“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.”

 Greta Thunberg has blasted President Joe Biden’s policy on the climate adding that it’s “strange” he’s considered a leader in the movement.

The prolific teen climate activist made the comments in an interview with The Washington Post.

In response to whether she is inspired by any world leaders, and specifically “by President Biden,” the Swedish teenager said: “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.”

She added: “The US is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.”

According to Thunberg, the lack of knowledge on climate change on the part of world leaders further off-tracks the crisis.

“We say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency. We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand,” she said in response to what she expected politicians to do.

 She noted that “in Sweden, we ignore — we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions.”

“How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? Thunberg countered.

“So it’s all about the narrative. It’s all about, what are we actually trying to solve?”

 Biden and US climate policies

While Biden has rejoined the Paris agreement and pledged to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, his administration has also approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than former President Donald Trump’s did.

 Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen released a report earlier this month, which shows that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved an average of 333 oil and gas drilling permits per month this year alone—40% more than it did over the first three years of Trump’s White House tenure.

“When it comes to climate change policy, President Biden is saying the right things. But we need more than just promises,” lead author Alan Zibel said in a statement.

 “The reality is that in the battle between the oil industry and Biden, the industry is winning. Despite Biden’s campaign commitments to stop drilling on public lands and waters, the industry still has the upper hand.

“Without aggressive government action, the fossil fuel industry will continue creating enormous amounts of climate-destroying pollution exploiting lands owned by the public.”

Thunberg slams world leaders

This isn’t the first time Thunberg has criticized politicians for their inability to address the climate issue.

 In various appearances around the world, after her solo strike for the climate snowballed into a global movement, Thunberg has called on world leaders to do more to fight global warming, stressing that her generation will see the most damaging effects of climate change if nothing is done.

In 2019, as a 16-year-old, she criticized world leaders in a passionate speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York over their failure to deliver ambitious new commitments to address dangerous global heating.

This year, she mocked world leaders – including US President Joe Biden and the UK’s Boris Johnson – at a youth climate summit in Milan.  

She summarized that the last 30 years of climate action had only amounted to “blah, blah, blah.”

Thunberg also dubbed the November held Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow “a failure” arguing it “turned into a PR event” in which “leaders are not doing anything” except “actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks” in order to keep profiting from a “destructive system”.

‘We lack the political will’

Summing up the situation, Thunberg told the Post: “What’s holding us back is that we lack the political will.

“Our goal is to find a solution that allows us to continue life [as it is] today…

 “But the uncomfortable truth is that we have left it too late for that. Or the world leaders have left it too late for that.

“We need to fundamentally change our societies now. If we would have started 30 years ago, it would have been smoother. But now it’s a different situation.”

• Read: Over half of UK’s universities ‘not on track to meet emissions targets’

Share this story: Greta Thunberg says it’s ‘strange’ to consider Joe Biden a climate leader.

Mohsina Dodhiya

See author's posts