Extreme weather failing to encourage political climate action, says activist Luisa Neubauer

The rise in extreme weather is not generating political support for climate action, Germany’s best-known climate activist has warned, as conspiracy theories increasingly circle after disasters made worse by global heating.

“Like many, I did buy into the idea that big catastrophes would do something to politics,” said Luisa Neubauer from Fridays for Future Germany. “I bought into that – and I’m glad about it – because I was naively believing there was a democratic responsibility that would live through coalition changes and climate changes.”

The 28-year-old activist, who spent three months in the US before the presidential election, said she had been shocked to see the destruction from Hurricane Helene “play into the cards of those denying climate disasters”.

Far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists used the wildfires that ravaged California this month to attack efforts to stop the planet from heating. Similar disinformation was seen in Spain after deadly floods struck Valencia in October.

On Wednesday, the Guardian revealed the extent to which climate science deniers from a US-based thinktank had been working with rightwing politicians in Europe to campaign against efforts to protect nature and quit fossil fuels.

Neubauer said the climate struggle in rich democracies had drastically changed, and that Elon Musk’s vocal support for the far right was symbolic of that shift.

Musk, the billionaire owner of electric carmaker Tesla, has boosted debunked conspiracy theories and thrown his support behind anti-immigrant and climate-sceptic parties in the UK and Germany. On Monday, he gave straight-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration that were celebrated by neo-Nazis.

“It’s no longer green technologies that are the issue, but the fight for democracy and truth,” said Neubauer. “If there’s no shared reality in which we operate, it will be impossible to move forward with the climate transition.”

Neubauer, who rose to fame during the global school strikes started by Greta Thunberg, said she used to think it did not matter if people wanted to save the planet for profit or morals. She described having felt like she was “in the future” when she travelled back to Germany in a Tesla after a climate conference in Madrid in 2019.

But she said that Musk – “a very extreme example” of green capitalism – had shown her the dangers of that line of thinking. “It was an illusion, but also a privilege, to understand the climate crisis as a mechanical issue that engineers and technology need to solve.”

Neubauer pointed to falling sales of heat pumps and electric cars in Germany last year – and the fierce disinformation campaigns against them – as reasons to broaden the scope of climate activism.

“As climate movements, we’re often almost bullied into this belief that as soon as we talk about anything but emissions we’re losing sight of our actual issues,” she said. “[But] as climate activists we need to stand up for democracy, we need to stand up for the truth.”

Far-right networks across the world have increasingly connected their efforts to block climate action. The influence of foreign actors has become particularly controversial in Germany, where the far-right Alternative für Deutschland is polling second ahead of federal elections next month. Last month, Musk endorsed the AfD in an opinion piece in Welt am Sonntag that prompted the paper’s opinion editor to resign. He also hosted an hour-long talk with the party leader, Alice Weidel, on his social media platform, X, in which she falsely claimed that Hitler was a communist.

Neubauer said she contacted several German CEOs to write a joint response to Musk’s article endorsing the AfD, but none accepted. She declined to name the executives she approached.

Before the last German election in 2021, all parties bar the AfD promised to stop the planet from heating by 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. But in the four years since, public interest in cutting pollution has waned, anger at the Green party has surged – egged on by politicians across the political spectrum – and policies such as phasing out gas boilers have sparked fury among some voters.

“With the German heating law, I think media and party politics tested the waters on how easy it is to get people tricked into believing the Greens want an eco-dictatorship … and that we need to protect ourselves from [climate activists], rather than the climate crisis,” said Neubauer. “Apparently that worked out well.”

Neubauer has previously criticised centrist politicans, including the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, from the centre-left Social Democratic party, for polluting the discourse and normalising hateful rhetoric against climate activists. She said Fridays for Future’s greatest failure in Germany was not embedding climate policy across the democratic spectrum “in a way that it could sustainably live on without us”.

“It’s a disaster,” she said. “And I fear Germany is a very prominent example of what is happening in many liberal democracies around the world.”