“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” President Donald Trump told delegates in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly (GA) last week. It is a shame the president was not a speaker at this year’s Climate Week NYC, which wrapped up on Sunday, as he would have given them much needed relief from the steady drumbeat of alarmism heard during the weeklong gabfest.
Besides criticizing the UN’s failure to work to end conflicts and properly deal with immigration issues, the president focused on the climate change swindle promoted by the U.N. and nations around the world. He highlighted dire climate predictions made decades ago that have not come to pass, giving an example: “another UN official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming,” adding correctly, “Not happening.” He emphasized how global cooling used to be the concern, then global warming, now “climate change,” creating “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Trump also criticized other countries’ green energy policies, explaining how they are wasting money trying to reduce their “carbon footprint” at the expense of lost jobs and closed factories. “The carbon footprint is a hoax,” he bluntly, and correctly, told the GA.
In stark contrast, 2.5 miles away in Manhattan, Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, the primary UN climate body, told Climate Week NYC 2025:
“The clean energy transition is booming across almost all major economies and hit 2 trillion dollars last year alone…Meanwhile, climate disasters are hitting every economy and society harder every year. So, we need to step it up. And we need to step it up fast [to avoid catastrophe].”
At the Freshfields energy summit, a high-profile event held during this year’s Climate Week NYC, leaders agreed that coal must be “rapidly retired in developed economies” by 2035 to meet pathways aligned with the Paris Agreement. That developing countries account for nearly 80 percent of global coal consumption (as of 2024) didn’t seem to bother them. China, which alone consumes 58 percent of the world’s coal — more than the rest of the world combined, has made it clear they are going to continue to build coal fired power stations no matter what. In the first half of 2025 alone, China commissioned 21 GW of coal power, about 25 new coal-fired power plants — the most for that period since 2016. When it comes to China and developing countries, the tone shifts from rapid retirement of dependable coal plants in the west to respect for “energy sovereignty” and “national priorities” for Asia. If sovereignty is sacred, it should be respected universally, but the fact that it isn’t demonstrates yet another way China is gaming the system.
Tim Lenton, Professor of Earth System Science at University of Exeter and keynote speaker at Climate Week, chimed in,
“We need decisive mandates for the end of fossil fuel technologies that are going to be the crucial thing to stimulate the clean technologies we need.” Specifically, he wants to “Phase out of coal power stations in developed nations by 2035…mandating no petrol and diesel car sales from 2035…all heating appliances for buildings being heat pumps from 2035, and all trucks to be electric powered from 2040.”
If this were to actually happen, it would be an unmitigated disaster for businesses and consumers alike. Trump illustrated this well when he told the GA that European electricity bills are now “two to three times higher than the United States, and our bills are coming way down.” Yet, this is only a preview of massive costs to come if Europe continues to replace inexpensive, dependable conventional power with costly, unreliable wind and solar power.
In his 2021 brief for Canada’s House of Commons, Robert Lyman, economist and Principal of ENTRANS Policy Research Group, and former director general, environmental affairs, at Transport Canada, said, “The cost to electrify the U.S. economy would translate into annual cost increases of at least U.S. $5,000 per household” and that “annual consumer expenditures for energy would roughly double.” That doesn’t even take into account the loss of energy security with increased vulnerability to blackouts and brownouts.
For instance, Texas, the state with the most wind power, also had the greatest number of blackouts between 2000 and 2023. California, the state with the most solar power, had the third most blackouts. Dr. H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow on environmental policy for The Heartland Institute, said “wind and solar power are particularly unsuited for a large power grid because they work only when the weather conditions are just right.”
Trump was also right to call out EU politicians for leading their citizens to a health disaster. He pointed out how the U.S. has about 1,300 heat-related deaths annually, while Europe has more than 175,000, caused in large part by the high costs of electricity that prevents people from air-conditioning their homes. The population of Europe is only just over twice that of the U.S., so this means that the chances of a person dying due to the heat in Europe is 62 times that in America.
Over the past week, New York City showcased the stark contrast between a climate realist president and those advocating overhauling our entire energy infrastructure to address a problem that only exists in the imagination of uninformed activists. Bravo President Trump!
Tom Harris is executive director of Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.
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