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Countries clamour for urgent action after Trump calls climate change a 'con job'

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25th September, 2025 14:39 IST

Hours after US president Donald Trump labelled climate change as “the greatest con job ever” in speaking at the United Nations summit on 23 September 2025, multiple international coalitions present at the UN General Assembly issued urgent warnings, citing recent extreme climate events and a mounting scientific consensus as undeniable evidence of a planetary crisis.

This summer alone has witnessed record-breaking heatwaves, devastating floods in Asia and Europe, historic wildfires in Canada and the Mediterranean, and unprecedented low ice levels in the Arctic and Antarctic — phenomena underscored by global watchdogs like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as direct consequences of human-induced global warming.

The High Ambition Coalition (HAC), representing climate-forward nations including Germany, the UK and the European Commission, released a statement: “As we approach the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement and the creation of the High Ambition Coalition, the urgency of international climate action has never been greater. Climate change is being felt worldwide. People, particularly those already vulnerable, are experiencing devastating loss and damage.”

The HAC emphasised, “Global emissions must peak now and rapidly decline to net zero by 2050 if we are to have a fighting chance to avoid the worst.”

The coalition echoed scientists’ warnings that as the world nears the 1.5°C warming limit, “we face tipping points that threaten to throw our planet into an even greater and irreversible catastrophe”.

Echoing this, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group — representing more than 80 nations — stressed the existential stakes for their countries: “For us, 1.5 degrees Celsius is not a negotiating position, it is a red line. Overshooting this threshold would mean irreversible losses and damage for our nations, and it would represent not the failure of the Paris Agreement, but the failure of political will.”

Notably, the HAC already had a major setback earlier in the year with its failure to push through the global plastic treaty we were all hoping for.

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These groups, pointing to recent catastrophic hurricanes, droughts, and rising sea levels, demanded updated national climate targets “fully aligned with the 1.5 degrees Celsius pathway” at COP30 in Brazil, warning, “anything less would betray vulnerable nations”.

By contrast, President Trump at the UNGA intensified his climate denial, calling multilateral green policies a ruination of wealth and repeating, “It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion... All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.”

POTUS Donald Trump on climate changeThey were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.

His administration, in recent months, has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, repealed climate regulations and favoured fossil fuels, moves widely condemned by the IPCC and global environmental watchdogs as undermining international climate progress.

Trump’s remarks, urging leaders to abandon investments in renewable energy like wind and solar, echoing his past actions such as the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, came shortly after his nation marked the one-year- anniversary of Hurricane Helene’s devastation of the US Southeast.

Last year, just ahead of the presidential elections in the US that gave the POTUS his second mandate, a Carbon Brief analysis had forecast that a Trump win could add 4 billion tonnes to US emissions by 2030.

Meanwhile, the HAC and allied groups highlighted that progress under the Paris Agreement has helped avoid much more catastrophic warming — “helped avoid a four-degree world” — and spurred dramatic growth in renewables and lowered costs for clean technologies. Still, their statement concludes, “much more must be done to meet our promises” and calls for countries to submit 1.5°C-aligned climate plans ahead of COP30.

Global assessments, including the IPCC’s 2023 Synthesis Report, warn that the world is surpassing adaptation limits, with losses from extreme events rising yearly and plateauing at points where “no amount of adaptation will suffice”. The World Meteorological Organization recently confirmed that the past eight years are the warmest on record, with global greenhouse gas emissions still rising.

Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general, convened a Climate Summit during the UNGA, asserting, “Science tells us what’s needed. We must draw on the wisdom of the IPCC and other scientists to develop an action plan to deliver the necessary course correction.”

The HAC has echoed him after Trump’s tirade, to say, “Warnings from the scientific community cannot be ignored or silenced.”

At the summit, countries were urged to present updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), critical for keeping the Paris Agreement’s objectives in view. NDCs are expected to be revised every five years, aligning national emissions targets with the scientific imperative to hold global warming well below 2°C, while “pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C”.

With clear proof from global heatwaves, wildfire disasters and record-breaking sea level rise, climate change’s fingerprints are increasingly impossible to ignore — intensifying calls from vulnerable nations and experts for urgent, coordinated international action.

“Until we stop adding carbon to the atmosphere, the harm we are causing, particularly to the poorest and those least responsible for the climate crisis, will deepen and the need to continuously adapt will never end. The costs will go up and up. We will count them in human lives,” the HAC’s UNGA statement warned.

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