1News US correspondent Logan Church spoke with Donald Trump’s energy secretary, who said we should stop being so worried about climate change. Then he met a Prime Minister whose nation is being swallowed by the sea.
There is no confidence like that shown from an American politician. They’re loud, proud, and enjoy chatting to foreign journalists – we are a quandary to each other.
Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, was no exception when I met him, the day after the US President described climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”.
The comments sent waves around the globe, particularly troubling Pacific leaders, where climate change is not a “far in the future problem.”
So, I jumped at the chance to speak with his top official responsible for climate policy, alongside a small group of other journalists. He is part of Trump’s cabinet, regularly meeting and advising the president, as well as carrying out his political agenda.
“Climate change, like every other issue, is a tradeoff,” he said in his opening remarks to us.
His big concern was that the race to harness renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind, has created a major energy deficit and driven up prices for consumers.
“About a billion people live lifestyles remotely recognisable to all of us,” he said. “We’re in fancy clothes and travelling on motorised transport and turning light switches on and off. Seven billion people want to live lives like us too. The only road from here to there is massively more energy.”
“We have a cure, massively more expensive than the worst cure of the disease. We’re going to bring back data. We’re going to bring back science and open, honest dialogue. No more cancel culture – you can’t say anything about climate change, or you’d be shouted down.“
But that begs the question – what ‘trade off’? And for whom?
So, I asked: “Many nations in the Pacific are already dealing with the effects of climate change, and they see it as an existential threat. Tuvalu is one example, and we have issues in New Zealand as well. What would you say to the smaller nations who look to bigger nations like the United States of America for global leadership on this issue?”
“Tuvalu, I hear a lot about that,” said Secretary Wright.
“Tuvalu, as most of these Pacific Island nations, they’re atolls. They’re coral atolls. They rise and fall with the sea level. If you took the total area of them, it’s grown about 1% in the last 50 years. Sea level has risen a few inches, but they – sea level has risen 400 feet in the last 12,000 years, and those islands have risen up with that, and when sea levels fall, those islands will go back down again.”
“Climate change is not nothing,” he continued.
“Sea levels are rising - it’s a real thing. But we should be honest and credible about it- and getting everyone scared that their nations are going to be swallowed up, and 20% of kids have nightmares about climate change – that’s just an unrealistic presentation of it."
He stated there was no evidence that hurricanes (cyclones in New Zealand), floods, or droughts are increasing, and deaths from extreme weather is on a century-long decline.
“It's terrifying, it’s scary. I’ve been near hurricanes.They are awful things but they’re as old as human civilisation,” he said.
"We’ve not seen changes in trends for them, but we have – have a society that’s way better able to withstand them. Thank you for the question.”
Dissecting all of that
I left the briefing somewhat troubled. We in New Zealand have seen the very impact of wild weather, which science shows is increasing in intensity.
What I saw in Hawke's Bay during Cyclone Gabrielle, as one example, will stay with me forever.
Seeking some clarity, I sent a full transcript of Secretary’s Wright’s comments to me to one of New Zealand’s top climate scientists - James Renwick, of Victoria University.
We had a lengthy conversation. I’ve broken his comments up by theme.
Claim that coral atolls rise and fall with the sea level
“There’s a grain in truth in what he says – it's true that recent research shows that coral atolls in the Pacific and the tropics grow - as sea levels rise, they actually rise themselves,” said Renwick.
“That’s been happening but that’s because the rate of sea level rise has been relatively slow so far – the Secretary makes the point that sea levels have gone up and down by hundreds of feet over thousands of years - and that is true, but the rate of rise generally has been pretty slow with these geological process. We are going to see very rapid rates of sea level rises in the future as the big ice sheets begin to melt faster. Sea levels will come up – whether or not the coral atolls can keep up that remains to be seen.”
There was a bigger problem, he said.
“The process the coral facilitates to make this happen requires the coral to be alive. Coral atolls are dying off all over the world – it's estimated that with two degrees of warming, with the ocean acidification etc, pretty much all the coral atolls will be dead – so it becomes a moot point whether these atolls can grow at all.
“Plus, a lot of islands in the Pacific and elsewhere are not coral atolls - they are volcanic. Already we know in places like Fiji that whole villages are having to get out of the way of the rising sea.”
Claim that we are unreasonably scared
“The way to avoid that is 1) to be realistic about the problem, but 2) to really look at how we tackle it and turn it around,” said Renwick.
“I come back to the renewable energy story – if people can understand this is what we do, we stop burning fossil fuels that will stop causing climate change and give people some hope around what they can do to contribute, that will get around the nightmares rather than ignoring the problem which is the tone of the comments from the Secretary.”
Claim there is no evidence of hurricanes, floods, or droughts increasing
“I don’t know where he’s getting that from - he’s reading a different IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to the one I contributed to - because the latest report says there is a trend towards more violent tropical cyclones, with more violent wind and rain falling out of them. Yes, the number of tropical cyclones isn’t increasing, but when they happen, they are more violent. Tropical cyclones are becoming a bigger problem and more dangerous,” he said.
“The IPCC report points out there’s been a trend towards more droughts, heavier rainfall over landfall pretty much globally. Most weather and climate extremes are more frequent and more intense – and we know this is because of human-caused greenhouse gas emission.”
Claim that extreme weather deaths are dropping
“That’s true – there's very good data on this. But that’s not because there are less extremes, that's because we have much better early warning systems, much better emergency management systems, better communication systems – people know when something bad is happening and they get out of the way. It’s not about the easing of extremes globally - it’s about our ability to take action ourselves.”
On Secretary Wright's comments in general
“My overall reaction is that these remarks are disingenuous at best, misdirected, a bit of misinformation in there. I wasn’t impressed with his overall comments.”
On President Trump describing climate change as a 'con'
“There’s no question the climate is changing, there’s no question that humans are causing it – people can think what they like, but the President is not paying attention to the science or choosing to ignore it.”
The country with the most to lose
There was a reason I asked Secretary Wright specifically about Tuvalu.
The highest point of the small island nation is just four and half meters above sea level. That puts the nation’s roughly 10,000 citizens at risk of losing, well, everything.
Already Tuvalu deals with flooding, saltwater intrusion into freshwater and farmland. Parts of the island are simply disappearing.
Prime Minister Feleti Teo was in New York as part of the United Nations leader's week. I caught up with him after a meeting he co-chaired with other island nations – from New Zealand to Malta – on sea level rise.
“I was totally appalled by the comments - I don't expect it so blatantly,” he said, asked for his thoughts on what President Trump had said earlier in the week, as well as the overall White House take on climate change.
"It took us by surprise...well, not that surprised but we didn’t expect it so publicly announced, but we are firm and confident in the international science that most of the countries around the world believe that climate change is a reality."
I asked if he would like to see more US leadership on this issue, as one of the four biggest emitters in the world and the country with the most diplomatic power.
“That would be very helpful,” he said.
“With the US position on climate change - and renewable energy they totally dismiss those as a hoax it's quite concerning for countries like Tuvalu which is at the forefront of climate change.”
For them, they say climate change is not a ‘trade off’ for social and economic advancement - it’s an existential threat they are dealing with every day.
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