Abdication - Whatever Happens After The Belem Garbage Fire, It's Going To Happen Without The United States [View all]

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A decade after the ambitious Paris climate accords were forged under U.N. auspices, the world seems doomed to fail its chief target — the limiting of global warming to just 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. Maintaining that threshold seems a fantasy, my colleague Ruby Mellen reported, and it could be surpassed within this decade. Even as many countries have launched their transitions to renewable energy, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels are projected to rise to an all-time high. The International Energy Agency estimates that, if current policy conditions hold, the planet will warm nearly 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.

For some in Belém, the global calamity that will entail is impossible to deny. “As a scientist, I’ve never had reason to be so concerned as I am today for the future we are facing,” Johan Rockstrom, director of the Germany-based Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a video message welcoming delegates to a pavilion at the summit on planetary science. “We’ll be approaching tipping points of irreversible changes undermining life support and will have impacts affecting billions of co-citizens around the world. We need climate action faster than ever. Scale and pace is the only currency that matters.”

For President Donald Trump, little of this matters. He had denounced climate action as a “con job,” wants to expand drilling for oil and gas off the U.S. coast, and has campaigned against the green policies of other Western countries. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” he said at the U.N. General Assembly in September. “You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.” Apart from withdrawing (for a second time) from the Paris climate accords, the Trump administration has also undermined or stalled international efforts to forge a treaty curbing of global plastic pollution as well as a separate potential pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions in international shipping. Trump’s domestic policies this term have sought to reverse the initiatives of the Biden administration, which pledged two years ago along with the rest of the world to transition away from fossil fuels, and saw massive investment in green energy as an essential part of the competition with China in the coming decades.

To no one’s surprise, not only is Trump a no-show at the ongoing summit in Brazil, but the White House also didn’t even dispatch a senior-level delegation — as other major emitters whose leaders are also absent, such as China and India, have. At a leaders’ summit that took place ahead of the start of COP30 this week, Trump’s counterparts spoke gloomily of the moment. “Ten years ago, the world came together in Paris united in our determination to tackle the climate crisis. A consensus that was based on science that is unequivocal,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. “Today, sadly, that consensus is gone.” Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, who is already locked in battles with the White House, pulled fewer punches. “Mr. Donald Trump isn’t coming. He’s behaving in a way that denies science, and he’s leading his society with eyes closed into the abyss and, with it, humanity,” Petro said. “Mr. Trump is wrong. Science illuminates the collapse if the United States doesn’t move toward decarbonizing its own economy.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/11/14/trump-cop30-climate-united-nations/