COP30 Begins With U.S. Allies and Rivals Alike Calling for Action

The international climate summit opened on Thursday in Belém, a Brazilian city on the edge of the imperiled Amazon rainforest, with several of America’s global allies and rivals alike making the case that slowing down global warming is today key to economic growth and energy security.

It was a sharp counterpoint to President Trump, who has called climate change a “con job” and attacked global efforts to transition away from coal, oil and gas.

Few speakers named Mr. Trump, who has launched a full-throated and somewhat successful attack on global efforts to reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The Trump administration has withdrawn from the landmark Paris climate agreement, and no senior American government officials are present at the meeting in Belém.

The summit comes at a time when international cooperation is lagging on virtually everything, war and trade disputes are raising prices of basic goods, and extreme weather events, aggravated by the burning of coal, oil and gas, has heightened human suffering. In the last two weeks alone, storms and hurricanes supersized by climate change clobbered Mexico, Jamaica and Haiti.

Globally, 2025 is on track to be the second- or third-hottest year on record, part of a decade that witnessed the hottest 10 years on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The cost of extreme weather hazards to the global economy: around $1.4 trillion a year, according to BloombergNEF.

“We can choose to lead or be led to ruin,” António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, told the audience. He used the podium to scold the fossil fuel industry, as he often does, and leaders who he said were “captive to fossil fuel interests, rather than protecting the public interest.”