Greta Thunberg (klimataktivist)

If you watch the footage, Greta leans forward excitedly at Trump’s approach. It’s almost as if she’s expecting he’ll do the same as every other leader, and seek her blessing, like the MPs who declared a ‘climate emergency’ for her, or Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelected president of the EU, who made a show of kissing her hand when she came to pour brimstone on Brussels. But Trump keeps going, completely oblivious, and obviously with more important things to do than to kiss her ring.

The environment that is dying is the liberal democratic order in which we live. The world that is coming to an end is political: the post-1945 order, led by the United States. The form of Great Thunberg’s protest is familiar to any student of medieval Europe, the civilisation that produced the Children’s Crusade and Joan of Arc. The content of her protest is a deliquescence of Protestantism into narcissistic terror.

‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth,’ says Greta. She was five years old when the wheels came off the European economy in 2008, and stole the dreams of a generation. The Swedes, like most other Europeans, have given up on procreation. Their demography is sustained by massive immigration which, their leaders tell them, is necessary in order to maintain the tax base and the welfare system.

Environmentalism is for rich white people, and so is life without religion. ‘The eyes of all future generations are upon you,’ Greta threatens. ‘And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.’ This is prophetic, and pathetic too, in its faithless Lutheranism and reverse predestination.

A culture without purpose seizes on a false prophet because she signifies a faith that it has lost. This is why the cult of St Greta attracts converts in the affluent classes of western Europe and North America. American pollution and carbon emissions have been falling for decades, and the majority of the world’s pollution and carbon emissions come from India and China, but the stations of her martyrdom are in Stockholm, London and New York. Not just because the Chinese police would make short work of her and her PR handlers if they tried any nonsense near the Great Hall of the People, but because this daft circus only means something in the decaying West.