PARTISAN TALK HEATS UP CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT
Obama-era leaders used a climate summit hosted by Mayor Martin J. Walsh to bash President Trump and call for “kicking a few butts” of so-called climatechange deniers, but Walsh and other mayors insisted the event — staged as a replacement for a gathering canceled by Trump last year — was nonpartisan.
Walsh’s International Mayors Climate Summit, held yesterday at Boston University, brought several dozen mayors
from around the world to discuss climate change and listen to former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Environmental Protection Agency Chief Gina McCarthy weigh in on the issue. Both Kerry and McCarthy served under former President Barack Obama.
The summit — which was sponsored by BU and did not use city funds, according to a mayoral spokeswoman — came a day before Walsh hosts the United States Conference of Mayors in Boston. Several attendees of that meeting, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric M. Garcetti, overlapped with the summit.
Walsh and Kerry had originally planned to hold a climate summit with Chinese officials in Boston last year, mirroring one in Bejing in 2016, but it was canceled after the State Department withdrew support. At the same time, Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accord, an agreement between 196 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a major focus of Kerry’s time as secretary of state.
During a “fireside chat” at yesterday’s summit, Kerry called Trump’s election a “hostile takeover” and Congress “dysfunctional,” while praising mayors for honoring the Paris accord in their own cities. But he suggested that the U.S. could rejoin the accord with Trump out of the picture.
“I’m really optimistic about this, and the good thing is we’re officially not out of Paris until a week after the 2020 election, so if we do the right thing, we’ll solve the problem and be back in 30 days later,” Kerry said to applause.
Walsh insisted Kerry’s talk was mostly about climate change and not about attacking Trump.
“His whole conversation focused on the climate, you just happened to take one word he might have said out of context,” Walsh said when asked about Kerry’s remarks at a press conference. “What he said was it could all be very different ... there could potentially be a change in Washington where we wouldn’t be ending that and actually staying in that agreement.
“This is absolutely a climate summit,” Walsh said.
In a separate speech, McCarthy urged the crowd to take local action instead of waiting for Washington, but got in a few digs against people denying climate change.
“It’s sticking your head in the sand and guess what’s out there exposed — your butt! We have to go kick a few butts of those who have their heads in the sand,” McCarthy told a laughing crowd.
“We have leadership that doesn’t want to lead on the issue of climate change but I see lots of little leaders out there doing just that,” she said.
At the press conference, Walsh said attendees at the upcoming Conference of Mayors don’t view climate change through Democratic or Republican perspectives. Jim Brainard, the Republican mayor of Carmel, Ind., agreed.
“Mayors don’t have the leisure to be that political, it’s about providing services and improving the quality of life in our communities,” Brainard said. “This is a nonpartisan issue.”