What UN’s Climate Conference Needs To Know About America First

Americans – and free people everywhere – deserve governments that expand opportunity and improve human flourishing. Yet the upcoming COP30 climate summit offers a familiar and  troubling display of globalist elites who are increasingly detached from the real needs of the world’s citizens.

Rather than create a forum to promote prosperity, COP gatherings have become a ritualized performance in which political and corporate Davos elites reaffirm their ideological commitment to net-zero and decarbonization and other policies that ultimately lead to deindustrialization. These approaches do not uplift people – they restrict energy access, stifle economic growth, and limit human progress.

COP30 is being held in the Amazon rainforest, a region that environmental activists describe as sacred and untouchable – the “lungs of the planet,” home to hundreds of indigenous tribes and countless keystone species. For decades, activists have treated any development there as a moral failure.  Yet now, thousands of acres of rainforest are being cleared for new highways, luxury accommodations, and expanded private jet facilities to welcome COP30 attendees.

Where are the outraged activists?  Where are the global protest campaigns? Their silence is not just noticeable – it is revealing.

The climate agenda is not about protecting nature.  It is not about lifting people out of poverty.  It is about control. Global elites seek to direct how nations develop, how citizens consume energy, and even how individuals live – under the claim of planetary stewardship.

This year’s summit in Belém is once again portrayed as a grand moral gathering of statesmen and technocrats who hope to empower Brazil with billions in new investment. But the investment in infrastructure is limited to “green industrialization” – carbon credits, restricted-use land designations, and renewable energy projects designed to reshape economies from the top down.

Meanwhile, the basic needs of millions of people are ignored.  In northern Brazil,  just 64.2% of the population has access to safe drinking water. Across Latin America, 166 million people lack access to safe water all together.  Yet the  U.N.  bureaucrats are more concerned with expanding access to electric vehicles and energy transitions – not ensuring families can drink clean water.

This disconnection between rhetoric and reality exposes the left’s anti-human methodology. Human progress – industrialization, innovations, and competitive free markets – is treated not as the greatest engine of prosperity in history, but as a threat to be restrained.

The United States was right to step back.  Choosing not to attend COP30 is a statement: America will not participate in the global system designed to diminish our energy security, affordability, or sovereignty. We reject the premise that unelected international elites know what is best for our citizens – or for the citizens of any nation. If the  U.N. truly cared about development, it would empower countries like Brazil to responsibly harness their natural resources, develop industries and build prosperity for their people. Instead, COP30 demands the opposite: it promotes a model that says growth must be slowed, energy must be rationed, and human ambition must be constrained.

Americans should fundamentally reject the demand that our nation sacrifice manufacturing strength, affordable energy, and strategic independence to appease bureaucrats in Geneva and activists in Davos. That is why President Trump was right to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord – and why the United States must continue to lead with policies grounded in sovereignty, innovation, and opportunity.

If global elites at COP30 believe they are charting the future of the planet, then the United States must once again remind them clearly: they never will chart our course. America has always been the nation that chooses growth over stagnation, liberty over control, and prosperity over decline.

America is the beacon of light to the free world, a shining city upon a hill. Billions around the globe look to America—not Davos, not Brussels, not the United Nations—to lead the way forward.

Carla Sands is the former U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark. She currently serves as the Chair of the America First Policy Institute’s Foreign Policy Initiative and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow for Energy & Environment at AFPI. 

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.