Luisa Neubauer


Luisa-Marie Neubauer is a German climate activist. She is one of the main organisers of the school strike for climate movement in Germany, where it is commonly referred to under its alternative name Fridays for Future. She advocates a climate policy that complies with and surpasses the Paris Agreement and endorses de-growth. Neubauer is a member of Alliance 90/The Greens and the Green Youth.

Life

Neubauer was born in Hamburg as the youngest of four siblings. Her grandmother was married to Feiko Reemtsma. She got involved in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, sensitized Luisa Neubauer to the climate problem and gave her her share of the taz cooperative. Two of her three older siblings live in London. Her cousin Carla Reemtsma is also a climate activist.
Neubauer grew up in Hamburg-Iserbrook district and completed her high school diploma at the in Hamburg-Blankenese in 2014. In the year after her graduation she worked for a development aid project in Tanzania and on a ecological farm in England. In 2015 she started studying Geography at the University of Göttingen. She did a semester abroad at the University College London and received scholarships from the German government and the Alliance 90/The Greens-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation. In 2020 she completed her studies with a Bachelor of Science.

Early activism

Neubauer has been a youth ambassador of the non-governmental organization ONE since 2015. She has also been a member of the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations, 350.org, the Right Livelihood Award foundation, the Fossil Free campaign and The Hunger Project. With the campaign Divest! Withdraw your money! she forced the University of Göttingen to stop investing in industries that make money with coal, oil or gas.

Fridays For Future

As of the beginning of 2019, Neubauer became known as one of the leading Fridays For Future activists. Many media outlets refer to her as the "German face of the movement." Neubauer rejects comparisons of herself and other strike organisers to Greta Thunberg, saying: "We're building a mass-movement and reaching out quite far in our methods of mobilising and gaining attention. What Greta does is incredibly inspiring but actually relatively far from that."
Neubauer does not see the strikes as a means of directly affecting politics. More important is the work behind the strikes: "What we're doing is incredibly sustainable. We're creating structures and turning the events into educational experiences. And we're leading debates on the principles of climate protection."
On 13 January 2020, it was announced that Neubauer had turned down an offer by Joe Kaeser to sit on the Siemens energy board. In a statement Neubauer said that “If I were to take it up, I would be obliged to represent the company’s interests and could never be an independent critic of Siemens,” she explained. “That is not compatible with my role as climate activist.”
On the day before Siemens announced that they will keep the contract with Adani to provide the rail infrastructure of the Carmichael coal mine in Australia. Neubauer told the news agency DPA: “We asked Kaeser to do everything possible to stop the Adani mine. Instead he will now profit from this disastrous project.“ She added that this decision was “so last century“ and that Kaeser was making an “unforgivable mistake”.

Criticism

Neubauer received negative press coverage for her past flights to countries all around the world; she responded that any criticism of her personal consumption distracts from larger structural and political issues.
, a professor of political science at the University of Regensburg, accused her of using the term “old white men“ as a synonym for people with different opinions to discredit people with different opinions.
Neubauer faced backlashes and is being accused of having a sexist world-view after claiming that men as a gender have failed in human history and women would do a much better job.
Furthermore, some claim that she fails to position herself against the rapid rising of the global human population.
Neubauer was criticized for her statement regarding the ways of democracy. She stated that some causes like those pursued by Fridays for Future cannot be handled swiftly and eagerly enough by democratic means.

Other notable views

While positioning herself against the comparison of the climate change and the Holocaust, she has written in her latest book that the climate change is the greatest disaster in human history.
She rejects ideas to deal with the climate consequences by geoengineering and doesn't believe electric cars can really help to solve the general problem of the human lust for neverending economic growth.
She holds today's political class responsible, especially white men from the northern hemisphere, for being painfully slow while implementing needed climate measures. Therefore, the northern atmosphere is obligated to decrease their standard of living to pay for the future change of the global south towards an environmental way of life.