BUSINESS Trump touts US economy at climate change forum In Switzerland, president offers only tree-planting pledge

DAVOS, Switzerland — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s led a “spectacular” turnaround of the U.S. economy and urged the world to invest in America, but had less 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.

Trump kept to his speech script and did not mention the historic impeachment trial that was set to reconvene in the U.S. Senate in Washington later Tuesday. But he did comment when asked about the trial by the hordes of reporters covering the forum in Davos.

“It’s disgraceful,” Trump proceedings.

Trump’s speech during his two-day visit amounted to an election-year pitch to all those he referred to as “hardworking, ordinary citizens” of the U.S. who “felt neglected, betrayed, forgotten.”

Trump reminded the audience that when he spoke here in 2018, “I told you said of the that we had launched the great American comeback.”

“Today I’m proud to declare the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before,” the president said.

Climate issues are a main theme at the forum and the phrase “Act on Climate” was written in the snow at the landing zone where Trump’s Marine One helicopter set down in Davos.

Trump’s lone reference to climate issues in his speech was when he announced the U.S. would join a World Economic Forum initiative to plant 1 trillion trees worldwide. Afterward, in an apparent reference to those who warn about climate change, Trump said the world must “reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.”

Earth just finished its hottest decade on record with the five last years as the five hottest years on record, according to U.S. and other science agencies. Scientists repeatedly point to more extreme weather as a problem worsened by human-caused climate change.

Late last year, the Trump administration began pulling the U.S. out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement under which nearly 200 nations set goals to curb emissions of heat-trapping gasses that lead to climate change. Trump has called the Paris accord an unfair economic burden to the U.S. economy.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has been criticized by Trump, said world and business leaders aren’t taking the threat of global warming seriously.

“The facts are clear, but they are still too uncomfortable for you to address,” she told business and political leaders in Davos just after Trump’s speech. “You just leave it because you think it’s too depressing and people will give up, but people will not give up. You are the ones who are giving up.”

Thunberg brushed aside Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would join the economic forum’s initiative to plant 1 trillion trees across the globe to help capture carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Planting trees is good, of course, but it’s nowhere near enough,” Thunberg said.