President Donald Trump rebuked world leaders for being overly concerned about climate change during a speech to the United Nations in which he called global warming a “con job.”
Trump, who spoke for nearly an hour at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, argued that renewable energy such as wind and solar are a “scam” that should be eliminated. He urged nations instead to buy more American oil and gas, while also increasing nuclear energy.
“I’m really good at predicting things,” Trump said. “I don’t say that in a braggadocios way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”
The president’s remarks appear to mark his most extended and unfiltered riff on climate science and policy in front of global leaders during his second term. His comments came as Trump has waged a broad campaign to slash funding from climate research, cancel clean energy tax credits and roll back regulations to limit climate pollution, while expanding efforts to produce fossil fuels.
Trump also touched on immigration, his diplomatic efforts to end conflicts and the world economy. But he devoted more than 10 minutes to issues related to climate change. It comes less than 24 hours after he repeated unproven and discredited claims linking autism and Tylenol, a position that world leaders swiftly rejected.
Trump said assertions about rising temperatures have been made “by stupid people,” before declaring that climate change “used to be called global cooling.” He said environmentalists “want to kill all the cows.”
“The ‘carbon footprint’ is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they’re heading down a path of total destruction,” Trump told world leaders.
Countries around the world track the amount of carbon dioxide released by industries as a way of monitoring the results of climate policy.
The London-based Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, immediately shot down Trump’s climate claims and posted a link to accurate climate research.
Trump described the Paris climate agreement as “unfair” and urged other countries to withdraw from the pact, which includes nearly 200 nations. His comments come as the his administration is weighing whether to withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which could dramatically reshape international efforts to mitigate global warming for years to come.
“It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and 1930s they said, ‘Global cooling will kill the world,’” Trump said. “Then they said ‘global warming will kill the world.’ But then it started getting cooler. … [I]t’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
In the last decade, global average temperatures have consistently broken heat records, and 2024 was the hottest year on record in the past 175 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Scientists have known since at least the 19th century that rising carbon dioxide levels could warm the planet.
At times, Trump relied on statistics and data that could not be verified.
“Europe loses more than 175,000 to heat deaths every year because the costs are so expensive you can’t turn on an air conditioner. What is that all about? That’s not Europe. That’s not the Europe that I love and know. All in the name of pretending to stop the global warming hoax,” Trump said.
In 2024, more than 62,700 people are estimated to have died of heat-related causes, a 23 percent spike from the prior year. Human-caused climate change, which has warmed Europe faster than some other regions of the globe, is a driver of those deaths, scientists have determined. This summer, an estimated 25,000 people died of heat-related causes.
