This was so predictable:

And here’s the opening paragraph (emphasis ours) where TIME met with Greta before she set sail from America to Portugal:

Greta Thunberg sits in silence in the cabin of the boat that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, there’s a cow skull hanging on the wall, a faded globe, a child’s yellow raincoat. Outside, it’s a tempest: rain pelts the boat, ice coats the decks, and the sea batters the vessel that will take this slight girl, her father and a few companions from Virginia to Portugal. For a moment, it’s as if Thunberg were the eye of a hurricane, a pool of resolve at the center of swirling chaos. In here, she speaks quietly. Out there, the entire natural world seems to amplify her small voice, screaming along with her.

“We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow,” she says, tugging on the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt. “That is all we are saying.”

Weird. TIME — for some inexplicable reason — left out the part where the YouTubers flew in a captain which is the only reason Greta was able to complete this stunt in the first place:

So we’re to believe that the message that her travel does not actually save any CO2 is somehow still important? No thanks:

And, actually, she IS telling people how to live their lives. Which is why TIME bragged about her no-flying pledge is actually changing consumer behavior:

At the individual level, ordinary people are following Thunberg’s example. In Sweden, flying is increasingly seen as a wasteful emission of carbon—a change of attitude captured by a new word: flygskam, meaning “flight-shame.” There was an 8% drop in domestic flights between January and April according to Swedavia, which runs the nation’s airports, and Interrail ticket sales have tripled over the past two years. More than 19,000 people have signed a pledge swearing off air travel in 2020, and the German railway operator Deutsche Bahn reported a record number of passengers using its long-distance rail in the first six months of 2019. Swiss and Austrian railway operators also saw upticks on their night train services this year.

The Greta effect may be growing, but Thunberg herself remains unmoved. “One person stops flying doesn’t make much difference,” she says. “The thing we should look at is the emissions curve—it’s still rising. Of course something is happening, but basically nothing is happening.”

Anyway, she’s now turned on nations that actually say they believe climate change is a problem, so this will end well:

Maybe now that TIME is killing all these trees to put her on the cover something will be done?

***

Related: