CALGARY—Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg plans on travelling to Alberta soon, prompting a terse response from the United Conservative government — and an invitation to visit southern Alberta’s Tsuut’ina Nation.

The 16-year-old climate activist said she’ll be visiting Alberta in posts to her Facebook and Twitter accounts on Saturday night. She’ll be taking a few days rest beforehand to enjoy the sights in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Her posts did not say when or where in Alberta she intends to visit.

Star Calgary reached out to her on Sunday for additional details, but did not receive a response by press time.

Chief Lee Crowchild of the Tsuut’ina Nation extended a personal invitation to Thunberg to visit their land bordering Calgary’s southwest while in Alberta.

“You are my guest and we will do what we need to do to have you speak to the province with the voices of the Alberta Nations,” Crowchild wrote in a Twitter post on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the United Conservative government said on Sunday they expect Thunberg to consider what they described as Alberta’s leading human rights and environmental record.

In a statement from Christine Myatt, spokesperson for the Alberta premier’s office, the government “trusts” she’ll recognize these traits especially “in comparison to oil-producing dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela — which she will presumably visit next — as well as major growing emitters like China.”

Energy Minister Sonya Savage acknowledged in a Facebook post on Monday there are strong reactions to Thunberg’s announced visit and stressed Albertans are “welcoming and respectful.”

She applauded Thunberg’s visit — so long as she arrived with an open mind about Alberta’s environmental and social standards.

“If she is coming here to lecture in the middle of a federal election, it won’t be appreciated by the hundreds of thousands of hard working people in our oil and gas sector who are proud of the work they do to provide growing world demand for energy with the most responsibly produced energy anywhere on the planet,” Savage wrote in her post.

The energy minister also suggested Thunberg visit other major oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran and explain to them how Alberta is developing emissions-reduction technology.

Canada Action, an activist group that promotes the oil and gas industry, responded to news of Thunberg’s upcoming visit with a series of defensive tweets about visiting Alberta in light of Canada’s environmental standards.

“Visiting Alberta to recognize Canada’s leadership on environmental innovation, clean tech, renewables, responsible resource development and human rights protections!” read one of the group’s tweets.

Their tweets stressed Canada’s overwhelmingly non-carbon-emitting electrical generation system and its investment in carbon capture and storage technology, as well as its adoption of carbon pricing initiatives since 2007. However, all of the tweets ended with an emoji-dotted phrase: “the world needs more Canada” — a slogan calling for Canada’s oil and gas industry to expand its presence in the global market.

Experts have consistently warned of serious environmental consequences due to Canada’s oil and gas industry. Over a quarter of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 were due to industry production, according to data from Environment and Climate Change Canada. Furthermore, an April scientific report led by ECCC scientists suggest Canada is warming twice as fast as the global average.

Last October’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report concluded keeping global warming within 1.5 C will require a marked shift in the global energy industry, including huge increases in renewable energy investment and a corresponding reduction in the amount of energy supplied by oil.

Thunberg has spent the past several weeks travelling through the United States and Canada, speaking to United Nations delegates and schoolchildren alike about the need for drastic government action to address climate change. She intends to tour the Americas though a UN climate conference hosted in Chile this December.

In late September, she gave an emotional speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, decrying world leaders who she said preferred to speak about economic growth in the face of ecological collapse.

She has also recently visited climate activists in Denver, Colo., as well as North Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and South Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation. The latter has vigorously opposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline project because it could disrupt the reservation’s source of drinking water and cultural sites.

Thunberg’s activism began in August 2018 when she began sitting in front of the Swedish parliament building every school day for three weeks to protest a lack of action on the climate crisis. That September, she began striking every Friday in what became known as “Fridays for Future.”

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Her efforts, posted to Instagram and Twitter, went viral. Schoolchildren around the world — including Alberta — began organizing Friday climate demonstrations of their own in response.

Late September saw a massive series of marches as part of the Global Climate Strike. Organizers estimated over 7 million people took part in 185 countries around the globe. Thunberg attended one of them, in Montreal, along with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators.

Thousands also paraded through downtown Calgary and in front of the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton.

With files from the Associated Press

Clarification - Oct. 15, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version to make clear that according to data from Environment and Climate Change Canada, over a quarter of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 were due to industry production. The previous version said it was due to industrial activity.

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