At our annual Climate Forward live event yesterday, we hosted a series of conversations with world leaders, chief executives and activists about the state of our warming world.
(Watch all the sessions here. They will also be released as part of our new Climate Forward podcast, which is available wherever you get your podcasts.)
Some of the messages were blunt and represented opposing views. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, called President Trump’s remarks to the United Nations about climate change on Tuesday “an abomination.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking immediately after Newsom, forcefully defended the administration’s attacks on renewable power, and assailed, without providing evidence, a widely accepted area of climate science.
Many conversations were nuanced, revealing the complexities inherent in trying to address a colossal issue that is affecting the entire planet.
The biggest issues that came up: China’s growing lead in renewables, the Trump effect, how companies are playing the “long game” as climate politics shift and the tricky problem of rising energy demand.
China loomed large
As we reported this year, China is dominating in the development of many key energy technologies, including solar, batteries and electric vehicles.
China made news on Wednesday afternoon by releasing its updated climate goals, signaling it will cut emissions by 7 to 10 percent from peak levels by 2035. The cuts fall short of what scientists say is needed to keep global warming to the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times.
But China is still a sharp contrast to the United States, which has effectively exited global cooperation to address climate change.
Several speakers at the event were underwhelmed by China’s climate targets, and Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement gave China political cover.
Others had a lot to say about China’s transformation into a renewables superpower. Bob Mumgaard, the chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, said he was part of a Senate commission that discovered via satellite imagery that China was building fusion facilities it had not previously disclosed.
Newsom said that “China is just going to clean our clock.” The activist and author Bill McKibben joked the current U.S. approach to renewables could result in highways a decade from now looking like “the Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion,” with foreign tourists coming to stare at old-fashioned gas-powered vehicles.
But when asked about China’s dominance in these industries, Wright said he was not worried about the United States losing a step, and instead brought the conversation back to the fact that China is also still a major consumer of fossil fuels like coal.
The world reacts to Trump
Another big topic yesterday: the world adjusting to Trump.
Like Newsom, international leaders were critical of Trump’s U.N. speech on Tuesday in which he called climate issues a “hoax” perpetuated by “stupid people.”
Hilde Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, invited Trump to visit and witness the effects of sea level rise and corals dying. She added that he might enjoy a local golf course that straddles two islands.
The Australian mining magnate and billionaire Andrew Forrest also suggested that Trump come visit his home. “I feel real pain when I hear your president saying global warming is a great big con,” he said.
‘The long game’
There was one familiar refrain from executives yesterday when they were asked about how corporate climate commitments have shifted under Trump: They’re playing the long game.
Google’s chief sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, said the company’s climate work “truly transcends politics and political cycles.” The Microsoft executive Melanie Nakagawa added, “We also take a similar sort of long-term view.”
And in response to a question about the Trump administration’s attacks on the wind power industry, Scott Strazik, GE Vernova’s chief executive said, “We’re playing the long game here.”
The similarity in their responses reflected an uncomfortable reality for corporate leaders. Many are being extremely careful about their public comments to avoid unwanted attention from the White House. The result was a convergence on an answer so vague it can apply to just about anything.
No easy solutions for energy demand
We live in a power-hungry world, and it’s getting hungrier. On Wednesday, OpenAI announced plans to build data centers that will use enough energy to power hundreds of thousands of homes.
All of the panelists seemed to agree that supplying this energy would be a challenge. They differed on where it should all come from.
Microsoft and Google executives acknowledged that their plans to build data centers may result in using power from fossil fuel sources. Nakagawa, from Microsoft, said the company would try to blunt the effects of that consumption by purchasing renewable energy elsewhere.
Wright said that the Trump administration was working to keep coal plants open to match demand.
And in the optimism camp, Mumgaard said he hoped that, in the next two years, he could show the world that fusion energy can generate more power than it uses at a pilot plant being built outside of Boston. Such a breakthrough could reshape the world’s energy landscape.
At global climate summit this week, U.S. isolation was on full display
At a climate summit at the United Nations on Wednesday, the vast majority of the world’s nations gathered to make their newest pledges to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.
Geopolitical heavyweights including China, Russia, Japan and Germany were there. Dozens of small island states were there. The world’s poorest countries, including Chad and the Central African Republic, were there. Venezuela, Syria, Iran — there, too.
There are few issues on which the United States is more diplomatically isolated from the rest of the world than climate change. — Max Bearak and Somini Sengupta
One last thing
The simple rule that the actor Rainn Wilson uses to reconnect with nature
Ever heard of the 20-5-3 rule?
Spend 20 minutes outside three times per week. Add five hours per month somewhere a little wild, like a forest or a lake. And three days per year, try to go off the grid and spend time in nature without a cellphone.
Onstage at the event, accompanied by live musicians, Rainn Wilson, an actor, environmentalist and a star of “The Office,” shared this idea as one way to start changing our relationship with nature. (Watch the whole performance here.)
The idea was first developed by the scientist Rachel Hopman-Droste. Wilson said he lost half of his home in the Los Angeles fires this year, and just last month he evacuated his family from a cabin in Oregon to escape another fire threat.
He said that to address climate change, we must transform our relationship with nature. “We need to value nature as profoundly sacred,” he said. “Spiritual, even.”
Read Wilson’s Times opinion piece here on his approach. — Claire Brown
More climate news from around the web:
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Climate Trace, a nonprofit coalition co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, will soon let people track soot pollution in their neighborhoods, The Associated Press reports.
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The Washington Post reports that in the 24 hours after deadly floods swept through Texas hill country in April, Federal Emergency Management Agency staff members couldn’t reach the agency’s acting administrator, David Richardson.
Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.
David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series.
The post What World Leaders Told Us About Trump, China and Climate Change appeared first on New York Times.
