A German teenage YouTube star, dubbed the “anti-Greta” is “setting herself up as the antithesis” of everything that activist Greta Thunberg represents: a teenager who is asking youngsters to think before jumping into “climate alarmism,” The Daily Caller reports.
Fear over global warming is ripping apart friendships and stealing the spirit of young people, according to Naomi Seibt, who is preparing to speak at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference.
Seibt is trying to notch out a name for herself among climate skeptics. “My main problem with the climate change narrative is that most people who protest do not actually know the science behind it,” Seibt told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s terrifying young people and ruining relationships.” She says her passion for activism began in 2015 as young people with the Fridays for Future began holding protest after protest in her hometown.
Fridays for Future helped elevate the voice of Thunberg, a 17-year-old girl who traveled to the U.S. in August 2019 on a racing yacht. Her visit was designed to galvanize American support for climate policies ahead of the September 2019 United Nations climate summit in New York. Thunberg received praise in the media, with reporters arguing her rise to prominence is organic.
James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the institute, called Seibt a “fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” The Washington Post reported.
During the UN climate conference in Madrid in December, The Heartland Institute headlined Seibt at its forum, where Taylor described her as its “star.”
At the forum Seibt raised questions about the degree to which humans are contributing to climate change. Seibt acknowledges that climate change exists and that temperatures are increasing but is generally skeptical of the human impact.
Thunberg, on the other hand, fills a narrative that many activists believe the media should be devoting more time to promoting: that climate change is a crisis. “I want you to panic,” she said in 2019 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Thunberg received Time’s Person of the Year honors in 2019 for pressing the climate crisis viewpoint and for telling world officials at the U.N. climate summit that they “have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones.” She added: “How dare you!”
Seibt is asking her generation to take a different route.
“Don’t let an agenda that is trying to depict you as an energy-sucking leech on the planet get into your brain and take away all of your passionate spirit,” Seibt said in a Feb. 11 video posted to Heartland Institute’s website. “I don’t want you to panic.”
“I want you to think,” she said.