With President Donald Trump mocking the climate “con job” and top global-warming alarmist Bill Gates easing off the hysteria, many experts and analysts are predicting the upcoming United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summit in Belém, Brazil, will be an expensive flop. However, the UN, governments, and climate activists are not giving up yet. Instead, they are doubling down.
Officially, UN leaders and Brazilian authorities are promising major “progress” on saving the climate from the alleged dangers of human carbon dioxide emissions. Among other priorities for action at the 30th annual summit, all governments are supposed to bring a set of fresh “commitments” under the Paris Accord to slash CO2 emissions. A major push is on to build up the UN’s enforcement power, too.
Climate activists, meanwhile, are busy demanding trillions of dollars from taxpayers to save the world from CO2 — the supposedly dangerous gas exhaled by human beings — as if nothing was different this year. As usual, they are arguing even more vociferously than the previous year that time is running out. In short, they say, freedom and prosperity must be limited to help rein in emissions of what leading scientists call “the gas of life.”
Claiming that Trump does not represent Americans, U.S. activists purporting to speak for the American people are demanding big policy changes worldwide as well. “This is a really important moment to illustrate that Trump does not represent the entirety, or even anywhere near a majority, of us,” activist Collin Rees with “Oil Change International” was quoted as saying in far-left propaganda media outlets.
COP Flop?
But without the U.S. government — long the most significant financier of the whole movement — reality is starting to set in. Longtime commentator Marc Morano, editor of Climate Depot and often branded by alarmists as the world’s top threat to climate action, predicted that the climate bandwagon would suffer some major defeats this year. “It looks set to become a big flop,” he said.
In comments to The New American, Morano pointed out that the alarmists are facing quite a predicament. “This COP will FLOP for several reasons,” he said. “First, the Trump Effect has decimated the global climate agenda, and he has flipped the narrative on them by calling it a scam, a cult, a religion, and a fraud. Trump’s leadership has led to over 100 countries failing even to bother to try to reach their UN climate obligations.”
“Even more telling is the complete lack of reaction to Trump’s dismantling of the climate agenda,” Morano continued. “COP29 in 2024 was also a flop, and COP30 appears to be heading for a worse fate. Decades of lies about solar and wind energy being cheaper and ready to surpass fossil fuels are no longer even remotely tenable as over 80 percent of global energy still comes from coal, oil, and gas.”
“The Western world’s appetite for this entire COP process has dried up,” he concluded, echoing comments even from some quarters of the alarmist movement.
EU losing steam
Indeed, even the European Union superstate was forced to water down its typically grandiose promises on climate change and CO2. Activist “news” wire Reuters, which brazenly promotes the alarmist narrative without any semblance of balance or objectivity, reported that EU “climate ministers” reached a “weaker” deal “after watering down the goal” to secure an agreement across the regional bloc.
The new plan, which represents the EU’s “Nationally Determined Contributions” to cut CO2 under the UN Paris scheme, still requires drastic cuts to CO2 emissions over the next two decades. However, the recently announced “compromise” will allow many of those reductions to come from purchasing “carbon credits” from Third World regimes and companies. Critics on both sides of the issue often refer to the “carbon credits” as a scam.
Still, even watered down, the EU’s demands, if implemented, will further undermine the already-hurting economies of European nations. Industries across the EU are struggling in a major way, even in former powerhouses such as Germany. Many firms are choosing to leave for Communist China, which continues to build coal-fired power plants at record speed. The cost of living for Europeans, meanwhile, continues to skyrocket.
But EU bigwigs defended the moves as necessary. “Setting a climate target is not just picking a number, it is a political decision with far-reaching consequences for the continent,” argued Danish “climate minister” Lars Aagaard. “Therefore, we have also worked to provide comfort that it can be reached in a way that preserves competitiveness, social balance and security.”
Even Bill Gates Backing Down
Even billionaire population-control zealot Bill Gates, one of the world’s most extreme proponents of total government control masquerading as climate policy, has eased up on the doom-mongering. Of course, he continues to tout alleged man-made warming as a serious threat. But he now admits it will not destroy the world, and that there are other, more urgent concerns.
Writing on his personal blog last month, the infamous Covid tyrant shocked the climate world. “Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future,” he wrote, calling on activists to focus more on “improving lives” and less on useless so-called climate solutions that simply divert money and energy from serious endeavors.
“Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries,” he said. “We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature, and that our success relies on putting energy, health, and agriculture at the center of our strategies.”
UN Marching On
Pretending not to see or hear the screaming 800-pound gorilla in the room, UN Secretary-General António Guterres — a longtime leader of the Socialist International — went through the motions as he does every year. “We have never been better equipped to fight back,” claimed Guterres after rattling off a list of scenarios that would make the most unhinged doomsday preacher blush.
As in previous years, he used dishonesty to try to paint the UN’s demands as inevitable. “A clean energy revolution has taken hold,” Guterres continued, blatantly and knowingly lying about how solar, wind, and other “green” energies were now supposedly cheaper than conventional power. “The economics have shifted.”
But all is not rosy, he added. “Too many people are losing hope that their leaders will act,” claimed the socialist UN boss, despite the fact that the issue of climate change, even among those who believe it is caused by man, is near the bottom of public concerns expressed in polls. “We need to move faster — and move together. This COP must ignite a decade of acceleration and delivery.”
Among other policies, Guterres demanded in a speech to world leaders the “peaking [of] global emissions immediately; cutting them deeply this decade, accelerating the phase out of fossil fuels, slashing methane, and safeguarding forests and oceans,” and much more. He called for reorganizing sectors including energy, transportation, trade, and virtually everything else. The alternative, he made clear, is planetary doom.
Not surprisingly, Guterres also demanded money — lots of money. “We must demonstrate a clear and credible path to reaching the 1.3 trillion US dollars a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2035,” he said in his talk before world leaders in Belém ahead of the official conference start, pointing to pledges made by governments in last year’s climate agreement. Without the U.S. taxpayer to loot, that will be tough to reach.
Lula, Too
Brazilian President Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva, a longtime communist and close ally of various tyrants such as the late Fidel Castro, also sounded oblivious to what was going on globally on the climate front. While Morano and others ridicule the COP30 as a likely “flop,” Lula has been busy touting the upcoming summit as the “COP of truth.” This time there will be “real solutions,” he promised.
One of the key demands: The UN must have the power to enforce its socialist prescriptions masquerading as climate dictates. “We don’t want the COP to continue to be an exposition or a fair for ideological climate products, with everyone seeing what they want, how they want it, and no one being obliged to do anything and make things happen,” Lula said. “We want it to be very serious, and for the things we decide to be implemented.”
Among other concerns, the convicted criminal who in 1990 joined forces with Marxist terrorists and murderous dictators to create the São Paulo Forum, complained that some governments were “not complying” with the Paris Accord and other UN agreements. As such, the Brazilian government is proposing a UN-backed “global environmental council” to oversee then enforcement of it all.
This new enforcement and monitoring body is critical to the agenda, in his view. “Because otherwise nothing will happen,” Lula complained. “A country says ‘I’m not going to comply’ and nothing happens to it. So the COP loses its momentum, and soon people will no longer want to participate, because it’s pointless.”
What’s Next
Months before the summit began, logistical chaos was making headlines worldwide. From a lack of infrastructure to the unfathomably expensive lodging options, even climate alarmists in the press were horrified. When news broke that Brazilian authorities were chopping down tens of thousands of acres of pristine Amazon rain forest for the conference, environmentalist true believers no longer knew what to do with themselves.
Still, starting next week, tens of thousands of government officials, “journalists,” activists, and climate dignitaries will converge on Belém to hammer out this year’s annual “climate” agreement. But what sort of progress will be made without the U.S. government remains to be seen. The Trump administration is reportedly planning to send a low-level skeleton crew to keep tabs on the summit. But the White House is unlikely to play along.
During his first term in the White House, President Trump was able to do some serious damage to the climate machine, both domestically and internationally. However, as soon as Joe Biden’s administration seized power, much of that was reversed, with Biden doubling down on Obama’s regulatory assault against Americans and the U.S. economy broadly. Unless Congress acts, that is likely to happen again.
Climate alarmists still have hope. At the COP28 in Dubai, The New American asked seven U.S. Senators how the U.S. government could continue making so many promises when it appeared likely that Trump would soon be president again. U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) boasted of deceiving Americans and using taxpayer money to create climate constituencies in GOP-held districts. “We will continue, regardless,” he said.
Where Does Trump Go From Here?
After ridiculing the “climate scam” as the greatest “con job” in the history of humanity last month on the floor of the UN General Assembly, it is clear that Trump is no longer playing around. But he could do more. Morano called on the president to take one more crucial step to deliver a death blow to the UN “climate” agenda: Withdraw from the 1992 treaty signed by George H.W. Bush. It is the foundation upon which the whole project is built.
“Withdrawing from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would be the most significant step the Trump administration could take to shatter this 33-year climate stranglehold on America,” Morano said. “No Republican president has ever dared attempt it. This would etch Trump’s agenda in stone — making Trump 2.0’s climate legacy truly permanent and a nightmare for any future President AOC or Gavin Newsom to reverse.”
Multiple sources within the Trump administration told The New American that this has been discussed at the highest levels. If the president decides to move ahead with it, the move would be even more significant than his January 20 executive order withdrawing from the Paris Accord and all other UN “climate” deals negotiated under the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change. More should be known soon.
The New American will have a team of journalists at the COP30 in Belém with more updates soon. Stay tuned!
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