Gov. Jerry Brown's plan for a climate summit in California draws cheers from activists

Gov. Jerry Brown's plan for a climate summit in California draws cheers from activists

Gov. Jerry Brown has announced a summit on climate action that will take place next year in San Francisco. He spoke Thursday to a crowd of concertgoers at the Global Citizen Festival in Hamburg, Germany, following sets from pop singers Shakira and Pharrell Williams.

Brown made the announcement a few hours after President Trump touched down in Germany's second-largest city for the G-20 summit, where the United States' withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate agreement cast a shadow over his talks with other world leaders on Friday and Saturday.

Christiana Figueres, a former top United Nations official who was in charge of negotiations on the Paris agreement, introduced Brown at the Global Citizen concert as a "climate optimist." 

The crowd burst out in applause when Brown said Trump doe sn't speak for the rest of the U.S.

“It's really good to hear that not all Americans feel the way Trump does about climate change. I think a lot of people in Germany see that,” said Sarah Schmerse, 32, who attended the concert.

Trump was not invited to speak because his policies don't match up with the concert's goal of supporting global health, climate and gender equality, said a source involved in organizing the concert. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Argentine President Mauricio Macri and other leaders took the stage to speak about climate change to the crowd of 12,000.

“I think [Brown's] message was really important. It sends a signal to the G-20 to be brave and stand up to Trump,” said Christoph Schott, a campaign director at Avaaz, an activist group that organized a protest outside a G-20 preparation meeting in Berlin last week.

Lutz Weischer, a climate campaigner for the advocacy group Germanwatch, said Brown's message “shows that it is not the United States that are withdrawing from the Paris agreement, but only the U.S. federal government.”

قالب وردپرس

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: