President Donald Trump spent nearly an hour today telling the United Nations it was wrong on pretty much everything — including, maybe especially, climate change.
“The ‘carbon footprint’ is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they’re heading down a path of total destruction,” he told the 192 world leaders gathered at the U.N. General Assembly, in an address that sounded like countless other Trump speeches yet came at a perilous time for the global climate movement.
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Not just any Trump speech
What made today’s speech different was how fully Trump dwelled on the topic, in front of a global audience in the United Nations’ own house. Trump’s appearance came just a day before the U.N. hosts global leaders at a summit aimed at securing new climate targets and less than two months before the next major climate talks begin in Belém, Brazil.
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Trump is also flirting with leaving the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change — a move that would be a marked escalation of his efforts to divorce the U.S. from the global effort to curb climate change. The treaty, ratified by the Senate and signed by then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992, undergirds global climate action. It’s not clear that the U.S. could easily reenter if it left.
“I’ve been right about everything,” Trump said Tuesday. “And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.”
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