from StandpointMag Website
lies a shadowy cabal of lobbyists, investors and energy companies
seeking to
profit from a green bonanza her eco-mob increases the likelihood of legislation and investment that will make colossal profits for people like Global Challenge, We Don't Have Time and Sustainable Energy Angels. For Sweden's energy titans, saving the planet means government contracts to print the green stuff. Green energy lobbyists use populist scare tactics and a children's crusade to bypass elected representatives, but their goal is technocracy not democracy, profit not redistribution. Greta, a child of woke capitalism, is being used to ease the transition to green corporatism.
Illustration by Miriam Elia
Greta's parents, actor Svante Thunberg and opera singer Malena Ernman, 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.
But the Greta phenomenon has also involved 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.
These companies are preparing for the biggest bonanza of government contracts in history:
Greta, whether she
and her parents know it or not, is the face of their political
strategy.
Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of the social media platform We Don't Have Time, 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...
Independent journalist Rebecca Weidmo Uvell has obtained an earlier email from Bo Thorén's search for fresh green faces.
In February 2018, Bo Thorén invited a group of environmental activists, academics and politicians to plan,
In May, after Greta won second prize in an environmental op-ed writing competition run by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Thorén approached all the competition winners with a plan for a "school strike", modeled on the student walk-outs after the shootings at Parkland, Florida.
Fortunately, Greta's decision coincided with the publication of Scenes from the Heart, Svante and Malena's memoir of how saving the planet had saved their family.
Unfortunately, Malena omitted to tell her publisher that Ingmar Rentzhog had commandeered Greta's stunt.
It was, however, a dream for Ingmar Rentzhog.
When Rentzhog combined Thorén's plan and Malena Ernman's musical fame with Greta's uncanny charisma and We Have No Time's mailing list, he turned Greta into a viral celebrity.
Trained by Al Gore's Climate Reality Project, Rentzhog set up We Don't Have Time in late 2017 to,
Rentzhog and his CEO David Olsson have backgrounds in finance, not environmental activism, Rentzhog as the founder of Laika, an investment relations company, and Olsson with Svenska Bostadsfonden, one of Sweden's biggest real estate funds, whose board Rentzhog joined in June 2017.
We Don't Have Time's
investors included Gustav Stenbeck, whose family control
Kinnevik, one of Sweden's largest investment corporations.
When Greta met Rentzhog, he was the salaried chairman of a private think-tank owned by an ex-Social Democrat minister with a background in the energy sector.
His board was stacked
with powerful sectoral interests, including career Social Democrats,
major union leaders, and lobbyists with links to Brussels. And his
board's vice-chair was a member of one of Sweden's most powerful
green energy investment groups.
On September 2, 2018, a week after Rentzhog claimed to have stumbled on Greta, Dagens Nyheter ran a long op-ed on the need to force the greening of the global economy by "bottom-up" action against national governments, including,
Greta's mother was one of the nine signatories.
Ex-Minister for the
Future Kristina Persson and three other Global Challenge
board members signed the op-ed but cited other affiliations. Only
Rentzhog admitted that he was associated with Global Challenge.
Rentzhog claims that,
He admits that he showed Malena Ernman,
Greta's father Svante, who now devotes himself to managing her career, declined my interview requests and refused to reply to a detailed list of written questions about Ingmar Rentzhog and Global Challenge.
Instead, Svante issued an evasive three-paragraph statement through an intermediary.
He says 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" We Don't Have Time or Global Challenge.
Yet Greta served on We
Have No Time's advisory board between November 2018 and January
2019, and Malena Ernman signed a letter with four Global Challenge
board members.
Svante refuses to answer
my questions about whether he and Greta have met members of the
Global Challenge board. But Global Challenge board member Anders
Wijkman remembers.
Its alarmist 1972 report, A Limit to Growth, has become a cornerstone of the "climate emergency" campaign.
In December 2018, 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 only way to save ourselves is to follow the Climate Emergency Plan, and instantly green the global energy business through massive government investment and emergency legislation.
Wijkman of the Club of Rome sees Greta as vital to pushing the "climate emergency" strategy on Europe's political class.
Greta, Wijkman says, has been "instrumental" to this breakthrough.
Has Ingmar Rentzhog been essential to Greta's rise?
Greta's father Svante claims she,
But 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.
In January, Rentzhog and We Don't Have Time used Greta's face and story in promotional materials for a share issue for a new venture.
Rentzhog claimed that the family knew, but Greta and her parents parents insisted that they did not. They announced that 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... For Sweden's energy titans, saving the planet means government contracts to print the green stuff.
Green energy lobbyists use populist scare tactics and a children's crusade to bypass elected representatives, but their goal is technocracy not democracy, profit not redistribution.
Greta, a child of woke
capitalism, is being used to ease the transition to
green corporatism...
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