Swedish teen to protest for climate change by sailing across Atlantic

STOCKHOLM (AP)—Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager whose social media-savvy activism has inspired tens of thousands of students in Europe to skip classes and protest for faster action against climate change, plans to take her message to America the old-fashioned way: by boat.

The 16-year-old tweeted July 29 that she’ll sail across the Atlantic aboard a high-tech racing yacht, leaving Britain next month.

In an exclusive interview ahead of her announcement, Thunberg told The Associated Press that she spent a long time trying to figure out whether she could accept invitations to U.N. climate summits in New York and Santiago, Chile, later this year.

Thunberg, who doesn’t use planes because of their high greenhouse gas emissions, says “it needs to be easier to be climate neutral.”