Climate change influencer once chums with Greta Thunberg now calls the movement a 'scam'

A decade ago, Lucy Biggers was like many people in their 20s. She believed that climate change posed an immediate and catastrophic risk to mankind, that we should rapidly eliminate fossil fuels to address the problem, that renewables are up to that task, and that our wealthy, privileged lives in the West are a mark of shame. 

At that time, Biggers worked for the climate outlet NowThis Entertainment, where she helped make videos, some of which garnered millions of views promoting these ideas. She interviewed Swedish celebrity climate activist Greta Thunberg and helped New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get elected in 2018. She built up a sizable following as a “sustainability influencer.” 

While her fans cheered her on, Biggers told Just the News that her beliefs in a “climate crisis” took a toll on her mental health. That’s true of many young people. The most recent poll on the topic, published in the renowned medical journal The Lancet, surveyed over 15,000 people aged 16-25 in the U.S. about their thoughts and emotions about climate change. The poll found that 85% are moderately worried about climate change, and nearly 58% are very or extremely worried. Nearly 43% said it impacts their mental health. 

Seeing the light: "it's a scam"

Over time, Biggers began to question her leftist ideals, and she started to see the climate movement as anti-human and ultimately harmful. She now calls the climate movement a “scam,” and she’s making videos on TikTok and elsewhere in hopes that young people will consider a more positive view of modern life, one they can hopefully be grateful for. In turn, they can escape the anxiety she says the climate movement causes young people to feel. 

Those who followed her for her work with NowThis are not happy about this new message. 

In April 2016, protests erupted near Bismarck, North Dakota, over the Dakota Access Pipeline that was being constructed at the time. The protesters rallied around the Native Americans on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, who claimed the pipeline threatened their water supplies and violated their sovereignty. 

The following October, actress Shailene Woodley, who had been voicing her support for the protesters and encouraging people to travel to Standing Rock to be a part of it, received an award from the Environmental Media Association. She gave an emotional speech imploring people to support the shutdown of the pipeline construction. Biggers took excerpts from the speech and added some somber music and subtitles. She posted the video, and within 24 hours, it had over 1 million views. Since then, it’s received over 17 million views. 

She spent years promoting the "climate change crisis"

She traveled to Standing Rock to join with the protesters, where she made more videos promoting their message. She continued making content for NowThis after the protests, promoting things like sustainable hemp farming, the impacts of plastic straws, and her “sustainability journey.”  She interviewed Thunberg in Stockholm, Sweden, for a NowThis series called “One Small Step,” which encouraged people to reduce their waste through recycling and reducing use. 

“I think she's a good person,” Biggers says, looking back on the meeting. “But she's caught up on the wrong side of the movement. She's been morally inverted.” 

She also posted content from a “Solving Our Climate Crisis” panel featuring Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I). 

Guilt and shame fostered by Green movement and leftist narrative 

She said her thinking on climate change began to change as a result of the Covid pandemic. The world shut down entirely for months, and the world saw only a slight dip in global emissions. 

“I thought, ‘wow, if we have to shut down the entire world and bring the world to a stop and emissions go down only a little, what does the climate movement want us to do? And what sacrifices will we have to make? And honestly, would I want to live in that world?’” Biggers said. 

The birth of her son, she said, also had her reconsidering the ideals of the climate movement. She had been living for so long with a sense that the modern, wealthy world was shameful and destructive. 

“I had so much guilt and shame for being a modern human because I saw the world through this lens of the climate movement. I didn't want to pass that guilt and shame on to my son and make him feel bad for living a modern life,” Biggers said. 

Biggers developed a large following on social media platforms as her anti-fossil fuel, pro-green posts resonated with the liberal narrative. At one point, she had between 30,000 and 50,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, where some of her videos garnered as many as 2.5 million "likes."

Losing her religion

As she lost faith in the climate movement, she said, she began to feel less and less comfortable producing content for NowThis. In 2020, she left the company for a job with a media nonprofit, where she worked for a year before taking a position running social media for The Free Press. 

She was reluctant at first to speak out against the climate movement, she explained, but she gradually eased into it over the last couple of years. In May 2024, she published an article in The Free Press about her journey from sustainability influencer to climate skeptic. 

The following August, she posted a video on TikTok, the first of dozens, explaining why she left the climate movement. In May of this year, she posted the first in a series of videos explaining why she thinks the climate movement is a “scam.” 

Her work with NowThis had been posted on YouTube, Facebook and on her personal account on Instagram, where her following had been built up around her sustainability work. Her last Instagram post as a sustainability influencer was on January 10, 2023. She would not post again until she shared her Free Press article, and it was the first time she expressed her dissent about the climate movement directly to her sustainability audience. 

She said she avoided reading the comments on the post. “I knew it was going to just knock me off my confidence in myself,” Biggers said. 

Climate activists, leftists, prefer hate over debate

While some of the comments are supportive and others politely disagree with her present stance, many are, as expected, full of vitriol. She’s accused of being paid by oil companies and of having a “white savior mentality.” 

“F—ing sad to see a sellout at a time when we need people the most. Climate change is here and you are actively working against solutions and restorative justice for communities that have been trampled over by the wheel of Western imperialism, exploitation, and fossil fuels,” one recent comment stated. 

Almost none of these comments address any of the facts and arguments she makes in the Free Press article about why the movement’s thinking on energy and climate is flawed and why fossil fuels have a net-positive impact on people’s lives. 

“Do fossil fuels cause our planet to warm? Yes. They also make modern life possible, freeing women from hours of labor and empowering us in a million different ways,” Biggers argued in the article. 

“They’re singularly cost-effective and versatile as an energy source. This is something that the ‘keep it in the ground’ climate activists never acknowledge. Nor do they admit that the promised panacea of renewable energy, like solar and wind, are nowhere near close to replacing fossil fuels and in fact, have their own dark environmental footprint. ” 

Many of the comments attack Biggers personally or claim Biggers is exaggerating her role at NowThis. One of those comments is from Josh Fox, who wrote and directed the 2010 anti-fracking documentary “Gasland,” which has been widely criticized for inaccurate information about hydraulic fracturing and for deliberately omitting information that was inconvenient to the film’s narrative. In particular, that film allegedly staged a scene where water from a garden hose was flammable because of fracking. Although cited by environmentalists, the film has been largely debunked.

In his post attacking Biggers, Fox claimed the NowThis videos credited to her were actually made by him. 

“I feel that this article was only written becuase [sic] Lucy had a come to Jesus moment about how ineffective HER work was- she made tons of videos advocating for consumer solutions ti [sic] environmental problems. Yes. THOSE videos were bulls–t,” Fox wrote.

Shedding the movement's games of guilt, shame and fear

Biggers is now 35, and she says she is much happier, having left behind the apocalyptic, anti-humanism of the climate movement. 

“For years, I just lived feeling so much guilt I couldn't appreciate all the abundance around me,” Biggers said. 

As she has grown more comfortable speaking out against the climate movement, she’s been expanding the “why the climate movement is a scam” videos to other platforms. She recently began posting them on her Instagram account and on X. 

“Hopefully, anyone who relates to my story can see themselves in me. Maybe one of my videos will spark something in them that makes them start to unwind some of these beliefs and realize they don't have to walk around with so much guilt and shame and fear. And there's so many mental games that the movement plays on you,” Biggers said. 

She said that Americans are so self-critical because they want to be better people, which speaks highly of our culture. However, that self-criticism is taken to a level she calls “self-destructive empathy.” 

“You're so empathetic to everybody else's problems that you don't prioritize yourself. And so you start to just feel guilty for being alive,” Biggers said.