The uphill battle ahead: Four different leaders, four different takes on global warming

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Four men. Four corners of the globe. Four vastly different visions and experiences on climate change.

At the United Nations this week, a quartet of leaders with distinct personal styles and decidedly different national agendas demonstrated why saving the planet isn’t simple, fast or something they can even agree on.

U.S. President Donald Trump, a real estate tycoon and television personality, kicked off the issue a day early when he played skunk at a garden party. He told fellow leaders at the United Nations not to worry about climate change because it’s a scam and insisted that renewable energy, such as wind and solar, would wreck their economy. He was basically alone on that.

Then, on Wednesday, when more than 100 leaders gathered specifically to work on climate, it was the engineer-turned-president, Xi Jinping of China, who seized the moment, attention and headlines in a controlled video. He announced that for the first time, the world’s top carbon polluter would cut emissions. Though experts called it timid, he positioned his country to amass ever more economic might by cornering the market of the very renewables that Trump denigrated.

Feleti Penitala Teo, the soft-spoken prime minister of the small island nation of Tuvalu, talked of watching the beaches of his childhood get swallowed up by climate change’s rising seas. His role, he said in a Thursday interview, is to be the conscience of his colleagues.

And finally, playing host even though he lives a continent away was Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former trade negotiator who represents a country that acts as a common middle ground for issues between North and South, rich and poor. He will host climate negotiations in Belem, Brazil, in November.

Their differences on the issue tell an important and intricate story.

United States: Donald Trump kicks it off

This week included a special climate summit for more than 100 world leaders on Wednesday. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Lula put this together with the idea of getting countries to submit strong national carbon pollution plans before the November Brazil climate negotiations.

The U.S. didn’t really participate.

But the day before, when world leaders could talk about whatever they wanted, Donald Trump included a large section about climate change. He made pronouncements that ran afoul of what scientists, temperature records and other world leaders said.

“This climate change, it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion,” Trump said, reiterating a long repeated belief. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. And I’m really good at predicting things.”

Trump, who has frequently complained about the aesthetics of wind turbines, which he erroneously calls windmills, said renewable energy is “falsely named… a joke.”

“They don’t work,” he said. “They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough.”

China: Grabbing attention and market share

While Trump talked doubt, Xi, like many who would follow, talked about how big a problem climate change is and how the countries of globe have to work together.

While one country may be acting against this, “the international community should stay focused in the right direction,” Xi said. He urged the world to “remain unwavering in confidence, unremitting in actions and unrelenting in intensity.”

Xi was trained as an engineer. Climate analyst Alden Meyer of the European think tank E3G said Chinese leadership is “very, very technically based, so they respect and understand the science. China of course is suffering from climate impacts, from heat, from flooding, storms. And they know the threat this poses.”

“Green and low carbon transition is the trend of our time,” Xi said.

While Trump has dismissed renewables, China during Xi’s rule has become the top global player in renewable energy technology and used its Belt and Road Initiative to help bring the technology to developing countries — at a price. He promised even more green investments for both domestic and international markets.

When compared to Trump, who is older, Xi came off as “the sober elder above the fray,” said David Waskow, the World Resources Institute’s International Climate Initiative director.

Tuvalu: Living the climate experience

Teo is the only one of the four leaders who lives near the ocean and is watching those rising waters, feeling their impact and talking to scientists about the issues that have made climate change the overwhelming issue that could literally wipe out his nation.

“We’re totally behind the science. And this is not our science. It’s international science,” Teo said. “So as a small island, country, I couldn’t envisage how such a publicly renowned science is being disputed by a major country like the U.S.”

“We can actually physically see the difference in terms of the level of the sea,” Teo said in an interview. “Climate change is a lived experience for us right now. It is no longer a speculative scenario.”

This week, like China, Tuvalu submitted its climate-fighting plan with the key being producing now carbon emissions within the decade.

“The major irony for us and the frustration that goes with it is that we don’t contribute to climate change, but we are at the very front line,” Teo said. “We have to do what is right. It is my hope that (Trump, Xi and Lula) will likewise do what is morally right.”

Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister of the island nation of Vanuatu, which is encountering climate change as an existential threat, has come to expect speeches like Tuesday’s from Trump. But he added that “in many ways it has galvanized the countries of high ambition to double down on the fact that we need to have strong multilateral action and ambitious goals.”

Brazil: Feeling the ‘chemistry’

Lula said climate change is real, and the upcoming climate conference in Brazil must be a decisive moment to avoid the risk of “a vicious cycle of mistrust and paralysis.”

“Walls at borders will not stop droughts or storms,” Lula said. “Nature does not bow down to bombs or warships. No country stands above another.”

“All of us may lose because denialism may actually win,” he warned.

But a transition to renewable energy, he said, “opens the door to a productive and technological transformation comparable to the Industrial Revolution.” Despite cheering such a transition, at home, Lula, who fashions himself as an environmentalist and pragmatist, supports increased oil drilling, including in the Amazon.

”Lula has a lot of relationships,” E3G’s Meyer said. “He has a lot of credibility that he has built up over the years. And the sense I’m getting is he realizes that he’s going to need to put that into play.”

After Xi’s announcement and a chance encounter with Trump, Lula said that he and Trump shook hands and embraced. He said he had a good feeling about the “chemistry” between them, despite long-standing political differences.

Lightheartedly pointing out that he’s a few months older than Trump, but that they’re both turning 80 soon, Lula suggested that there was no need to play games: They’re both too old for that.

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