Teen activist Greta Thunberg has a jam-packed itinerary for her trip to the United States: Lead a global climate protest; appear on “The Daily Show,” learn how to fist-bump a former president of the United States.
“All of these young people [in the United States] seem so eager, very enthusiastic,” Thunberg told Obama in a video of their short meeting released Tuesday. “Which is a very good thing. I mean, no one is too small to have an impact.”
Thunberg arrived in the United States last month after a two-week voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on a zero-emissions sailboat. (The teenager refuses to take planes.) In New York, she met with fellow school strikers and United Nations officials. In Washington, she has protested outside the White House and received an award from Amnesty International, and she is scheduled to give an address to members of Congress.
This Friday, the teenager will lead a rally in New York ahead of a United Nations summit on climate action. Hundreds of thousands of youths in at least 150 countries have said they will walk out of school in solidarity with her.
In a Tuesday tweet sharing the video of their meeting, Obama called Greta “one of our planet’s greatest advocates."
“You and me, we’re a team,” Obama told the teenager during their meeting Monday. (He didn’t specify what they’d teamed up on.) Then he wished her good luck, and, shaking his hand, Greta wished him luck in return.
Several of Obama’s environmental policies have been rolled back under President Trump’s administration, most recently a 2015 rule that gave the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to protect the nation’s waterways.
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