President Trump was not a happy camper when he stepped off a faulty escalator on his way to address the United Nations General Assembly recently. By the time he had finished speaking, many in that self-important assemblage were in an even worse mood.
Trump was not the only world leader firing bullets into the UN’s climate and environmental policies that heretofore have been deemed sacrosanct but are now exposed as economy killers. While China is not subject to the UN’s meddling scrutiny, Europe and Africa (and the U.S.) are.
While Trump devoted the bulk of his address to foreign policy and immigration issues, he eventually turned to focus on energy. Trump called renewables “a joke” and said they don’t work and are too expensive – and inadequate to fire up the plants modern nations need.
Trump scolded the UN assemblage for not recognizing that China has been playing Western nations as fools by selling Chinese-made wind and solar while building coal and natural gas plants to power the bulk of their industrial sector. “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they … sure as hell like selling the windmills.”
Many countries in Europe are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda, Trump said. Germany had gone far down the green energy path, shuttering coal and nuclear power plants while buying oil from Russia. But Germany’s new leadership has retreated towards fossil fuels and nuclear and opened a lot of different plants, energy plants, energy-producing plants, and they’re doing well, he added.
The Germans have finally realized that going all green was a disaster – that “all green is all bankrupt. That’s what it represents,” he said. By contrast, the United Kingdom once was a great oil producer – thanks to North Sea oil. But today, oil production is so highly taxed that no developer, no oil company can go there, even though there is a tremendous amount of known oil and even more that has yet to be found.
Trump was not done.
He recalled that in 1982, the UN Environment Programme’s executive director predicted that by the year 2000 climate change would cause a global catastrophe as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust. Another UN official in 1989 said that within a decade entire nations would be wiped off the map by global warming. These same people just a few years earlier had claimed that global cooling would kill the world.
To Trump, “climate change” is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.
Stupid people at the UN and elsewhere made faulty predictions that left their nations with no chance for success. Nations that do not disavow the green scam will ultimately fail. The “carbon footprint,” he added, is “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.” For example, President Obama talked a lot about carbon footprint when not flying to Hawaii to play a round of golf.
He scoffed at Europe for bragging about reducing its carbon footprint by 37% – at the cost of factories closed, jobs lost, and downward-spiraling economies. Well, whoop-te-do! China now produces more carbon dioxide than the rest of the world’s developed nations combined – and global carbon dioxide has increased by 54%.
Brutal UN-backed green energy policies, Trump said, have done nothing to clean the air but have instead redistributed manufacturing and industrial activity away from developed countries that follow insane environmental rules to polluting countries that ignore those rules – and they are the ones making a fortune. Meanwhile, European electricity bills are four to five times those in China and twice to three times higher than in the United States.
The results are striking. While air conditioning has helped lower heat-related deaths in the U.S. to just 1,300 a year, Europe loses more than 175,000 annually to overheating – all in the name of pretending to stop the global warming hoax. It is high time, Trump said, to stop the scam. Nations must stop inflicting pain on their citizens while radically disrupting their own societies.
Italian President Giorgia Meloni, after calling for widespread reform of “outdated” UN conventions, turned to assault “30 years of ‘blind-faith globalization’ [in which] things have not gone well, and things could get worse. ” The UN must halt its “unsustainable green plans in Europe and the West, which are leading to deindustrialization far soon than decarbonization.”
Unsustainable environmentalism, she said, has destroyed the automobile sector in Europe, created problems and job losses in the U.S, and depleted knowledge while not improving the health of the planet (or its people). This is not to deny that the climate changes but to affirm reason, which calls for “gradual reform instead of ideological extremism” and keeping humanity at the center.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei also accused the UN leadership of “overreach” and slammed the 80-year-old body as a “supranational model of governance led by international bureaucrats who seek to impose a particular way of life on the citizens of the world.” He urged member nations to reject the UN’s overreaches that they justify by proclaiming “noble agendas.”
“We have gone,” he said, “from being an organization that aimed to mediate peace among equals to one that seeks to dictate what each nation-state and individual must do across the various corners of the globe.” Instead, he urged the UN to return to the immortal principles that uphold the dignity of life, freedom, and property of all individuals under the rule of law.”
By contrast, most African leaders – whose nations bear the brunt of anti-development UN policies that punish them for relying on fossil fuels for income and energy – gave lip service to the UN climate agenda. But Sen. Heineken Lokpobiri, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, called on global investors to seize emerging opportunities in his nation’s rapidly transforming oil sector.
Lokpobiri, in his keynote speech at the U.S.-Nigeria Council’s session on oil sector collaboration (held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly), praised his nation’s “strong reforms, enhanced production capacity, and regional influence as key drivers of growth.”
“At the heart of Nigeria’s renewed energy agenda is a clear and deliberate policy direction: to open our oil sector to deeper, smarter, and more strategic partnerships,” the Minister stated. “The time to invest is not just now — it is ripe.” Lokpobiri affirmed that Nigeria would continue to leverage its fossil fuel reserves to finance its energy mix while adhering to international climate agreements – a sop deemed necessary to pacify the anti-fossil-fuel UN environment ministry.
The Africa Petroleum Producers Organization was hosting its first Energy Investment Roundtable to spotlight Africa’s energy potential and catalyze international investment into the continent’s evolving energy sector. Given Africa’s immense shortage of affordable (or even available) electricity, sustainable energy development there means bringing lights and power to six hundred million Africans for the first time – a goal all too often ignored by UN bureaucrats and other promoters of the green agenda.
Led by President Trump, the UN got its first taste of reality in a long, long time.
This piece originally appeared at RealClearEnergy.org and has been republished here with permission.
