US absence set to loom over COP30

The absence of U.S. leaders and the Trump administration’s broader retreat from climate action is expected to loom over this year's COP30 summit.

COP30, the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference that kicks off Monday in Belém, Brazil, is an annual gathering of nations to work on the future of climate action.

The U.S. — which is the largest historic greenhouse gas emitter and currently has the second-most emissions, behind only China — has said it does not plan to send any “high level representatives” to the conference.

Administration officials have not answered follow-up questions about whether they plan to send any representation that would not be considered "high level."

The White House has noted that President Trump is engaging with world leaders on energy in other ways, including deals to buy fossil fuels from the U.S. 

Jennifer Haverkamp, a former U.S. climate negotiator, told The Hill that the U.S.’s absence “will inevitably be felt.”

“It's just that this is such a huge global problem that it's going to be especially notable that the U.S. is not at the table helping achieve outcomes,” said Haverkamp, who is now a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School.

The U.S.’s decision not to send high level officials comes after Trump, at the start of his presidency, moved to withdraw the nation from the global Paris Agreement, under which countries agreed to try to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

The move put the U.S. in a lonely position on the world stage, as 194 countries are part of the agreement. 

The Paris Agreement was negotiated at a previous COP meeting, and since then, many future conferences have focused on hammering out specific details within it. COP30 is being described as focused on implementation of past agreements and adapting to climate change’s impacts.

The summit comes amid a broader retreat from climate-focused policy in Washington, with some U.S. leaders downplaying or denying the fact that the climate is changing at all.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, is not only trying to roll back climate regulations, it also is seeking to overturn the landmark finding that climate change poses a threat to the public.

Meanwhile, Trump has embraced polluting oil, gas and coal and has sought to hamper renewables through the repeal of Biden-era incentives as well as new roadblocks of his own.

While it is still formally a part of the Paris Agreement for the time being, the U.S. has also sought to distance itself from United Nations climate efforts, including by issuing a statement saying it “does not support” a recent U.N. report noting that the world is offtrack from its climate goals. 

And the U.S. has also changed the way it is engaging on the international stage in general, slashing foreign assistance programs, imposing tariffs and seeking to make one-on-one trade agreements.

Haverkamp said the U.S.’s exit from international assistance, specifically with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), could hamper global climate financing efforts.

“The Brazilian hosts are supposed to develop a road map for how to start implementing last year's agreement to mobilize $300 billion a year for climate finance,” she said. 

“The U.S. was a major contributor in that process, and with the … elimination of USAID and the U.S. very clearly stepping back from contributing in that space, I think it will both make it harder to see significant ambition from the remaining countries with capacity in that area, and I think it's also always been the case that how much developing countries are willing and able to do on the mitigation side is closely tied to what they see in support on finance from the developed countries,” she added.

However, the nation’s impending Paris Agreement withdrawal also comes as the U.S. has actually sought to hamper other global environmental action. 

Recently, U.S. officials worked to stop the International Maritime Organization (IMO) from adopting a carbon tax for global shipping.

“By mobilizing IMO member states around shared concerns for economic security, we exposed the framework’s flaws: a regressive tax that would burden developing nations and stifle growth,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal. 

“Should this initiative or any other similar one emerge from the U.N. bureaucracy again, our coalition against it will be ready — and larger,” he added.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on a recent press call described the Trump administration as using “full thug tactics to batter that down at the very last minute.”

The U.S. also reportedly told other countries to reject plastic production limits during an effort to achieve a global plastics treaty that ultimately flopped.

André Corrêa do Lago, president of this year’s COP summit, recently told Bloomberg that he expects it to play out differently because the U.S. is on its way out of the Paris Agreement.

“I think it's different than the U.S. acting in two negotiations that they believed were going to affect them,” Corrêa do Lago said.  

Nevertheless, he said the U.S. has shown “in a very clear way how all of these negotiations have become, essentially, economic.”

“Countries really have to be very careful because no country in the world is ready for the transition, every country will have to sacrifice some sectors or will have to invest very heavily for changes,” he added.