US Will Not Send High-Level Representatives to COP30, White House Says

The move reflects the US’s anti-climate stance, as the country retreats from international climate commitments.

—

The US will not send high-level representatives to next week’s COP30 climate summit, a White House spokeswoman confirmed last week, a move in line with the administration’s anti-climate stance.

Since taking office in January, US President Donald Trump has overturned much of the country’s progress on climate, building on his campaign promise to “drill, baby drill” and “unleash American energy”. He has mandated the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and from the board of the UN’s Loss and Damage Fund, a hard-fought climate damage fund aimed at helping developing nations cope with climate change-fuelled disasters. 

In February, a State Department delegation was banned from travelling to China for a key meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where its member governments agreed on the outlines, timelines, and budget of its upcoming reports. The IPCC is considered the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change.

Instead, Trump has signed a series of executive orders aimed at reviving coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and has opened up more areas to oil and gas exploration, pledging to make the US a “manufacturing nation” by using the country’s vast fossil fuel reserves. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said in January.

The burning of fossil fuels – coal, natural gas, and oil – for electricity and heat is the single-largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions, the primary drivers of global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere and raising Earth’s surface temperature.

In confirming that the US will not have any official representation at this year’s UN COP30 climate summit, a spokeswoman told the Guardian that Trump “will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” It is the first time the US will be absent from UN climate summits.

EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra called it a “watershed moment”.

“We’re talking about the largest, the most dominant, most important geopolitical player from the whole world. It is the second-largest emitter,” Hoekstra told Bloomberg. “So if a player of that magnitude basically says, ‘Well, I’m going to leave and have it all sorted out by the rest of you,’ clearly that does damage.”

The two-week summit is set to commence next Monday in Belém, Brazil. It is the first UN climate change conference to be held in the Amazon rainforest region, a location widely described as being at the “epicenter” or “heart of the climate crisis”.

Follow our COP30 coverage.

Featured image: UN Climate Change/Kiara Worth.