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The uphill battle ahead: Four different leaders, four different takes on global warming

By  SETH BORENSTEIN and MELINA WALLING, September 26, 2025

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Four men. Four corners of the globe. Four vastly different visions and experiences on climate change.

At the United Nations this week, a quartet of leaders with distinct personal styles and decidedly different national agendas demonstrated why saving the planet isn’t simple, fast or something they can even agree on.

U.S. President Donald Trump, a real estate tycoon and television personality, kicked off the issue a day early when he played skunk at a garden party. He told fellow leaders at the United Nations not to worry about climate change because it’s a scam and insisted that renewable energy, such as wind and solar, would wreck their economy. He was basically alone on that.

Then, on Wednesday, when more than 100 leaders gathered specifically to work on climate, it was the engineer-turned-president, Xi Jinping of China, who seized the moment, attention and headlines in a controlled video. He announced that for the first time, the world’s top carbon polluter would cut emissions. Though experts called it timid, he positioned his country to amass ever more economic might by cornering the market of the very renewables that Trump denigrated.

Feleti Penitala Teo, the soft-spoken prime minister of the small island nation of Tuvalu, talked of watching the beaches of his childhood get swallowed up by climate change’s rising seas. His role, he said in a Thursday interview, is to be the conscience of his colleagues.

And finally, playing host even though he lives a continent away was Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former trade negotiator who represents a country that acts as a common middle ground for issues between North and South, rich and poor. He will host climate negotiations in Belem, Brazil, in November.

Their differences on the issue tell an important and intricate story…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-united-nations-trump-lula-xi-8ab619c37a5471fc0de0a063feaf7b9e

September 30, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change