Shellenberger: Climate Fanatics Are Weaponizing Mental Illlness

“Climate protesters are triggering widespread anger and signs of violence,” writes author and prominent critic of climate alarmism Michael Shellenberger. “And yet President Joe Biden, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and other global elites are encouraging them, which is exceedingly dangerous and irresponsible.”

As a case in point, Shellenberger has highlighted a particularly disturbing recent video showing a young woman cry and scream into a camera while claiming she was essentially forced to climb onto an overhead gantry above a major freeway outside London over ‘climate change’ due to oil and gas extraction. It’s likely police or passersby may have initially thought she was suicidal. Police were soon forced to shut down the busy roadway over the safety issue, while emergency responders had to put on safety harnesses to clear the gantries. 

A 24 year-old woman shut down a major highway in UK just now. She says it’s for the climate but she’s obviously suffering from severe mental distress, narcissism, and grandiosity. “Why does it take young people like me?” she asks.

Climate fanatics are weaponizing mental illness pic.twitter.com/e7JCwlrrz6

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) November 7, 2022

Human resilience to disasters is rising and there is no scientific scenario for greater deaths from disasters due to climate change in the future.

The activists ignore these facts.

Shellenberger further describes the clear narcissism behind such stunts in his tweet thread…

The young woman is describing herself as a victim. The template for this was set by Greta Thunberg. It’s pathological. They are privileged elites financed by their some of the richest people in the world. They are throwing temper tantrums.

Statements like “Why does it take young people like me?” and Thunberg’s “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school …How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words” are grandiose, narcissistic, and manipulative. 

“This is an exceedingly dangerous phenomenon because narcissism is about a lack of empathy. It’s about entitlement. And it’s exploitative. ‘I’m a victim, so I’m a saint. I’m morally superior to you. I have a right because I have a grievance. You have an obligation towards me.’” 

“They don’t have any meaningful agendas. They just want to be heard. They want to garner attention. They want to become celebrities and famous. They want to control, They want to have power. They’re power-oriented power. They are entitled and aggressive.”

European authorities are actively encouraging these dangerously pathological behaviors by refusing to properly enforce laws and deter such crimes. The reason is because they support the cause. As such, they are, to some extent, working together.

The new PM of UK @RishiSunak encouraged these protests by re-instating a ban on fracking. The activists feel they are winning. They are emboldened. That’s why they are engaging in ever-more extreme behaviors. They must be shut down.

Watch as the climate activists express narcissism in the form of victimhood, grandiosity, and lack of empathy for the people impacted by their behaviors.

Reporter: “Isn’t the risk that you lose support from Londoners?”

Activist: “We don’t actually need support.” pic.twitter.com/Ux9sFwszdN

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) November 7, 2022

Let’s be clear about what’s occurring. Rich fanatics & the news media are weaponizing mental illness to advance a radical, anti-capitalist agenda. That’s textbook psychopathic behavior: lack of empathy, lack of control (panic), and anti-social behavior.

It was clear from the beginning of Thunberg’s stardom that she suffered from an anxiety disorder, and yet she, her handlers, and her parents all suggested that it stemmed from her profound concern over climate change. That turned out to be a lie. 

Thunberg’s mother, a textbook narcissist, admitted as much in 2020 when she decided she needed to publish her own book. The media lapped it all up without ever asking: is this healthy psychologically for the Thunbergs and the rest of the society?

Of course, it wasn’t. But the media egged her on and insisted that anybody who dared question whether it was ethical or healthy for the world’s most influential teenager to urge panic was a “climate denier” who was somehow threatened by a child. The gaslighting was grotesque. 

And they’re not done. Thunberg Inc. and the media are now delivering her up as a savior from the mass psychopathology they created. You couldn’t make it up. This isn’t just cynical it’s also inhumane. 

Any doubts that this is about psychopathology stemming from fanaticism & nihilism, not climate change, can be put to rest when you consider that the main demand of the narcissists is a ban on natural gas, which is the main reason UK emissions have been declining for decades.

The fanatical elites who are weaponizing mental illness are also waging class war. They are against cheap energy & industrial capitalism because they lift up ordinary people and close the gap with the elites, who want distance & inequality.

Naturally the elites need to claim the opposite, that they want an end to inequality and poverty, because everybody knows the quickest way to increase inequality and poverty is by making energy and food more expensive. Watch what they do, and demand. 

“Part and parcel of our narcissistic culture is black-and-white dichotomous thinking” known as “splitting.”

Wrote Thunberg, “Everyone says that there is no black-and-white issue, but I think this is. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t.”

Adds @GingerCoy , “If a person laments that they are a victim, in this narcissistic age, it should be a red flag that they are likely a perpetrator.”

Such is the case with climate activists. 

They are some of the richest and most privileged people in the world, thanks to cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Some of them, like the heirs and heiresses to the Getty Oil and Rockefeller Oil fortunes, are more directly beneficiaries than others. 

And yet they are actively seeking to deprive others, both their fellow citizens and Africans, of those very fuels, as well as non-fossil sources of productive energy, like hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. 

The heirs to the Getty and Rockefeller say they are financing anti-fracking advocacy because fracking is bad for the climate, but it was always obvious that fracking, by creating cheap and abundant natural gas to replace coal, would reduce emissions and be great for the climate. 

The real and often unconscious reason that the heirs to the Getty and Rockefeller fortunes finance anti-fracking is the same reason that Putin consciously did: fracking threatens their economic wealth, social status, and political power. 

More oil and gas from fracking reduced the price, and thus the value, of existing oil and gas assets. It meant the old rich had to make way for the new rich in social circles. Think of how the country club snobs looked down on the Rodney Dangerfield character in “Caddyshack.” 

Anti-capitalism thus became the ideology of the old rich, or what sociologist Thorstein Veblen called “the leisure class.”

Veblen noted the importance of “conspicuous consumption,” the tendency of leisure class to flaunt their wealth through fancy dresses and jewelry. 

Today, elites flaunt their wealth through “luxury beliefs, ideas and opinions that confer status in the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower class,” eg we must make energy more expensive & return to less efficient, feudal modes of production, to protect Nature. 

The capitalist class, the people who built their wealth from scratch, tend to feel proud, not guilty, for what they built. They defend free markets as part of their legacy. Their children and grandchildren who inherit their wealth struggle with their purpose. 

They tend toward neuroticism because they know, at some level, that they did nothing to deserve their good fortune. They compensate for their feelings of inferiority by devising various ways to put down the new rich and their workers, such as by financing activists to block roads 

Why, in the end, are educated elites anti-capitalist? Because capitalism reduces their power.

If climate change didn’t exist, elites like Thunberg would find some other reason to be anti-capitalist, to demand a “Great Reset,” and to demand higher costs for energy and food.

The victims are working people trying to pay their energy bills, get to work, and survive the worst energy crisis in modern history.

They are also the young people whose anxiety disorders and narcissism are worsened by the fanatics.

We need to have compassion toward the people who are plainly in mental distress. They are in the grip of a fanatical ideology.

But we also need to impose strict consequences for their dangerous and pathological behaviors in order to deter others from doing the same.

*  *  *

PS: It is good to see the police cracking down. More of that, please.

“Operations like these come at a cost.

“Since Oct used more than 10,000 officer shifts to police Just Stop Oil protests.

“These are officers who would otherwise be dealing with issues that matter to local communities, such as knife crime and responding to burglaries.”

— Metropolitan Police Events (@MetPoliceEvents) November 6, 2022

The police make a good point: the more time they must spend dealing with the temper tantrums of climate narcissists, the less time they have to deal with other crimes.