Donald Trump is so spectacularly horrible that it’s hard to look away – especially now that he’s discovered bombs. But precisely because everyone’s staring gape-mouthed in his direction, other world leaders are able to get away with almost anything.

Don’t believe me? Look one country north, at Justin Trudeau.

Look all you want, in fact – he sure is cute, the planet’s only sovereign leader who appears to have recently quit a boy band. And he’s mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it’s deserved: in lots of ways he’s the anti-Trump, and it’s no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over.

But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in Washington.

Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialise in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5C (2.7F).

But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tar sands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet.

Last month, speaking at a Houston petroleum industry gathering, he got a standing ovation from the oilmen for saying: “No country would find 173bn barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”

Recoverable oil estimate
Yes, 173bn barrels is indeed the estimate for recoverable oil in the tar sands. So let’s do some math. If Canada digs up that oil and sells it to people to burn, it will produce, according to the math whizzes at Oil Change International, 30 percent of the carbon necessary to take us past the 1.5C target that Canada helped set in Paris.

That is to say, Canada, which represents one half of 1 percent of the planet’s population, is claiming the right to sell the oil that will use up a third of the earth’s remaining carbon budget. Trump is a creep and a danger and unpleasant to look at, but at least he’s not a stunning hypocrite.

This having-your-cake-and-burning-it-too is central to Canada’s self-image/energy policy. McKenna, confronted by Canada’s veteran environmentalist David Suzuki, said tartly: “We have an incredible climate change plan that includes putting a price on carbon pollution, also investing in clean innovation.

“But we also know we need to get our natural resources to market and we’re doing both.” Right.

But doing the second negates the first – in fact, it completely overwhelms it. If Canada is busy shipping carbon all over the world, it wouldn’t matter all that much if every Tim Horton’s stopped selling doughnuts and started peddling solar panels instead.

Canada’s got company in this scam. Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull is supposed to be more sensitive than his predecessor, a Trump-like blowhard.

When he signed on his nation to the Paris climate accords, he said: “It is clear the agreement was a watershed, a turning point and the adoption of a comprehensive strategy has galvanised the international community and spurred on global action.”

Which is a fine thing to say – or would be, if your government wasn’t backing plans for the largest coal mine on Earth.

Mathematically and morally absurd
That single mine, in a country of 24 million people, will produce 362 percent of the annual carbon emissions that everyone in the Philippines produces in the course of a year.

It is obviously, mathematically and morally absurd.

Trump, of course, is working just as eagerly to please the fossil fuel industry – he’s instructed the Bureau of Land Management to make permitting even easier for new oil and gas projects, for instance. And frackers won’t even have to keep track of how much methane they’re spewing under his new guidelines.

And why should they? If you believe, as Trump apparently does, that global warming is a delusion, a hoax, a mirage, you might as well get out of the way.

Trump’s insulting the planet, in other words. But at least he’s not pretending otherwise.

That was one strange weekend Malcolm Turnbull just spent in Papua New Guinea on his first official visit, even if at first glance the running sheet looked typical enough.

The usual Aussie-prime-minister-in-PNG schedule was dusted off trotting out a tête-à-tête with the PNG PM, a Bomana-Kokoda experience and a business breakfast dominated by expats. Nothing new there.

But otherwise there were some bizarre deviations, including a mix-up which left the PNG media believing it hadn’t been invited to a Turnbull press conference.

As ABC PNG correspondent Erik Tlozek put it in a Facebook post:

“I am disappointed and embarrassed that my PNG media colleagues felt they were not allowed to attend this morning’s press conference with Malcolm Turnbull at Bomana.

“If Australia wants to show that its government is open to media scrutiny, surely it should welcome journalists to a presser held in their own country.”

Later SBS journalist Stefan Armbruster added to this by tweeting:

“Hear from sources [that] PNG journalists excluded from Turnbull presser post-Kokoda wreath-laying. [They] were told it’s an ‘Australian thing’.”

An Australian thing?

This was later rendered by New Zealand journalist Michael Field as:

“Some Australian journos now using Facebook to say sorry for the Whites-Only press briefing Turnbull had in PNG: Melanesians journos were excluded”

– not quite on the money but an understandable interpretation.

The Australian High Commission in PNG later apologised for what was described as

“a misunderstanding”.

As Radio New Zealand International’s Johnny Blades reported,

“the fact that only Australian journalists had access to Mr Turnbull during this leg says a lot about how Canberra conducts its business in PNG.”

Manus asylum seekers
Turnbull further raised the ire of Papua New Guineans and refugee support groups by sidling away from one of the key issues in the Australia-PNG relationship – the future of asylum seekers stranded on Manus Island.

He didn’t address the issue front on, preferring to use the evasive words, “one step at a time.”

This prompted Manus MP Ron Knight to tweet: “He hasn’t even the courtesy of meeting the Manus leaders or coming here to see himself the problem. No respect.”

Turnbull’s Immigration Minister Peter Dutton was not as reticent as his boss, airily telling PNG the refugees were its problem, not Australia’s,

This provoked a sharp rebuff from Transparency PNG’s gritty chairman Lawrence Stephens: “You haul people illegally into PNG. Now they become PNG’s problem? Come on!”

Dutton doubled down with what read like a “stuff you PNG” statement: “We’ll be withdrawing the assets from Manus Island. We are not going to have a detention centre there for other uses. We’re not going to have facilities being used or repurposed. The centre will be dismantled.”

So there, PNG. We’ll trash all the stuff we gave you and go home.

Turnbull had earlier run into criticism about the timing of his trip from former PNG prime minister Sir Mekere Morauta.

‘Dangerous position’
Morauta said Turnbull had placed himself in a “dangerous position”, especially “with the prospect of a new government just around the corner”.

Turnbull dismissed the complaint, saying the timing of his visit was “entirely unrelated” to any domestic political events in PNG and that the election was a matter for the people of PNG “absolutely”.

Before departing Port Moresby for India, Turnbull also was forced to deflect questions about Papua New Guinea’s poor economic performance.

Asked if it was a concern to Australia that the PNG government was “broke”, Turnbull said this was a matter for the PNG government.

Not entirely the case, though, as just a couple of weeks ago Australia effectively refused to bail out PNG who had asked that the half billion dollars of tied Australian aid be used instead to prop up its budget.

Australia had said no.

Oh, and a footnote to that business breakfast with Malcolm Turnbull. Christine Aiwa – executive assistant to the managing director of the Post-Courier – paid K900 for four senior journalists to attend.

“But the waiters were instructed not to serve our journalists any breakfast; one was only given an orange juice,” she wrote on Facebook.

“That’s discriminating. I will not stop until I get the full refund of K900 back, and I want an apology.”

It was, all in all, quite a weekend.

Keith Jackson blogs at PNG Attitude where this column was first published. It is republished with the permission of the author.