Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg said in an interview published this week that she thinks it is “strange” President Joe Biden is considered a leader in climate change.
Asked by the Washington Post whether she is inspired by Biden or any other world leaders fighting climate change, Thunberg replied, “If you call him a leader.”
“I mean, it’s strange that people think of Joe Biden as a leader for the climate when you see what his administration is doing,” the 18-year-old Swedish citizen continued.
Thunberg has frequently called out world leaders for not doing “enough” to combat climate change. In 2019, she famously broke down during the UN climate action summit, accusing world leaders of stealing her “dreams and childhood with your empty words.”
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” she said at the time. “How dare you!”
Earlier this year, she specifically called out the Biden administration for not passing radical leftist environmental policies.
“They have said themselves that this is an existential threat, and they’d better treat it accordingly, which they are not,” she said in March. “They are just treating the climate crisis as [if] it were a political topic among other topics.”
Biden’s commitment to radical environmentalism “doesn’t mean anything unless that actually leads to increased ambition and if they actually fulfill those ambitions,” Thunberg told the Post.
Biden is trying to pass sweeping climate initiatives in a massive $2 trillion spending bill, but it hit a roadblock in the Senate after Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he wouldn’t vote for it. Manchin said he is specifically concerned with the environmental policies Biden has proposed, noting they would hurt constituents in his state who depend on the coal and oil industries.
