Trump’s UN Speech Cannot Steer the Global Climate Effort

Alice C. Hill is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

President Donald Trump used his UN General Assembly speech to deliver the longest and most detailed statement of his climate and energy views since returning to the White House. In front of an audience mostly of countries party to the UN climate treaty system, he devoted more than ten minutes to the topic to emphasize his opinion that climate change was the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” 

Despite years of railing against global warming as a “hoax,” Trump has typically treated climate as a passing reference in past UN speeches. This time was different. At the General Assembly, he used his time to brand renewable energy as a “scam,” characterize carbon accounting as a conspiracy, and claim environmentalists “want to kill all the cows.” 

What unfolded in this speech was something akin to a marketing pitch for American fossil fuels, filled with disparagements of renewable energy, dismissals of climate science, and caricatures of environmentalists. His words also landed at a sensitive diplomatic moment. It is one that China used to take a leading position at a UN climate summit the following day, with the UN climate conference in Brazil looming in November. President Xi Jinping appeared at the meeting via video link and remarked that the “green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time” before announcing a new commitment to reduce China’s emissions by 2035. 

“While some countries are acting against it, the international community should stay focused on the right direction,” Xi added at the summit, which the United States did not attend.  

President Trump’s comments were no accident—the timing mattered. His remarks came as countries are mulling over how far they should stretch to address worsening warming. Just weeks away, the 2025 Conference of Parties—the UN climate conference also known as COP30—in Belém, Brazil, marks a critical milestone where nations are expected to share new, more ambitious commitments to reduce heat-trapping pollution under the Paris Agreement. But, at the time of Trump’s speech, most countries had yet to come forward with their promises. 

What Trump left unsaid about the US withdrawal from the international climate space is as important as anything he did say.  

He offered no acknowledgment of the decades of scientific research, synthesized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), demonstrating that the burning of fossil fuels is the principal driver of global warming. Nor did he discuss the mounting damage from climate-worsened weather extremes afflicting nations across the globe. 

Ignoring climate science, he repeated a refrain that it makes no difference what the United States or Europe does because China will keep emitting. That argument sidesteps the United States’ role as the largest historical emitter and its continuing contributions to the problem. As the IPCC has repeatedly stated, every ton of carbon avoided matters in slowing the pace of warming. 

He also downplayed the dynamism of China’s energy system. While China is the biggest emitter and is still building new coal plants, it is also a leader in climate solutions, deploying record levels of solar, wind, electric vehicles, and batteries. In 2024 alone, China installed more solar capacity than the rest of the world combined. By ceding leadership on clean energy to China, Trump makes it easy for China to position itself as the primary supplier of affordable clean technologies to developing countries. 

Instead, Trump claimed that renewable energy is, in part, “destroying a large part of the free world,” bankrupting nations, and raising costs. The data tell a different story. Over the past fifteen years, the cost of solar power has fallen by more than 80 percent, and onshore wind power by more than 70 percent. Today, in most of the world, new wind and solar power are the cheapest sources of electricity. Lithium-ion battery prices have also dropped nearly 90 percent since 2010. 

But Trump’s preferences are clear, as one of the clearest through-lines in his remarks was the promotion of American fossil fuels. He urged nations to buy U.S. oil and gas, contrasting it with what he portrays as Europe’s misguided energy policies, while deriding wind and solar as a “scam” and a “con job.” At the same time, he painted U.S. fossil fuels as abundant, reliable, and economically liberating. He even tried to reinvent coal as a clean energy source, describing it as “clean, beautiful coal." The overall effect felt like a sales job for hydrocarbons. 

Although there has been little public rebuke by world leaders of Trump’s climate remarks, for delegates preparing for COP30, his words were both a warning and a provocation. Indeed, they show that one of the world’s largest emitters is once again abdicating responsibility, putting other countries in a difficult position. According to Politico, one European official observed about the speech, “the world will take it, because the world has no choice.” 

Trump’s remarks have highlighted the stakes: If the other countries allow such rhetoric to blunt ambition, the Paris Agreement’s momentum could falter. If instead nations double down—strengthening pledges, accelerating renewables, and rejecting denialism—the speech may serve as a galvanizing moment. 

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.