Imagine going to the kitchen in your office to grab a fork and seeing the face of the climate change wunderkind Greta Thunberg staring at you, shaming you for using plasticware. That’s what some office workers are facing in kitchens across the world.

And another (Haaretz, actually- I know, shocking) pic.twitter.com/CeB0wGKSWx — Allison K. Sommer (@AllisonKSommer) November 5, 2019

This bizarre trend seems to have started in the newsroom kitchen at the liberal Haaretz paper in Israel and has since spread to other offices. The message is clear: Thunberg isn’t just judging your use of plastics, she’s judging you. Oh, and so are all of the folks planting her picture.

A similar image is going up in billboard form in, you guessed it, San Francisco.

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg is getting a huge mural in downtown San Francisco https://t.co/NNOUukg0ZL pic.twitter.com/px8ksltWhk — CNN (@CNN) November 9, 2019

The city can’t find the time to clean up the piles of human waste on the sidewalks, but a local nonprofit organization has decided to erect a giant image of a teenage girl who has accomplished nothing outside of browbeating the world with hyperbole. It sure seems a strange use of resources to put up a mural while environmental hazards exist on every city block. Then again, that’s if you’re taking these people at their words about what their priorities are.

In reality, it’s not about making a cleaner or less polluted Earth — the motivation is purely virtue-signaling.

Exhibit A is the very face the movement has chosen: a child. They are quick to express outrage at anyone daring to debate Thunberg's ideas because of her age, insisting, what kind of a monster argues with a child? The movement has decided to adopt as their mascot someone they view as unassailable, which exposes the flimsiness of their ability to debate in the marketplace of ideas. They don’t want to have an honest conversation and view the very idea of doing as insulting.

That same performative streak is present at protests and rallies on the issue as well. Take this common sight — twerking protesters, seen at numerous protests in the last several months:

#ClimateChange protest causing traffic gridlock/nightmare for commuters. Protesters are blocking intersections across the District. A viewer shared this video with me. It took him 3 hours to get downtown for work... @WUSA9 pic.twitter.com/8ew6qZCoVv — Annie Yu (@AnnieYuTV) September 23, 2019

There is, of course, no way for leaders to police who attends a rally, but there is certainly no distancing taking place either. These are the images people see when there is a climate change rally, and there has been no attempt to create a new image. Apparently, the next step for the movement after the rallies is these murals and office pranks. This only further shows how unseriously the supposedly dire problem of climate change is taken by their own activists.

What does a serious climate change movement look like? For starters, it’s represented by adults with coherent arguments, not children or twerking protesters making the dangerous decision to block traffic. The next step for a legitimate climate change movement wouldn’t be scattering photos of children or erecting murals of them, either. If activists want to be taken seriously, it’s time to behave seriously.

If those littering offices with photos of Thunberg want to convince their co-workers about the dire state of the planet, the answer isn’t playing pranks in the kitchen. But that’s not actually the intention. In reality, it’s just more of what we’ve come to expect from climate change activists: performative virtue-signaling.

Bethany Mandel is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four and a freelance writer. She is an editor at Ricochet.com, a columnist at the Forward, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.