For years, countries around the world pressed the US to engage with them in addressing the climate crisis and to show it was serious about taking action. Now, with key United Nations climate talks under way in Brazil this week, other nations have been quietly hoping the US stays well away.
Under Donald Trump, who has called the climate crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, the US has not only pulled back from climate action but openly agitated for greater global fossil fuel use and for other countries to tear down their own climate policies.
“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” the US president told leaders at a UN speech in September. “You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
There was an air of relief among some diplomats, then, when the White House said that no high-level representatives would attend the Cop30 summit in Belém, Brazil, this week. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” a White House spokesperson said.
American commitment to curb global heating has waxed and waned over the years but the US now appears to not only be uninterested, but actively fighting for the other side. “Before, it was benign neglect, even in Trump’s first term,” said a former senior state department official. “Now it’s quite the opposite. They don’t want to participate and don’t want others to, either.
“If the choice is no US or a US that is there as a spoiler, to wreck and disrupt things, then I think most countries would prefer there to be no US,” the former official added. “I mean, we are now to the right of Saudi Arabia, when you think about it. The Saudis negotiate hard but they are OK with the Paris agreement. They aren’t against the word ‘climate’.”
Trump was not, as expected, present at a leaders summit held last week as a curtain raiser for Cop30, although the US president loomed over the event, with the leaders of Colombia and Chile calling him a liar for his rejection of climate science.
The US position on climate has hit a nadir, more hostile than during Trump’s first term or under George W Bush, when the US refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol, according to Todd Stern, a lead climate negotiator for the US during Barack Obama’s presidency.
“The president has made it clear he wants to withdraw from the Paris agreement, so it doesn’t surprise me they aren’t sending anyone because they aren’t engaged in this,” Stern said. “I don’t think they would add anything useful. This is a much more aggressive administration now, across the board.”
Any sort of US presence at the Belém talks, where countries will work through new emissions-cutting targets and topics such as climate finance, could have repeated extraordinary scenes seen when countries met in London last month to rubber-stamp plans for a small levy on greenhouse gas emissions from shipping.
US representatives at the talks were accused of using bully-like behavior to force countries to drop the plan, reportedly issuing threats of higher fees for docking in American ports and even visa restrictions upon US travel for negotiators and their families. Trump had called the proposal a “global green new scam tax on shipping” and demanded it be blocked. The tactics appear to have paid off, with the pollution fee now delayed for at least a year.
“It would have had a microscopic effect on the US economy, particularly compared to Trump’s tariff warfare, and yet they went into full thug tactics to batter that down at the very last minute,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator.
While the US is unlikely to show up in Brazil at all – the state department’s office that dealt with climate issues is now shuttered and there was no US presence at UN climate meetings in Germany and then Peru this year – Whitehouse said countries should still be wary of an “Al Capone-style attack” from the Trump administration at Cop30, possibly upon a European Union mechanism to tax imports based on the amount of planet-heating pollution they create.
“I think if you allow yourself to be intimidated by this administration, they will seize all the ground that you cede them, and then come back for more,” he said. “It’s only when you stop and fight and push back that you have a chance.”
Embracing an unapologetic “drill, baby, drill” approach, Trump has struck individual deals to ramp up fossil fuel production with countries such as Japan and South Korea, as well as extracting a promise from the European Union to purchase more US oil and gas.
The EU’s climate rules have been targeted by the White House, as have windfarms in the UK. “We don’t do wind because wind is a disaster,” Trump said during a press conference with Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, in September. “It’s a very expensive joke, frankly.”
Although Trump has torn up climate policies and halted renewable energy projects in the US, this is unlikely to stymie the energy switch globally. The world is set to build nearly 4,600 gigawatts of clean power between now and 2030, the International Energy Agency recently found, which is nearly double the amount built over the previous five-year period which was, in turn, double the amount installed in the five years before that.
“The thing about climate change is that you can’t hold back the waves,” said Stern. “There’s irreversible, strong, vigorous motion towards clean energy across the world.
“This administration might want to go back to the future but it’s not going to happen. The countries at Cop won’t be paying any attention to the United States at the national level.”
But Trump’s antipathy toward climate action is just the most pointed manifestation of a general malaise in global climate politics in recent years. Governments are more intent to be seen fighting inflation than carbon pollution and almost every country is not doing enough to cut emissions or provide finance to those worst affected by worsening floods, storms and droughts.
Some climate advocates have become drawn to other issues or have even downplayed the severity of the crisis. Trump recently crowed about fellow billionaire Bill Gates’s apparent backtracking on climate action, posting on Truth Social: “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”
The most vulnerable countries are now casting around to see whether any leaders will now step up. “The US’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement leaves a void that must urgently be filled,” said Ilana Seid, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, which advocates for low-lying countries most threatened by a hotter world.
Seid said smaller, developing countries do not have the resources to recover from the sort of devastation wrought by enormous storms such as Hurricane Melissa, which last month smashed into Jamaica and was probably worsened by an overheated atmosphere and ocean.
“Due to bigger countries’ indifference to climate action, we are off track on the 1.5C goal, and heading towards even more destructive impacts,” she said. “This is a poignant illustration of the disproportionate, unjust effect on the vulnerable people who have contributed the least to climate change.”
The US government may be absent, but roughly 100 US governors, members of Congress and state and city officials will still go to Belém to argue that a vast chunk of the US is still committed to dealing with the climate crisis. The task at Cop30 will be to keep despair at bay, until a rapidly heating world can again focus on the climate emergency that is exacerbating many of the other problems now drawing attention.
“No country, including the United States that is now being led by an anti-science, increasingly authoritarian Trump administration, can stop global climate action,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The question is, is it going to accelerate fast enough, given the dire space we’re in now with the climate crisis? We have this rapidly shrinking window. The science is absolutely stark.”
