While domestic woes sidelined major figures like US President Donald Trump, this year’s gathering of the global elites in the Swiss ski resort of Davos showcased divisions on pressing issues like trade and the environment.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, howled about alleged hypocrisy after reports that a record number of flights by carbon-spewing private jets would ferry rich corporate bigwigs to talk at the event this year including about global warming.

“I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” said the student, who got a waiver from school to travel 32 hours from her home in Sweden by train, to keep he carbon footprint down.

Since founder Klaus Schwab first gathered European business executives back in 1971, the World Economic Forum has defended globalization as a force for good that improves lives and boosts prosperity.

Now, advocates of closer economic and cultural ties are on the defensive. Trump’s “America First” sloganeering, the Brexit-style self-interest, populist politics and the rise of “strongman” leaders in countries from the Philippines to Brazil have shaken confidence in the international rules and organizations set up since World War II.

The conference center in Davos still bustled with business executives, presidents and prime ministers, heads of non-governmental organizations, scientists, and artists. They met privately or sat on publicly broadcast discussions about world issues: Poverty, climate change, the rise of machines, diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, and trade disputes among them.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan will push for global data governance when it hosts the Group of 20 leading industrialized and developing nations this year. Leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia held talks toward ending the long-standing conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Britain’s health secretary unveiled a five-year plan to tackle the global threat of antimicrobial resistance.

Still, the WEF has struggled to shake off the impression that it hosts champagne-swilling executives more interested in their bottom line and power-hungry politicians more interested in polishing their global image than in the state of the world.

Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, pledged to work “in harmony with the world” to cut carbon emissions. The nationalist leader has faced international concerns that his country could allow far more aggressive deforestation in the oxygen-rich Amazon. But he provided no details and was asked no probing questions by the WEF organizers about his policies.