World / US Prez Biden treating climate crisis like a political topic: Greta

Stockholm: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg criticised newly elected US President Joe Biden on the issue of climate change, saying science shows that his efforts are "not doing enough" on the matter. 

In an interview with Mehdi Hasan for MSNBC on Sunday (March 7), the 18-year-old activist slammed Biden for not handling the issue efficiently. 

Recently, Biden signed the United States back into the Paris Agreement, revoking the decision taken by former president Donald Trump of departing from the global accord.   

The MSNBC host Hasan asked Thunberg: "In your view, how has Joe Biden done on climate issues in his first 50 days in office? What grade would you give him?"

"Well, you shouldn't take this from me, I'm just a teenager, so I’m not — I don’t have the mandate to sort of give grades like that. My opinions on this doesn’t matter,” Thunberg said. 

“You should rather look at the science and whether his policies are in line with the Paris agreements and to stay below 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius, and then you can clearly see that, no, it’s not nearly enough in line with the science. That’s not me saying, that’s just black and white, looking at the facts,” she continued.

Greta also accused the president of treating it more like a "political topic" rather than a "crisis".

“They are just treating the climate crisis as it was a political topic, among other topics and, yeah, treat it as a crisis, that’s the No. 1 step,” she added.

On being asked by the host what the Biden administration should do that it hasn't done already, Swedish activist declined to name one thing she would suggest , but getting people involved as top priority. 

"So what we need now is to raise awareness and to create public opinion to treat the crisis like a crisis. Because if people are not aware of the crisis that we face, of course they wouldn’t put pressure on the elected leaders. So I would just tell him to, to tell the situation as it is,” she said.

The mission of this agreement was to keep global warming below 2 degree celsius and ideally below 1.5 degree celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.