What we take for granted might not be here for our children.

So said former Vice President Al Gore over and over again in his Inconvenient Truth presentations. Gores argument at the time was that to prevent climate change from destroying our childrens future, human societies needed to transition to 100% renewable sources of energy and that we had 10 years to do so. (This was in 2006.)

As this arbitrary deadline came and went, it was only a matter of time before Gores rhetorical invocation of aphoristic children evolved into the recruitment of actual, real-life children for activist purposes.

Which brings us to Greta Thunberg. Thunberg, 15 years old at the time, gained overnight celebrity in 2018 as the face of Fridays for Future, a global strike of school-aged students advocating more ambitious climate action. Since then, she went viral with her infamous "How dare you?" speech at the United Nations, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean as a symbolic alternative to carbon-intensive air travel, and helped launch Climate Live, a series of pop music concerts modeled after the 1985 Live Aid festival.

Thunberg more recently came under criticism for surreptitiously deleting a 2018 tweet in which she quoted a climate scientist as having claimed that climate change will wipe out all humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years. The criticism amounts to so much concern trolling, according to Thunbergs defenders. Right wingers have been dunking all week on Thunberg deleting a hyperbolic tweet she made when she was 15 years old, journalist David Bernstein responded.

And here we see the Teflon moral clarity of Thunbergs particular brand of childhood climate activism. When she demands aggressive action and adherence to scientific principle, hers is an urgent and authoritative voice speaking with the unspoiled wisdom of youth. When she gets something wrong, hey, what do you expect? Shes just a child!

Thunberg is out with her most recent book, her third, released in February and titled The Climate Book. The book collates the perspectives of over 100 figures in the climate discourse. They include climate scientists Elizabeth Kolbert and Michael Mann, activists Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, and liberal economists Thomas Piketty and Kate Raworth. These figures are overwhelmingly more established and senior than Thunberg of those whose birthdays could be verified on Wikipedia, the average contributors age is 52.

And so it is somewhat conspicuous that most of the words in Thunbergs new book do not come from the young activist but from those older, familiar luminaries of the climate movement. Her presence is constrained to short introductions to the five sections of the book and, of course, her name on the cover. Now 20 years old, its almost as though Thunbergs particular power her youth, at once fortifying her truth and forgiving her mistakes is wearing off.

Thunberg herself has wrestled with the pitfalls of childhood as a part of activist performance art. Im a completely different person in private. I appear very angry in the media, but Im not, Thunberg told the BBC in 2021. But Thunbergs performative, youthful anger may have just been proof of concept, preceding a rising tide of climate anxiety lamented, some would say fomented, by the climate community.

The leading scholar on climate anxiety is Britt Wray, a planetary health postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health. Last year, Wray published a popular book titled Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, as well as a widely covered survey of climate anxiety in children around the world.

A majority of the surveys respondents agreed with the statement humanity is doomed, an uptick over older people that Wray attributes to the messages the young receive from media about climate change. Its shameful that we have left young people with that kind of emotional reality, Wray recently told Yale E360. But I dont think theyre overreacting.

Like Gore with his trusty aphorism and the climate advocates channeling their message through Thunberg, Wray here is conscripting children to advance a political argument. After all, it is far from settled whether humanity is, in fact, doomed. As many of the chapters in The Climate Book attest, recent socioeconomic and technological developments have bent the global carbon emissions curve to within striking distance of activists climate goals. And indeed, it is highly plausible that many of the priorities advanced by the wider climate movement including "degrowth," bans on industrial agriculture, and programs to reverse overpopulation pose even greater threats to human well-being than carbon emissions do.

In many ways, Gores abstract children have given way to living, breathing little humans, and not just captains such as Thunberg but infantry, too. Consider the group of elementary school-aged children the Sunrise Movement brought to the soon-to-retire Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinsteins office in 2019. Senator, if this doesnt get turned around in 10 years, youre looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with the consequences, said the childrens chaperone, gesturing at the cherubic faces of the young proto-activists. Its not going to get turned around in 10 years. Ive been doing this for 30 years, responded the senator. You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I dont respond to that.

The exchange, which was captured on video, was activist catnip. This is how @SenFeinstein reacted to children asking her to support the #GreenNewDeal resolution with smugness + disrespect, the Sunrise Movement tweeted. But if you watch the video, it is clear that the senator was responding to the adult chaperone as much as the children themselves.

Or consider the so-called Childrens Climate Lawsuit, a suit brought against the U.S. federal government by 21 young people seeking damages caused by fossil fuel consumption. That suit was filed by Our Childrens Trust, an organization supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Patagonia, and other major climate donors, to protect the Earths climate system for present and future generations by representing young people in global legal efforts to secure their binding and enforceable legal rights to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate.

Dragooning child soldiers into activist causes is nothing new. Yet for a distinctly intergenerational challenge, in which either utopia or apocalypse allegedly awaits at the end, children offer a particularly potent force in climate debates. The invocation of childrens voices is the advocates way of short-circuiting those debates.

What makes Thunbergs new book so discomfiting is the sense that she has aged out of this function, that she has, literally, outlived her usefulness to the movement. This is the end of the book, she writes. It is where I am supposed to round up my thoughts and write some inspirational words worthy of last sentences. But I will not do that. Instead, I will leave that to you. It feels like a curtain closing on her entire project. Her fleeting youth is both message and messenger.

One wonders how many of the young people named in the Childrens Climate Lawsuit, or the students paraded in front of Feinstein, or the survey respondents whose anxieties Wray cultivates, will have the same platform to reflect and reckon with their role in climate advocacy that Thunberg has. Even if theyre so lucky, they might wind up where she is: a footnote to, not an author of, older and more powerful adults agenda.

Alex Trembath is the deputy director at the Breakthrough Institute.

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Greta Thunberg is out with her most recent book, her third, released ... - Washington Examiner