Climate crisis will not be discussed at G7 next year, says Trump official

Climate crisis will not be discussed at G7 next year, says Trump official

Mick Mulvaney: ‘Climate change will not be on the agenda’

Summit to take place at Trump’s National Doral Miami

Emily Holden in Washington

Thu 17 Oct 2019 19.54 BSTFirst published on Thu 17 Oct 2019 19.10 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/g7-summit-2020-trump-climate-crisis

The climate crisis will not be formally discussed at the G7 summit in June next year, Donald Trump’s acting White House chief of staff said on Thursday.

“Climate change will not be on the agenda,” Mick Mulvaney told reporters, without elaborating.

Mulvaney announced that the 2020 summit of seven of the world’s most powerful industrialised countries will take place at the National Doral Miami, one of the president’s golf resorts in Florida, despite widespread ethics concerns and an ongoing impeachment inquiry into Trump’s conduct.

From weakening regulation on vehicle emissions to blocking warnings about how coastal parks could flood and withdrawing funding for conservation programs, the Trump administration is accused of consistently ignoring, burying and undermining climate science.

The White House’s stance is likely to be widely criticized, possibly even by members of the president’s own party. Florida is on the frontline of the climate crisis, facing ever stronger hurricanes and rising sea levels. While the state’s elected leaders had long denied climate science, they have recently started to change their tune. In August, the Republican senator Marco Rubio wrote that “climate change is a real problem”.

The state’s recently elected Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has hired the ex-hostage negotiator Dr Julia Nesheiwat as the state’s first chief resilience officer in charge of preparing Florida “for the environmental, physical and economic impacts of climate change, especially sea-level rise”.

Gabriel Filippelli, a climate scientist who advised the state department under the Obama administration, criticized the administration for ignoring the crisis.

 “It means that irony is definitely NOT on the agenda!” Filippelli said on Twitter, referring to the decision to ignore the source of rising temperatures and sea-level rise at an international meeting outside of one of the country’s most climate-vulnerable cities.

Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser to Bill Clinton, said Trump won’t be able to prevent other countries from discussing the crisis anyway.

“The other nations will no doubt bring up climate change in both an economic and security context,” Bledsoe said. “The issue is going to come up frequently because it is increasingly a matter of public safety, national security and the economic costs of impacts.”

But even if climate were on the agenda, Bledsoe said: “It’s not like under Trump there were going to be any big breakthroughs anyway.”

“It’s deeply ironic that the US state most vulnerable immediately to climate change impacts will host a meeting at which global leaders will be forced by the US to largely ignore the topic,” Bledsoe added.