Greta Thunberg doesn't care about Steven Mnuchin's jab
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Greta Thunberg just gave Davos its “OK, Boomer” moment.
The teenage climate crusader on Friday shrugged off US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s jabs at her age, saying she and her comrades are used to criticism.
“We cannot care about those kinds of things,” Thunberg said Friday before the start of a protest in the Swiss town hosting this week’s World Economic Forum, where the 17-year-old Swedish activist gave a fiery speech Tuesday.
Thunberg was responding to Mnuchin’s snide remarks about her at a Thursday press conference. The former hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs executive suggested she should study economics in college before lecturing world leaders about climate change.
Thunberg — who was named Time magazine’s 2019 “Person of the Year” — said Mnuchin’s shade had “of course no effect” on her and her fellow young activists, who “are being criticized all the time.”
Thunberg and four other young campaigners spoke to reporters before their “Fridays for Future” protest through Davos. Thunberg rose to international fame by skipping school on Fridays to protest inaction against climate change, which helped spark a global youth movement.
“My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realize that our remaining (1.5-degree) carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up,” Thunberg tweeted Thursday in an apparent response to Mnuchin.
Thunberg has urged government and corporate leaders to combat the climate crisis by divesting from fossil fuels. When asked how such divestment would affect the American economic model, Mnuchin dismissed Thunberg’s demand.
“Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I’m confused,” Mnuchin said Thursday, adding that the remark was “a joke.”
“After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us,” he continued.
With Post wires
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