By Paul Homewood
Once upon a time, there was a young girl called Greta, who claimed she could see carbon dioxide in the air. So concerned was she by this that she literally thought everybody was going to die.
Therefore she spontaneously decided to skip school, and instead sit outside it every day with a placard reading “School strike for the climate”.
From these humble beginnings, Greta’s school strike took off, with thousands of other children copying her.
Or so, at least, we are led to believe. A quite different reality is beginning to emerge.
There have already been suggestions that Greta’s rise to fame was not quite as spontaneous as advertised.
Just by coincidence, no doubt, when Greta launched a one-girl “school strike” at the Swedish parliament on the morning of August 20, 2018. Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of the social media platform We Have No Time, just happened to be passing. Inspired, Rentzhog posted Greta’s photograph on his personal 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, media entrepeneur Rentzhog told that he “met Greta for the first time” at the parliament, and that he “did not know Greta or Greta’s parents” before then. Yet in the same emails, Rentzhog admitted to meeting Greta’s mother Malena Ernman “3-4 months before everything started”—in early May 2018, when he and Malena had shared a stage at a 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” by “a mailing list from a climate activist” named Bo Thorén, leader of the Fossil Free Dalsland group.
Further investigations reveal links to green lobbyists, PR hustlers, eco-academics, and a think-tank founded by a wealthy ex-minister in Sweden’s Social Democratic government with links to the country’s energy companies.
Now we learn that a movie has been made about Greta:
Fine, you might say. She is famous after all.
Except that according to the Mail, the film makers have been following her since the very start of her school strikes in August 2018:
Greta Thunberg’s journey from a ‘quiet teenage schoolgirl’ to the figurehead of a global climate movement has been captured for an upcoming documentary.
Those involved in the project are said to have been following the Swedish teenager since she first began her ‘school strike for the climate’ movement in Stockholm last August.
It’s quite remarkable how a film company just happened to be passing by that day, along with Rentzhog. And even more remarkable how they thought it would be worthwhile spending months filming on the off chance that anybody would want to watch the movie eventually.
The film’s director, Nathan Grossman, who apparently only has one underwhelming film to his name, has followed Greta to the ends of the Earth, from her school-striking on the sidewalk in front of the Swedish Parliament, to the high seas aboard the $4mn racing yacht Malizia II. One is entitled to ask where the money came from to fund his travels.
As RT comment:
One might ask why, if Thunberg’s meteoric rise from her lonely sidewalk protests to hectoring the rulers of the world about her stolen future was as organic as it is presented, a documentary crew was already present to film her sitting alone on the pavement? It’s not like her parents have been trying to make her a celebrity since she was just 12 years old, only to have their exploitative TV show idea rejected by Swedish broadcaster SVT. Never mind, all that did happen.
https://www.rt.com/news/476133-greta-documentary-rise-to-fame/
As for poor little Greta herself, this footage of her press conference at UNICEF in September reveals just how lost she is without her prewritten scripts and stage managed appearances:
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
December 23, 2019 at 08:21AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 