Paris hosts summit, and it’s all about Trump
PARIS — The global climate summit in Paris was designed to bypass Donald Trump, but the U.S. president ended up playing a starring role.
Trump became the unwitting villain as world leaders, investors and other Americans assailed him Tuesday for rejecting the Paris climate accord.
To emphasize their point — and prevent others from following his lead — they announced more than $1 billion in investments to make it easier for countries and industries to give up oil and coal.
French President Emmanuel Macron used the summit to seize the global spotlight, capitalizing on Trump’s isolationist policies and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s domestic weakness to position himself as the world’s moral compass on climate change.
“We’re not moving fast enough,” Macron said, warning that the 2015 Paris climate accord is “fragile.”
“It’s time to act and move faster and win this battle” against climate change, he told the more than 50 world leaders and others gathered in Paris.
After opening the summit on a pessimistic note, Macron was more encouraging at the closing, praising the “very concrete” commitments made by the participants.
“We started today to make up some ground in this battlefield,” he said in his closing speech. Tuesday’s commitments will be able to be tracked and verified on a dedicated platform, he added.
Bill Gates, Richard Branson and other energy executives and investment fund leaders announced a dozen international projects emerging from the summit that will inject money into efforts to curb climate change.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim won rousing applause when he announced that his agency would stop financing oil and gas projects in two years.
The summit, co-hosted by the U.N., the World Bank and Macron, was held on the second anniversary of the Paris climate accord, which was ratified by 170 countries. More than 50 heads of state and government took part.