During an interview I once called Greta Thunberg the Meghan Markle of environmentalism, meaning that, like the Duchess of Sussex, the Swedish activist’s media appearances are negatively correlated with her popularity. I think that this relationship has intensified over the last couple of weeks in which Ms Thunberg decided to become an active supporter of Hamas, accusing Israel of “occupation” and “genocide.” These claims are obvious nonsense, and once Israel has finished its operations in the Gaza strip, there will still be millions of Palestinians around – the only population in the world, by the way, that is simultaneously the victim of an alleged genocide but also growing in number. It is like the wrong claim that Gaza is the world’s most densely populated area with 5,479 people per square kilometre. That is about the same population density as in the city of London (5,596 people per square kilometre) and less than the district in Vienna where this column is currently written (5,722 people per square kilometre). 

Some are befuddled as to the evolution of Ms Thunberg from climate activist to Israel hater, but this is in fact entirely logical. For the most part, the environmental movement has never been about the environment as much as it has been an expression of civilisational (especially Western) self-hate. As energy issues specialist Emmet Penney has written, “the post war American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenics movement […] Its boosters included historic figures like Theodore Roosevelt and lesser-knowns like Madison Grant, whose bestselling book The Passing of the Great Race was referred to by Hitler as his ‘Bible,’ and Henry Fairfield Osborn, then president of the Natural History Museum.”

If the Nazis were obsessed with the “Jewish question” than the environmentalists are obsessed with the “human question” and both groups are propagating a dramatic reduction of the object of their obsession. Human flourishing and ingenuity are viewed as a threat, since it would allow more of our species to survive and thrive, something environmentalism and its sister-discipline, the degrowth movement, cannot abide.