Mockery: The Climate Movement’s Secret Weapon

Dunk on losers, save the planet

A kid laughs at people (public domain)

The climate movement is, by its nature, filled with responsible, conscientious people. These are people who approach the world with empathy and kindness, people who are willing to make serious personal sacrifices for the common good. They’re generally not mean folks.

This may pose a bit of a problem.

I realized this while enjoying the recent social-media dustup between climate activist Greta Thunberg and professional misogynist Andrew Tate. In case you somehow missed it: Tate, for some reason, tried to troll Thunberg by bragging about his sportscar collection, highlighting how wasteful his cars were. Thunberg, not generally known for her sense of humor, replied with a truly excellent tweet:

Tate’s week got worse after that — he filmed a pretty pathetic video in reply to Thunberg and then got arrested by Romanian police for sex trafficking. Meanwhile, Thunberg’s tweet has already become one of the most-liked posts in the history of the platform.

Now, in some ways, this is a profoundly unimportant story. A pathetic guy whose brand is being an asshole was, well, an asshole, and somebody cleverly put him in his place. To the extent that they had heard of him, most people already Andrew Tate was a clown or worse.

But I was intrigued by the way in which Thunberg took what Tate clearly thought to be his strengths — his wealth, his lavish lifestyle, his willingness to provoke — and quickly turned them into weaknesses.

PowerPoints will only get us so far

Here’s the thing — the climate movement has won all of the scientific arguments against its enemies, and it’s winning most of the economic arguments. All of the people who are going to be convinced by white papers and pie charts and people with PhDs are already aligned with the climate movement.