Teen climate worrier Greta Thunberg and the protest movement “Fridays for Future” were nominated Thursday for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize by two left-wing Swedish lawmakers.
This is the second time the 17-year-old has been made a contender for the award and comes one week after she held a press conference in Davos, Switzerland, and complained her list of demands (on fossil fuel divestment) had been “completely ignored” by attendees at the World Economic Forum.
“Greta Thunberg is a climate activist, and the main reason she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is that despite her young age, she has worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis,” Left Party parliamentarians Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling wrote in a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
“The climate crisis will produce new conflicts and ultimately wars. Action for reducing our emissions and complying with the Paris Agreement is therefore also an act of making peace,” they said.
Give the Nobel Peace Prize to @GretaThunberg and @Fridays4future Read our nomination here: https://t.co/7XStH9PQwe With @hsvenneling
— Jens Holm (@holmjens) January 30, 2020
The pair claimed that without the Fridays For Future movement and Greta Thunberg, “the climate issue would not have been on the agenda to such an extent as it is today.”
Thunberg was mentioned as a possible Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019, when the honour ultimately went to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
She began her “School Strike for the Climate” outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018, and has since traveled the world to speak about it.
Thunberg’s nomination came on the same day she made steps to trademark both her name and the “Fridays for Future” term, claiming both were being used by others to make a profit, as Breitbart News reported.
Delingpole: Greta Thunberg’s Dad Writes Her Facebook Posts https://t.co/6D9tTROq1g
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 14, 2020
Thunberg announced her intentions on social media platform Instagram, complaining that, “my name and the #FridaysForFuture movement are constantly being used for commercial purposes without any consent whatsoever.”
“Unfortunately there are still people who are trying to impersonate me or falsely claim that they ‘represent’ me in order to communicate with high profile people, politicians, media, artists etc,” she said and apologized to anyone who may have been misled by such people.
If Thunberg is successful she will stand alongside former U.S. President Barack Obama who claimed it in 2009.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said then it endorsed Obama’s appeal that, “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges” and his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
The Nobel committee’s secretary later said he regretted awarding the prize to Obama, acknowledging the decision was met with derision in the U.S. and around the world with critics arguing he had not done anything worthy of such recognition.
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