A young, long-haired, European activist passionately addressed climate change before a crowd of supporters in Maryland on Friday. But it wasn’t Greta Thunberg. Instead, it was Naomi Seibt, a 19-year-old self-styled “climate realist” from Germany who used her debut speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference to decry what she called “climate alarmists” who are “fear-mongering and using panic as a tool to restrict our freedoms.”
Heartland leaders passed out black t-shirts emblazoned with Seibt’s image and her signature catch phrase: “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.” “The climate has always been changing, and so it’s ridiculous to say we deny climate change,” Seibt said Friday. “Man vastly overestimates his power if he thinks he can, with CO2 emissions, destroy the climate.”
Seibt dismissed allegations she is being used by climate skeptics to woo young people and counter Thunberg, the Swedish activist who has won international acclaim for arguing the world needs to rapidly throttle the greenhouse gas emissions fueling a warming world. “I am not the puppet of the right wing or the climate deniers or the Heartland Institute either,” Seibt said.