Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old teenage climate activist who has garnered international attention for making apocalyptic predictions about the fate of the environment, has been nominated for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize by two Swedish legislators.
Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling, members of Sweden’s Left Party, said Thunberg “has worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis,” citing her efforts at “reducing our emissions and complying with the Paris Agreement is therefore also an act of making peace,” according to The New York Post.
The Nobel nomination follows Thunberg gracing the cover of Time Magazine as its 2019 “Person of the Year,” as Time stated:
She has succeeded in creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change. She has offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not … She has focused the world’s attention on environmental injustices that young indigenous activists have been protesting for years. Because of her, hundreds of thousands of teenage “Gretas,” from Lebanon to Liberia, have skipped school to lead their peers in climate strikes around the world.
Time also preached, “Where others speak the language of hope, Thunberg repeats the unassailable science: Oceans will rise. Cities will flood. Millions of people will suffer.”
Thunberg was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize by three members of Norway’s parliament. They stated that “the massive movement Greta has set in motion is a very important peace contribution.”
A national legislator from any country is permitted to nominate someone for the Peace Prize.
In mid-January, Michael D. Shellenberger, President of Environmental Progress, sent a shot across the bow at the extreme rhetoric purveyed by Thunberg and others embracing her position, as The Daily Wire reported. Thunberg had spoken in September before the United Nations and castigated adults, saying:
My message is that we’ll be watching you. This is all wrong, I shouldn’t be up here, I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope, how dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. 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 fairytales of eternal economic growth.
Shellenberger told the House Committee On Science, Space, and Technology:
I believe that scientists, journalists, and advocates have an obligation to represent climate science accurately, even if doing so reduces the saliency of our concerns. No credible scientific body has claimed climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. And yet some activists, scientists, and journalists make such apocalyptic assertions, which I believe contribute to rising levels of anxiety, including among adolescents, and worsening political polarization.
He added, “My colleagues and I have carefully reviewed the science, interviewed the individuals who make such claims, and written a series of articles debunking them. In response, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change invited me to review its next Assessment Report, and Harper Collins will publish our research findings this June.”