Fiji’s former Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Dr Satyendra Prasad, has “respectfully and with deep humility” disagreed with U.S President Donald Trump’s claim that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Speaking at the UN General Assembly last month, Trump dismissed climate change science and criticised global climate action efforts.
“Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons were wrong.They were made by stupid people that of course their country’s fortunes and given those same countries, no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump said.
He called renewable energy a “joke” and “pathetic”, claiming they don’t work and are too expensive and weak.
“Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time, and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived.”
Trump also called the carbon footprint “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions” and blamed immigration and the high cost of renewable energy for “destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet.
“All of these countries are working so hard on the carbon footprint, which is nonsense by the way,” he added.
Ambassador Prasad strongly rejected Trump’s claims in a post on social media, emphasising that Pacific Islanders would not be misled into denying the reality and impacts of climate change.
“I believe that Pacific Islanders, our elders, our students, our women, our church and community leaders and our leaders will also disagree,” he wrote.
“The Blue Pacific will not be ‘conned’ in believing that industrial powers do not have responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and its impacts on our livelihoods.
“The ‘hoax’ that the Pacific Island states do see is large countries avoiding responsibility for their historical and current greenhouse gas emissions. The ‘con’ that Pacific Islands experience are large economies unwilling to transition away from fossil fuels at pace, thus denying Pacific Islanders a fair shot at a stable and secure future,” Ambassador Prasad said.
Trump further criticised international climate agreements, saying, “The entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected immediately, and it must be immediate. That’s why in America, I withdrew from the fake Paris Climate Accord, where, by the way, America was paying so much more than every country. Others weren’t paying.”
The former Ambassador joined other Pacific voices in urging the United States to re-commit to the Paris Climate Agreement, stressing that industrialised nations must take responsibility for emissions that are disproportionately threatening vulnerable island states…PACNEWS
