Ecofeminist Energy Illiteracy: Greta in Alberta Oil Country

Abstract

This paper rebuts Keller (2021) and the feminist view that Greta Thunberg’s 2019 visit to ‘tar sands’ Alberta sparked ugly push-back by pro-oil activists due to ‘patriarchal petroculture’ rather than this resistance being a response to an on-going geopolitical ‘green’ transnational trade war against Alberta. This paper will examine how Greta is the exploited ‘walking native advertisement’ for a transnational social media/social engineering project established by several carbon offset promoters. Greta is not a true example of ‘spectacular’ mediated transnational girlhood (Projansky 2014), but rather she is a figure contrived. Greta Thunberg’s earnest and naive climate concerns have been exploited by the rich and powerful; a child with a black and white world view due to her Asperger’s’ ‘super power’. This paper deconstructs the fallacious logic and confirmation bias of an ecofeminist perspective that is clouded with energy illiteracy.