Svante Thunberg

Svante Fritz Vilhelm Ernman Thunberg (born 10 June 1969) is a Swedish actor and producer. He is the father of activist Greta Thunberg.

Life and career Svante Fritz Vilhelm Thunberg was born on 10 June 1969 in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of actor Olof Thunberg and actress . Thunberg is named after an ancestral cousin, Svante Arrhenius, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903.

Before taking a course in drama studies at the University of Gothenburg, Thunberg appeared with his father in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1998, he appeared in the Sveriges Television drama series Skärgårdsdoktorn. After that, he mostly had small parts in stage productions.

Thunberg's first daughter, Greta, was born on 3 January 2003, and her parents married in July 2004. They had a second daughter, Beata, on 3 November 2005. selling his Porsche.

Climate

Thunberg did not initially support his daughter's school strike for the climate, which began in August 2018. He believed that she should attend school and not miss classes. His message to her was "If you are going to do this, you are going to do it by yourself."

In September 2018 Thunberg said "Greta forced us to change our lives, I didn’t have a clue about the climate. We started looking into it, reading all the books." In December, he told a conference in Katowice that he and his wife had given up flying.

Due to Greta's status as a minor, once her School Strike for Climate activism went viral, Thunberg became closely involved in her climate campaign as both guardian and chaperone until she became old enough to travel without supervision (which is documented in the Hulu film I am Greta). In July 2019, Thunberg accompanied Greta on her transatlantic crossings on the sailing vessels Malizia II and La Vagabond to visit North America en route to COP25 (see Transatlantic Voyages of Greta Thunberg).

In a 2019 interview with BBC Radio, Thunberg spoke of the years of depression Greta had suffered (which had been triggered by her sense of hopelessness after learning about climate change) and his worries about her. He added "I did all these things, I knew they were the right thing to do... but I didn't do it to save the climate, I did it to save my child."

Thunberg and his wife, Malena Ernman, coauthored the memoir Scenes from the Heart (2018), which tells the story of the Thunberg family in the years before Greta was known as an international activist. It centered on the family's struggles addressing Greta's depression and obtaining the services and help she required. An updated edition of Scenes from the Heart was republished in 2020 under the title Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis (2020). The updated version includes the Thunberg family's views on the challenges surrounding the Earth's climate crisis.