Teenage activist and Time magazine Person of the Year Greta Thunberg has dedicated her life to fighting climate change, traversing the globe to raise awareness of the dangers posed by the rapidly-warming planet. But Thunberg is a busy person, and she knows that some things just aren’t worth the effort—like, for instance, having a one-on-one chat with the president of the United States. On BBC Radio’s Today program Monday, Thunberg was asked about when she brushed shoulders with Donald Trump at the United Nations climate summit in September. And while she greeted the president with a steely death stare that instantly went viral, Thunberg said she didn’t bother to actually speak with Trump. “I probably wouldn’t have said anything, I wouldn’t have wasted my time,” she said.
Thunberg said she wouldn’t expect Trump to listen to her pleas for climate action, given the president’s track record for ignoring the science. “Honestly, I don’t think I would have said anything because obviously he’s not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me?” she said. The 16-year-old has a point, given that the Trump administration has systematically shut down scientific projects and sidelined its own scientists nationwide, blocking climate research and spurring a mass exodus of scientists from the federal government. “The disregard for expertise in the federal government is worse than it’s ever been,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told the New York Times in December. “It’s pervasive.” The Trump administration has also expressed its disregard for climate action through its policies, rolling back more than 80 different environmental regulations—half of which were undertaken by past administrations to fight climate change.
Thunberg’s comments Monday mark the latest turn in the ongoing feud between the Swedish activist and the American president, who has made no secret of his disdain for Thunberg and her achievements. Trump’s cyberbullying started in September, after Thunberg used her U.N. speech to shame world leaders for their inaction on climate change, accusing them of having “stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words.” Thunberg “seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” Trump passive-aggressively tweeted in response to Thunberg’s speech. “So nice to see!” When Thunberg beat out Trump for Time‘s Person of the Year, the president couldn’t help but speak out once again. “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend!” Trump tweeted in December. “Chill Greta, Chill!” The entire Trump team got in on the action that time around: First Lady Melania Trump suggested Thunberg had Trump’s attack coming, Donald Trump Jr. called the pick a “marketing gimmick,” and the Trump campaign tweeted out a truly unnerving Photoshop job superimposing Trump’s head onto Thunberg’s body. (The president and his team have yet to weigh in on Thunberg’s latest comments.)
Thunberg has taken Trump’s jealousy in stride, proving to be the more adept Twitter user than Trump by changing by changing her bio to mock the president’s attacks. And for as much as Trump and other world leaders work themselves into a tizzy over Thunberg—Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, for instance, has openly called her a “brat”—the teenager isn’t too concerned about what a bunch of ineffectual world leaders have to say. “Those attacks are just funny because they obviously don’t mean anything,” she told the BBC Monday. “I guess of course it means something—they are terrified of young people bringing change which they don’t want—but that is just proof that we are actually doing something and that they see us as some kind of threat.”
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