Clash of messages as climate takes centre stage at Davos

PARIS - US President Donald Trump on Tuesday assailed environmental "prophets of doom", delivering an uncompromising message in Davos as Swedish teenage campaigner Greta Thunberg slammed government inaction on the climate crisis.

The 50th meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) got under way in the ski resort with an avowed focus on climate change but with starkly different visions over global warming laid bare.

The clash in messages between Trump and Thunberg came as Greenpeace said some of the world's biggest banks, insurers and pension funds have collectively invested $1.4 trillion in fossil fuel companies since the 2015 Paris climate deal.

The Paris accord, signed by nearly 200 nations, enjoins them to limit global temperature rises to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius through a rapid and wide-ranging drawdown of planet-warming carbon emissions.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the world's leading authority on the subject - says that for a better-than-even chance of reaching the safer Paris cap of 1.5C, oil and gas consumption would need to decline 37 percent and 25 percent respectively by 2030.

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International which analysed the portfolios of 24 of the banks represented at Davos, said financial institutions were complicit in climate change by funding the fuels that drive it.

"Banks, insurers and pension funds are as culpable for the climate emergency as the fossil fuel industry - specifically those that go to Davos," Morgan said. "These Davos players say they support the Paris agreement but since its signing they've pumped $1.4 trillion into fossil fuels."

The Greenpeace report found that just 10 banks had provided $1 trillion to fossil fuels since Paris. That same amount could pay to double the world's solar power capacity.

It also identified three pension funds with at least $26 billion in fossil fuel holdings, and alleged that four of the world's biggest insurance firms - AIG, Prudential, Sompo and Tokio marine - had no publicly disclosed policies to divest from fossil fuels.

"The fossil fuel industry needs the finance sector but its not the same the other way around, so why are these bank, insurers and pensions propping up dirty energy?" asked Morgan

With the climate emergency front and centre at the annual summit of the world's business elite, Greenpeace accused some institutions in attendance of failing to live up to the Forum's goal of "improving the state of the world".

"The massive scale at which global banks continue to pump billions of dollars into fossil fuels is flatly incompatible with a liveable future," said Alison Kirsh, climate and energy lead researcher at Rainforest Action Network.

'Our house is still on fire'

In his speech, Trump boasted Tuesday that he's led a “spectacular” turnaround of the US economy and urged the world to invest in America, but had little to say about climate change issues that are a focus of this year's gathering of top business and political leaders in the Swiss Alps.

Late last year, the Trump administration began pulling the US out of the Paris agreement, calling it an unfair economic burden to the US economy.

Thunberg was in the audience to hear the typically bullish speech by Trump. It was received in virtual silence apart from a brief flurry of applause when Trump said the US would join an initiative to plant 1 trillion trees worldwide.

In an apparent rebuke to Trump, Thunberg told the forum that planting trees was not enough to address climate change.

"Our house is still on fire," Thunberg said, repeating her remarks at Davos a year ago. "Your inaction is fuelling the flames," the teenage activist added, in the latest to-and-fro with the 73-year-old president.

Their ongoing debate around climate change appears as an attempt by both to frame the argument, with Thunberg calling for an immediate end to fossil fuel investments in front of a packed audience less than a hour after the US President's keynote address.

"We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse," Trump had said, growling that "they want to see us do badly".

He claimed that "alarmists" had been wrong on previous occasions by predicting population crisis, mass starvation and the end of oil. Trump branded those warning of out-of-control global warming and other environmental disasters "the heirs of yesterday's foolish fortune tellers".

Trump spent nearly all of his approximately 30-minute speech talking about how the US economy has performed well under his leadership, claiming that, “America is thriving. America is flourishing and yes, America is winning again like never before.”

Trump’s speech was criticized by the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

“He managed to say absolutely zero on climate change,” Stiglitz said. “Meanwhile we’re going to roast.”

Thunberg slammed "empty words and promises" by world leaders.

"You say children shouldn't worry... don't be so pessimistic and then, nothing, silence," she said. "The science and voice of young people is not the centre of the conversation, but it needs to be."

Several young activists travelled to Davos this year, following in Thunberg's footsteps. Among the "climate heroes" being celebrated by the WEF are Irish teen scientist Fionn Ferreira, who created a solution for preventing micro plastics from reaching oceans. They also include South African climate activist Ayakha Melithafa, 17, and Canadian Autum Peltier, who has been advocating for water conservation since she was 8.

Natasha Wang Mwansa, an 18-year-old activist from Zambia who campaigns for girls’ and women’s rights, told an audience in Davos that “the older generation has a lot of experience, but we have ideas, we have energy, and we have solutions."

Salvador Gomez-Colon, who raised funds and awareness after Hurricane Maria devastated his native Puerto Rico in 2017, said young activists are doing more than just talking.

“We’re not waiting five, 10, 20 years to take the action we want to see. We’re not the future of the world, we’re the present, we’re acting now. We’re not waiting any longer.”

Climate refugees

Autumn Peltier, the chief water commissioner for the Anishinabek Nation of indigenous people in Canada, said plaudits are not what they are looking for at Davos.

“I don’t want your awards. If you are going to award me, award me with helping to find solutions and helping to make change.”

The UN has warned that the world needs to prepare for a surge in refugees with potentially millions of people being driven from their homes by the impact of climate change,

Speaking to Reuters news agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said a UN ruling this week meant those fleeing as a result of climate change had to be treated by recipient countries as refugees, with broad implications for governments.

The UN Human Rights Committee made the landmark ruling on Monday in relation to Ioane Teitiota, from the Pacific nation of Kiribati, who brought a case against New Zealand after authorities denied his claim of asylum. The IPCC says Kiribati is one of the six Pacific Island nations most threatened by rising sea levels, which pose a growing risk to tens of thousands of people living across its 33 islands.

"The ruling says if you have an immediate threat to your life due to climate change, due to the climate emergency, and if you cross the border and go to another country, you should not be sent back because you would be at risk of your life, just like in a war or in a situation of persecution," Grandi said.

"We must be prepared for a large surge of people moving against their will," he said. "I wouldn't venture to talk about specific numbers, it's too speculative, but certainly we're talking about millions here."

Potential drivers include wildfires like those seen in Australia, rising sea levels affecting low-lying islands, the destruction of crops and livestock in sub-Saharan Africa and floods worldwide, including in parts of the developed world.

Whereas for most of its 70 years UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, has worked to assist those fleeing poorer countries as a result of conflict, climate change is more indiscriminate, meaning richer countries may become a rising source of refugees.

"It is further proof that refugee movements and the broader issue of migration of populations... is a global challenge that cannot be confined to a few countries," said Grandi.

UNHCR, whose budget has risen from $1 billion a year in the early 1990s to $8.6 billion in 2019 as conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have forced civilians to flee, already assists more than 70 million forcibly displaced people globally.

"People are paying a lot more attention" to climate, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremner said at Davos, adding there was "genuine action by some big players", after investment titan BlackRock said it was partially divesting out of coal.

"But let's be clear - a big part of this is because we failed for a very long time and governments continue to fail," he added.