U.S. President Donald Trump skipped a discussion on climate with other world leaders at the Group of Seven summit in France, leaving an empty chair as global power brokers debated how to help the fire-ravaged Amazon and reduce carbon emissions.
Trump was scheduled to attend Monday’s session on climate, biodiversity and oceans at the G-7 summit in Biarritz , but didn’t. French President Emmanuel Macron, the summit host, said Trump’s aides were there instead.
Trump is a climate change skeptic who once had claimed it’s a hoax that was invented by the Chinese. His decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord has severely damaged global efforts to reduce emissions.
Trump started the morning behind schedule, and held one-on-one meetings while others were in the climate discussions. However, one of his interlocutors, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, managed to make it to the climate meeting.
Trump then met with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where he was asked about attending the climate session. Trump said it would be his next stop and that he wants clean air and water.
But he never showed up.
Macron shrugged off Trump’s absence, saying it wasn’t his goal to try to persuade Trump to rejoin the climate accord. “You can’t rewrite the past,” Macron told reporters.
But Macron said he and Trump had a “long, rich and totally positive” discussion on the Amazon fires and an international effort to invest in “re-foresting” the area.
G-7 countries pledged $20 million on Monday to help fight fires in the Amazon rainforest, which threaten its ability to capture carbon released into the atmosphere by cars and other emitters. It’s a small sum overall but G-7 summit host France hopes it will bring more attention to the fires.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres – who attended Monday’s climate talks – expressed hope that Americans themselves would help fight climate change even if their president doesn’t.
“I am very optimistic about American society and its capacity to deliver in relation to climate action,” he told reporters afterward. “What matters here is to have a strong engagement of the American society and of the American business community and the American local authorities.”
(AP)
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6 Responses
What’s the harm in Trump’s absence? He’s got nothing to contribute and he’s too stupid to learn anything.
He shouldn’t be rude to allies, even if they have come to the dubious belief that carbon emissions are the sole cause of warmer temperatures. After they destroy their economy, reduce carbon emissions, and don’t see the change in climate they expect, they will feel silly.
What’s the harm in Trump’s absence? Global Warming is an international scam.
How can you peoples be so ignorant? Global warming is a fact that is known and proven by esteemed scientists from around the world. I read in an article in The New York Times that while 76% of Democrats believe in global warming, only 42% of Republicans believe in this phenomena. Why should such an important and valid theory be a splitting point between political parties instead of an acknowledged fact that we must face in order to repair the broken and damaged environment? Only those too ignorant and uneducated to admit to man’s foibles as caretaker to this world will discredit global warming. While those who wish to make reparations to the heating world and rising seas have come to call for a global summit to act before it’s too late those too stubborn to admit to the folly of man have boycotted the summit, calling it “a waste of time ” and “stupid”. May the absence of this evil man be unnoticed in the quest for the solution to global warming and may they be able to build a better world for our children.
@festabachurmibangeladash
you are a little too late to be part of Dor Haflagah
Good for Trump for ignoring this gang of fraudsters. Nobody believed in “Global warming” so they had to rename it to “Climate change”. It is a pseudo science hoax crated by Globalists to implement their agenda of eugenics and population control. In the past their target was “fossil” fuels, now it is meat eating and having babies. The same people who call skeptics “science denials” deny themselves that there are only two genders.