With this in mind, Thunberg had an important question for Ocasio-Cortez about “climate denialism” in the US.

“I have heard about how bad the situation is in the US with climate denialism, but I find it very hard to believe,” she said during their video call conversation. “It’s bad here in Sweden – but I have seen reports of how little the US media mentions the climate crisis and how it is treated. How bad is it really?”

Ocasio-Cortez replied saying that things have actually improved after being “historically very, very bad”. She explained how ExxonMobil (one of the world’s largest publicly traded international oil and gas companies) knew the reality of the climate crisis as far back as the 1970s and soon started funding media and lobbying campaigns to hide the truth.

“They knew they couldn’t fund campaigns outright saying climate change is not real. But they could fund campaigns sowing confusion,” she explained. “So they would run campaigns saying we need to see more science, to sow doubt around the consensus. For a very long time it worked, and it got very bad. We came very close to acting on the climate in 1989, but the lobbying was so powerful that they effectively prevented action – we had almost 40% of Republican voters not believing that climate change was settled fact.”

Greta Thunberg just challenged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on America’s “climate denialism”