hankyoreh

Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg during her video interview with the Hankyoreh on Oct. 16. (Park Jong-shik, staff photographer)

“If [President Moon Jae-in] says that he admires what I do, then he’d better prove it. Because actions speak much louder than words,” Greta Thunberg said during a video interview with the Hankyoreh on Oct. 16.

Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old environmental activist from Sweden, is regarded as the avatar of the climate movement and a spokesperson for future generations.

The teenage activist has denounced leaders around the world for their timid action on climate change, but this was her first message to the leader of South Korea.

When the Swedish prime minister visited South Korea in December 2019, Moon congratulated Thunberg on being the youngest person ever named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. Moon also praised Sweden’s efforts to become the world’s first welfare state to move beyond fossil fuels, which he said brought hope to the world.

In the interview, Thunberg said that the rose-colored future that the Korean government is presenting under the name “Green New Deal” needs to be viewed more critically. “We can see all over the world that people are trying to use the term ‘green’ in order to justify their actions,” Thunberg said.

This was the Swedish activist’s first interview with the Korean press.

Thunberg said that the combination of the coronavirus pandemic and extreme weather events such as typhoons and forest fires make 2020 a “year of crisis.” After traveling around the world last year to take part in protests and make speeches calling for action on climate change, Thunberg said that “almost nothing has been done” by world leaders.

When told that Korean power company KEPCO was investing in a coal plant in Vietnam, Thunberg described that as a “huge problem.”

“Many countries that are seen as [world] ‘leaders’ on the climate [. . .] are actually villains,” Thunberg said. “They are still seen as leaders and they can do pretty much whatever they want [for the economy] and will not be held accountable.”

Thunberg said that this year’s US presidential election on Nov. 3 “is beyond politics.”

“The US has a very special responsibility” as one of the countries with the “most accumulated carbon emissions,” Thunberg said, adding that the next US president “should listen to and act on science and treat the climate crisis like a crisis.”

If Trump is reelected, the US would immediately finalize its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which has been signed by 197 countries around the world.

Thunberg became a household name after she stood alone in front of Sweden’s parliament in August 2018 to start a “school strike for climate.” Her strike soon spread to other countries; today, some 1.6 million students are participating in 133 countries around the world, including Korea.

During a speech before the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, in New York, Thunberg delivered the following warning. “You are failing us. [. . .] And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”

Thunberg’s fiery eyes and message to world leaders instantaneously conveyed the threat of climate change to people around the world.

By Choi Woo-ri, staff reporter

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