climate Investigations Center, which looks into climate denying groups, suspects the Heartland Institute is promoting Seibt as a counterattack to Thunberg’s fame. “They are trying to ride Greta’s wave, but there is no way this person is going to win hearts and minds the way Greta has,” Davies said. “They are trying to blunt the impact of Greta.”
Greta v anti-Greta: The two activists stand on opposite sides of the climate issue and have vastly different approaches to getting their messages out to the public. Calm v chaos: In most cases, the cool-headed person will prevail; however, in today’s rabid society of liberals each screeching louder than the other, it seems as if the loudest, most obnoxious will prevail, regardless of the message being presented.
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Read more from Kelli Ballard.
