Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin after he made comments belittling the environmental activism of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.
Mnuchin, 57, told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday that Thunberg could lecture world leaders on how to combat climate change “after she goes and studies economics in college.”
Ocasio-Cortez, 30, came to the defense of Thunberg, 17, in a Thursday tweet, stating that climate change deniers “deny logic” in an attempt to dismiss environmental policy issues.
“If you don’t have an economics degree like Greta, they’ll mock you for not having one,” the New York Democrat said. “If you DO have one, as I do, they’ll claim it’s illegitimate. Haters gonna hate & deniers will deny. They will deny logic, science, and environmental consensus in order to protect oligarchy.”
If you don’t have an economics degree like Greta, they’ll mock you for not having one.
If you DO have one, as I do, they’ll claim it’s illegitimate.
Haters gonna hate & deniers will deny. They will deny logic, science, and environmental consensus in order to protect oligarchy. https://t.co/6b0S40MQk2
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 23, 2020
Thunberg has become an international sensation for her climate change protests, which began in earnest when she sat outside the Swedish Parliament to protest environmental degradation. She went on to be named the 2019 “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. This week, she called for world leaders to divest from fossil fuels completely and called fossil fuel extraction “madness.”
