Trump administration skips COP30 climate summit and leaves California

In Belém, Brazil’s bustling gateway to the Amazon rainforest, leaders from nearly 200 nations have gathered for the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP30, to chart difficult next steps in the global fight against climate change. But the absence of the leaders of the world’s three largest greenhouse gas emitters – China, the United States and India – cast a shadow over the summit as it began.

Beijing and New Delhi sent high-level delegations to the two-week summit. The White House, however, said no high-level US officials would attend this year’s COP. President Trump has repeatedly dismissed man-made causes. climate change as “a hoax.”

Two Democratic governors, Gavin Newsom of California and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, were in Brazil to attend the summit, representing US efforts at the state level to curb emissions.

“What the hell is going on here?” Newsom asked at a global investor summit in São Paulo on Monday, where he launched a characteristic criticism of the Trump administration. “We are in Brazil, one of our great trading partners, one of the great democracies of the world. Home to all the rare earth metals we need. This is the country we should be dealing with, not slap with 50% tariffs“.

Ten years ago, 195 nations participating in the COP21 summit signed the historic Paris Agreement, which aimed to commit individual nations to taking measures that would collectively limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The goal of the agreement, which the Obama administration signed, was to continue efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels.

That goal now appears to be out of reach.

According to national plans presented this year, the planet is on track to warm by about 2.5°C (4.5°F) this century. The average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2024 It was the hottest since records began being kept in 1880, and the last 10 years have ranked among the warmest ever observed.

Still, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell told delegates in Brazil this week that after three decades of dedicated talks, “we are now bending the planet-warming emissions curve down for the first time.”

“I’m not sugarcoating it,” Stiell was quick to add. “We have a lot more work to do.”

A new UN analysis published this week shows that, if current national commitments are met, global emissions should fall by around 12% by 2035 compared to 2019 levels. This is an improvement on last month’s 10% projection, but still well short of the 60% reduction that scientists say would be needed to keep warming within the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has been pushing for stronger action, warning that exceeding the 1.5°C limit now seems almost inevitable and calling it a “moral failure” and “deadly negligence” that puts the lives of billions of people at risk.

Despite low expectations for radical progress, delegations at COP30 are widely expected to update national commitments to curb emissions in the next decade.

Also expected to emerge from the two-week meeting was a Brazilian-led initiative to raise $125 billion for rainforest protection, along with renewed scrutiny of fossil fuel companies, which Guterres accused of “holding back change” while raking in record profits and government subsidies.

More pressure is also likely to be applied to governments in rich nations to help fund climate adaptations around the world, to help developing countries mitigate the impacts of a warming planet.

At last year’s COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, countries agreed on the ambitious goal of mobilizing $1.3 trillion annually by 2035, with at least $300 billion expected to come from developing economies.

However, publicly available data on how much climate finance has actually been delivered since then remains scarce, and that could be a key point of contention for negotiators meeting in Belém.