Davos braces for Trump-Thunberg showdown as climate change tops agenda
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Some of the world’s top business people and politicians – and some celebrities – will gather in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum (WEF) this week.
US President Donald Trump, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg and Uber boss Dara Khosrowshahi are among the guests.
Thunberg is returning to the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the 2020 World Economic Forum with a strong and clear message: put an end to the fossil fuel “madness.”
Thunberg’s missive is aimed at, among others, US President Trump, who in the past has mocked the Swedish environmental campaigner, saying she has an “anger management problem.” Trump, who is among the most prominent climate change sceptics, is returning to Davos after giving it a miss in 2019 due to a government shutdown.
It’s the first time Trump and Thunberg would be present at the same event since last year’s United Nations climate change summit in New York, where the teenager could be seen staring down the US president as the two briefly crossed paths.
Later, Thunberg — named Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2019 — told the BBC that she “wouldn’t have wasted [her] time” talking to Trump about the climate crisis at the UN event.
“Honestly, I don’t think I would have said anything because obviously he’s not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me,” she said.
Thunberg, who famously told Davos participants last year that “our house is on fire,” has, however, found support among the organizers of the World Economic Forum, including its 81-year-old founder Klaus Schwab, who said the world is facing “a state of emergency.”
“We do not want to reach the tipping point of irreversibility on climate change,” Schwab told reporters on Tuesday. “We do not want the next generations to inherit a world, which becomes ever more hostile and ever less habitable – just think of the wildfires in Australia,” he said.
