Some countries’ leaders are watching rising seas threaten to swallow their homes. Others are watching their citizens die in floods, hurricanes and heat waves, all exacerbated by climate change.
But the world US President Donald Trump described in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday didn’t match the one many world leaders in the audience are contending with. Nor did it align with what scientists have long been observing.
“This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion,” Trump said.
“All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Trump has long been a critic of climate science and polices aimed at helping the world transition to green energies like wind and solar. His speech on Tuesday, however, was one of his most expansive to date. It included false statements and made connections between things that are not connected.
Ilana Seid, an ambassador from the island nation of Palau and head of the organisation of small island states, was in the audience. She said it’s what they’ve come to expect from Trump and the United States.
She added that not acting on climate change will “be a betrayal of the most vulnerable,” a sentiment echoed by Evans Davie Njewa of Malawi, who said that “we are endangering the lives of innocent people in the world.”
For Adelle Thomas, a climate scientist who has published more than 40 studies and has a doctorate, climate change disasters are personal, too.
A vice chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top body on climate science, Thomas is from the Bahamas and said she experienced first-hand “the devastation of the climate disaster” when Hurricane Sandy hit the Caribbean and New York City, the city Trump was speaking from, in 2012.
“Millions of people around the world can already testify to the devastation that climate change has brought to their lives,” she said.
“The evidence is not abstract. It is lived, it is deadly, and it demands urgent action.”
A look at some of Trump’s statements, the science behind them and the reaction.
On renewable energy
WHAT HE SAID: Trump called renewable sources of energy like wind power a “joke” and “pathetic,” falsely claiming they don’t work, are too expensive and too weak.
THE BACKSTORY: Solar and wind are now “almost always” the least expensive and the fastest options for new electricity generation, according to a July report from the United Nations. That report also said the world has passed a “positive tipping point” where those energy sources will only continue to become more widespread.
The three cheapest electricity sources globally last year were onshore wind, solar panels and new hydropower, according to an energy cost report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
Subsidies endorsed by Trump and the Republican Party are artificially keeping fossil fuels viable, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.
“If one were truly in favour of the ‘free market’ to determine this, then fossil fuels would be disappearing even faster,” he wrote in an email.
Relatedly, Trump falsely claimed European electricity bills are now “two to three times higher than the United States, and our bills are coming way down.”
But in fact, retail electricity prices in the United States have increased faster than the rate of inflation since 2022, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The agency expects prices to continue rising through 2026.
On the international politics of climate, the UN and the Paris Accord
WHAT HE SAID: Trump blasted the UN’s climate efforts, saying he withdrew America from the “fake” Paris climate accord because “America was paying so much more than every country, others weren’t paying.”
THE BACKSTORY: The Paris Agreement, decided by international consensus in 2015, is a voluntary but binding document in which each country is asked to set its own national goal to curb planet-warming emissions and decide how much money it will contribute to the countries that will be hit hardest by climate change.
Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for more than a century, the United States has put out more of the heat-trapping gas than any other nation, even though China is now the world’s number one carbon polluter.
Since 1850, the US has contributed 24 per cent of the human-caused carbon dioxide that’s in the air, according to Global Carbon Project data. The entire continent of Africa, with four times the population of the US, is responsible for about 3 per cent.
On coal being referred to as clean
WHAT HE SAID: “I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word ‘coal.’ Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal.’ Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
THE BACKSTORY: Coal kills millions of people a year. “The president can pretend coal is clean, but real people — mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters— will die for this lie,’’ said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson.
Trump also called the carbon footprint “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions,” a contention that Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler agreed with. Dessler said the term was coined by oil companies and may have been designed to shift the responsibility for combating climate change away from corporations to individuals.
The science of climate change started 169 years ago when Eunice Foote did simple experiments with flasks and sunlight, showing that carbon dioxide trapped more heat than the regular atmosphere. It’s an experiment that can be repeated at home and has been done in labs hundreds of times and in greenhouses around the world every day. It is basic physics and chemistry with a long history.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” the IPCC reported, which is made up of hundreds of scientists, with doctorates in the field.
In 2018, Trump’s own government said: “The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future.”
On cows and methane
WHAT HE SAID: In “the United States, we have still radicalised environmentalists and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore.”
THE BACKSTORY: Cows belch methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Around the world, cattle are often raised on lands where forests have been cut down. Since forests capture carbon dioxide, cutting them to raise cattle results in a double whammy. Still, no one is suggesting that cows be gotten rid of, said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the Changing Markets Foundation.
“This polarising and divisive language misrepresents the environmental message,” Urbancic wrote.
“What is true, however, is that cutting methane emissions is a quick win to slow global heating and meet climate targets.”
Trump also blamed dirty air blowing in from afar, floating garbage in the ocean coming from other countries and “radicalised environmentalists.”
Although the United States does indeed now have cleaner air than it has in decades, the pollution seeping into communities is primarily caused by local dirty energy and industry projects, not by other countries. And many experts have said the biggest blow to local air and water quality is the Trump administration’s own wide-ranging rollbacks to the power of the US Environmental Protection Agency and other bedrock environmental laws.
“It is sad to see marine debris, a globally important issue, being misrepresented so completely,” said Lucy Woodall, an associate professor of marine conservation and policy at the University of Exeter.