Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of the Senate’s loudest and most consistent voices on the climate crisis, landed in Belém, Brazil, this week as the lone, official federal U.S. presence at the COP30 climate summit, which began Monday. And he had to fight to make it happen. Not by choice. Not by bureaucratic screw-up. Not because of the government shutdown. Instead, according to Whitehouse, the State Department refused to sponsor his United Nations credentials, making it “just logistically really challenging” to even get badged — a serious departure from usual practice.
Politico reporters Sara Schonhardt and Zack Colman detail how this wasn’t just a mistaken mangling via red tape, but rather a deliberate effort by the Trump regime to keep official U.S. lips zipped regarding climate — at COP30 and elsewhere — unless those officials are saying that climate change is malarkey. Trump essentially told the rest of the world during his Sept. 23 U.N. speech that everything scientists have told them about the climate crisis, about greenhouse gases in general, is wrong. His Cabinet minions and other underlings have kept repeating that perilous, wacko assertion.
Whitehouse told the press that the recent U.S. government shutdown was a complication to his appearance in Brazil, but not the primary obstacle to his getting State Department sponsorship. “There was a very deliberate pattern of behavior to try to discourage official attendance here,” he said. Without accreditation, he argued, traveling to Belém would have been pointless.
A Newsweek piece by Jeff Young reports Whitehouse calling the administration’s obstruction “thuggish,” saying the refusal to credential him mirrored deeper political hostility toward climate engagement.
The senator isn’t just angry about the Trump regime’s failure to have a hefty, official U.S. presence in Belém. He’s furious about the vacuum it leaves behind for the future. For instance, China registered 789 delegates for COP30.
The State Department declined to comment directly about Whitehouse’s claims. Instead, in a press statement it noted that Trump “is directly engaging with leaders around the world on energy issues.” And White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers reiterated Trump’s criticism of clean energy efforts as the “Green New Scam,” saying the president “will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom
This retreat from the greener policies of the Joe Biden administration is no surprise since it’s been clear that making things worse was the only kind of climate action that was going to be on the Trump agenda from the minute he lied the oath of office in January and declared that the U.S. would (again) withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.
However, there are U.S. leaders in Belém. A coalition of 100 governors, mayors, and other top city and state officials made the trip to Brazil as part of the U.S. Climate Alliance. One of them, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, blasted Trump for disregarding COP30. "While [the U.S.] skips the world stage, California is showing up —leading, partnering, and proving what American climate leadership looks like," he said.
Former Vice President Al Gore, who is also attending the summit, took note of that sentiment in an interview Thursday with Politico. “There are two schools of thought” about the U.S. absence, he said. “The first says it’s damaging that no one from the U.S. government is here. But the other school of thought is, since [Trump is] so psychopathically focused on destroying any potential solutions to the climate crisis, it’s just as well that he has stayed away and that his minions are not here either.”
In Belém, pointing to images on a huge projection screen showing recent disasters worsened by global heating, Gore said that it is
“...literally insane that we are allowing this to continue. [...]
“How long are we going to stand by and keep turning the thermostat up so that these sort of events get even worse?
“We need to adapt as well as mitigate, but we also need to be realistic that if we allow this insanity to continue, to use the sky as an open sewer, that some things will be very difficult to adapt to.”
As if to underline the insanity, while the Trump administration has declined to send a formal delegation to Brazil, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright flew to Greece this week to promote the sale of more American natural gas.
Beyond the credential fight, Whitehouse argues the U.S. is deliberately losing the economic race against China. In an interview with AFP, reported by Journal de Bruxelles, he said the Trump administration’s fossil-fuel favoritism is “a huge self-administered blow” that undercuts American leadership in solar, wind, battery storage, and EVs. The subtext is stark: by ceding global clean-tech momentum to others, Trump isn’t just squandering an opportunity to show global leadership in the greatest crisis humankind has encountered, perhaps ever. He instead seems absolutely eager to sabotage our future.
