Thursday, 22 January 2026

Trump pulls out of UN climate agreement, 66 bodies deemed 'contrary' to US interests: SBS NEWS

The US will withdraw from the treaty underpinning all major international climate agreements and the UN climate science body, according to a White House memo.

Donald Trump speaks from behind a presidential podium with his hands raised. Behind him are several US flags.

United States President Donald Trump has openly scorned the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet and has pulled the US out of the landmark Paris climate accord in both of his terms. Source: AP / Evan Vucci

United States President Donald Trump is withdrawing the US from a foundational climate treaty and the world's leading global warming assessment body, as part of a sweeping exit from the United Nations system, the White House announced on Wednesday.

A total of 66 international organisations — comprised of "35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities" — were named in a White House memorandum as being "contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty".

Most notable among them is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the parent treaty underpinning all major international climate agreements.

Trump, who has thrown the full weight of his domestic policy behind fossil fuels, has openly scorned the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, deriding climate science as a "hoax" at the UN's high-level summit last September.

The UNFCCC was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992 and approved later that year by the US Senate during George HW Bush's presidency.

The US Constitution allows presidents to enter treaties "provided two-thirds of Senators present concur", but it is silent on the process for withdrawing from them — a legal ambiguity that could invite challenges.

Trump has already withdrawn from the landmark Paris climate accord since returning to office, just as he did during his first term, a move that former Democratic president Joe Biden later reversed.

Exiting the underlying treaty could introduce additional legal uncertainty around any future US effort to rejoin.

Speaking before the General Assembly in September, Trump delivered a scathing broadside against the world body founded in 1945 to promote global peace and cooperation in the wake of the Second World War.

"What is the purpose of the United Nations?" asked Trump in a wide-ranging speech, whose litany of complaints extended even to a broken escalator and teleprompter at the UN's New York headquarters.

The United States skipped the annual UN international climate summit last year for the first time in three decades.

UNFCCC exit 'a whole order of magnitude different'"President Trump's withdrawal of the United States from the bedrock global treaty to tackle climate change is a new low and yet another sign that this authoritarian, anti-science administration is determined to sacrifice people's wellbeing and destabilise global cooperation," Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists told AFP.

Jean Su, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told AFP: "Pulling out of the UNFCCC is a whole order of magnitude different from pulling out of the Paris Agreement."

"It's our contention that it's illegal for the President to unilaterally pull out of a treaty that required two-thirds of the Senate vote," she continued. "We are looking at legal options to pursue that line of argument."

"The United States would be the first country to walk away from the UNFCCC," said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. SBS NEWS

AI ‘Slop’ Websites Are Publishing Climate Science Denial (excerpt from DeSmog article)

AI ‘Slop’ Websites Are Publishing Climate Science Denial

MSN hosted AI-generated content that cited non-existent climate experts and institutions.

By Joey Grostern

onAug 27, 2025 @ 07:48 PDT

Series: Tech vs Climate

At the start of June, MSN, the world’s fourth-largest news aggregator, posted an article from a new climate-focused publication, Climate Cosmos, entitled: “Why Top Experts Are Rethinking Climate Alarmism”.

The article – by “Kathleen Westbrook M.Sc Climate Science” – cited a finding from the “Global Climate Research Institute” that “65 percent of surveyed climate professionals advocate for pragmatic, solution-focused messaging over fear-driven warnings.”

But there were a couple of major problems: the Global Climate Research Institute doesn’t exist, and nor does Kathleen Westbrook, whose profile on Climate Cosmos has now been renamed to ‘Henrieke Otte’.

The article accused those who advocate for climate action of overstating the harms caused by burning fossil fuels. It also promoted the work of Bjorn Lomborg, who has repeatedly called on governments to halt spending on climate action.

This piece was seemingly a breach of MSN’s “prohibited content” rules for posting false information, which MSN partners must abide by to access the aggregator’s huge reach of around 200 million monthly visitors. It was also posted on another U.S. news aggregator, Newsbreak.

Climate Cosmos only has a small pool of contributors, according to its website, yet pumps out multiple stories a day. To do this, it appears to be relying on the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

The first line of another piece, “What the Climate Movement Isn’t Telling You”, appeared to include the response to a prompt – an instruction given to an AI platform.

It read: “I’ll help you write an article about ‘What the Climate Movement Isn’t Telling You’ with current facts and data. Let me search for the latest information first.”

“As technology advances, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into our operations offers exciting opportunities to enhance the journalism at Climate Cosmos,” reads the AI disclaimer on site’s “about us” page. It also states: “we clearly disclose when AI-generated content is used”. However, Isacson’s piece included no such disclosure.

The article falsely claimed that humanity is on course to stay within the temperature goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, using this as a launchpad to attack the climate movement for allegedly failing to “reflect these new realities”.

Recent predictions suggest that the global average surface temperature is likely to increase to by anywhere between 1.9C and 2.9C by the end of the century, well above 1.5C limit set by the Paris Agreement.

This appears to confirm the concerns of technology experts who have warned that AI “has the potential to turbocharge climate disinformation”.

Climate Cosmos is “clearly the lowest possible level spam – they’re just trying to put out content out for some easy clicks, hence the clickbait-y titles,” said Philip Newell, communications co-chair of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition. “AI has brought the cost of disinformation down to nothing. It has automated bullshit.”

“It appears to be mostly AI slop, rather than a concerted disinformation operation,” he said – adding that AI has “no concern for accuracy”.

Climate Cosmos posted a host of articles on MSN every day and has more than 45,000 subscribers on the aggregator. However, in July, all of its MSN content disappeared, as did all the content produced by other publications belonging to its parent company.

A spokesperson for Microsoft, which owns MSN, told DeSmog: “when we become aware of instances that violate our policies, we take action to remove them as soon as possible.”

Newsbreak did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.

Even despite – or perhaps because – of this historical lack of editorial rigour, Climate Cosmos has been used by multiple anti-climate campaign groups and publications.

The website’s content has been cited by the Heartland Institute, Wattsupwiththat, the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), and the American Spectator. The climate denial project CFACT also reprinted an article from Climate Cosmos on its own site.

Climate Cosmos “appears to be climate denier propaganda posing as a science blog,” said Michael E. Mann, a leading climate scientist and Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania." Excerpt from DeSmog

Tuesday, 20 January 2026

Exxon knew there would be a climate crisis.

Trump ditches UN climate treaty as he moves to dismantle America’s climate protections

On Jan. 7, 2026, President Donald Trump declared that he would officially pull the United States out of the world’s most important global treaty for combating climate change. He said it was because the treaty ran “contrary to the interests of the United States.”

His order didn’t say which U.S. interests he had in mind.

Americans had just seen a year of widespread flooding from extreme weather across the U.S. Deadly wildfires had burned thousands of homes in the nation’s second-largest metro area, and 2025 had been the second- or third-hottest year globally on record. Insurers are no longer willing to insure homes in many areas of the country because of the rising risks, and they are raising prices in many others.

For decades, evidence has shown that increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, largely from burning fossil fuels, are raising global temperatures and influencing sea level rise, storms and wildfires.

Damn the torpedoes! Trump ditches a crucial climate treaty as he moves to dismantle America’s climate protections

The climate treaty – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – was created to bring the world together to find ways to lower those risks.

Trump’s order to now pull the U.S. out of that treaty adds to a growing list of moves by the admnistration to dismantle U.S. efforts to combat climate change, despite the risks. Many of those moves, and there have been dozens, have flown under the public radar.

Why this climate treaty matters

A year into the second Trump administration, you might wonder: What’s the big deal with the U.S. leaving the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change now?

After all, the Trump administration has been ignoring the UNFCCC since taking office in January. The administration moved to stop collecting and reporting corporate greenhouse gas emissions data required under the treaty. It canceled U.S. scientists’ involvement in international research. One of Trump’s first acts of his second term was to start the process of pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump made similar moves in his first term, but the U.S. returned to the Paris agreement after he left office.

This action is different. It vacates an actual treaty that was ratified by the U.S. Senate in October 1992 and signed by President George H.W. Bush.

America’s ratification that year broke a logjam of inaction by nations that had signed the agreement but were wary about actually ratifying it as a legal document. Once the U.S. ratified it, other countries followed, and the treaty entered into force on March 21, 1994.

The U.S. was a global leader on climate change for years. Not anymore.

Chipping away at climate policy

With the flurry of headlines about the U.S. intervention in Venezuela, renewed threats to seize Greenland, persistent high prices, immigration arrests, ICE and Border Patrol shootings, the Epstein files and the fight over ending health care subsidies, important news from other critical areas that affect public welfare has been overlooked for months.

Two climate-related decisions did dominate a few news cycles in 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency announced its intention to rescind its 2009 Endangerment Finding, a legal determination that certain greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public health and welfare that became the foundation of federal climate laws. There are indications that the move to rescind the finding could be finalized soon – the EPA sent its final draft rule to the White House for review in early January 2026. And the Department of Energy released a misinformed climate assessment authored by five handpicked climate skeptics.

Both moves drew condemnation from scientists, but that news was quickly overwhelmed by concern about a government shutdown and continuing science funding cuts and layoffs.

This chipping away at climate policy continued to accelerate at the end of 2025 with six more significant actions that went largely unnoticed.

Three could harm efforts to slow climate change:

The Trump administration moved to weaken vehicle emissions standards on Dec. 3. Instead of raising the industry average for cars and light trucks vehicles to 50 miles per gallon by 2031, as planned, the standard would rise to about 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031.
On Dec. 11, the U.S. joined Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia to block part of a U.N. environment report that would have called for phasing out fossil fuels.
Eleven days later, the U.S. Department of the Interior jeopardized billions of dollars of U.S. investment in clean energy by pausing the leases of five East Coast offshore wind farms.

Three other moves by the administration shot arrows at the heart of climate science:

The EPA rewrote its webpage about the causes of climate change to remove human influences, including burning fossil fuels – the primary cause of global warming. That occurred on Dec. 5.
On Dec. 17, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced plans to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a world-recognized leader in earth system science.
A week later, the administration invited the authors of the discredited Department of Energy climate report to write the next U.S. National Climate Assessment, the latest in a widely used series of reports mandated by Congress to assess the nation’s climate risks.

Fossil fuels at any cost

In early January 2025, the United States had reestablished itself as a world leader in climate science and was still working domestically and internationally to combat climate risks.

A year later, the U.S. government has abdicated both roles and is taking actions that will increase the likelihood of catastrophic climate-driven disasters and magnify their consequences by dismantling certain forecasting and warning systems and tearing apart programs that helped Americans recover from disasters, including targeting the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

To my mind, as a scholar of both environmental studies and economics, the administration’s moves enunciated clearly its strategy to discredit concerns about climate change, at the same time it promotes greater production of fossil fuels. It’s “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” with little consideration for what’s at risk.

Trump’s repudiation of the UNFCCC could give countries around the world cover to pull back their own efforts to fight a global problem if they decide it is not in their myopic “best interest.” So far, the other countries have stayed in both that treaty and the Paris climate agreement. However, many countries’ promises to protect the planet for future generations were weaker in 2025 than hoped.

The U.S. pullout may also leave the Trump administration at a disadvantage: The U.S. will no longer have a formal voice in the global forum where climate policies are debated, one where China has been gaining influence since Trump returned to the presidency.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump Links His Push for Greenland to Not Winning Nobel Peace Prize: New York Times

In a text, President Trump told Norway’s prime minister that he no longer felt obliged to “think purely of Peace” and that the U.S. needed the island for global security.

By Jeffrey Gettleman and Henrik Pryser Libell

Jan. 19, 2026Updated 6:14 p.m. ET

Leer en español

President Trump is now claiming that one reason he is pushing to acquire Greenland is that he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a text message he sent to Norway’s prime minister over the weekend.

Jonas Gahr Store, Norway’s leader, received the text message on Sunday, an official in the prime minister’s office said on Monday.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Mr. Trump wrote in the message, which was first published by PBS.

Mr. Trump also questioned Denmark’s claim to Greenland, saying, “There are no written documents,” and adding, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you!”

The tensions over Greenland have sharply escalated in the last week, and the message injected a new level of uncertainty into Mr. Trump’s thinking and his campaign to gain control of the island.

Greenland has been part of the Danish Kingdom for more than 300 years, and world leaders have condemned Mr. Trump’s insistence that the United States take over the territory, a giant icebound island in the Arctic region.

According to copies of the messages provided by the Norwegian prime minister’s office, Mr. Trump’s message was a response to one that Mr. Store sent Mr. Trump on Sunday. It was co-signed by the president of Finland, Alexander Stubb, a leader with whom Mr. Trump is close.

The European leaders asked to speak to Mr. Trump about Greenland and his threat of using tariffs to pressure Denmark into selling it, which Denmark has refused to do. They asked for a phone call and struck a collaborative tone, writing, “We believe we all should work to take this down and de-escalate — so much is happening around us where we need to stand together.”

After Mr. Trump’s response, Mr. Store said in a statement, “As regards the Nobel Peace Prize, I have on several occasions clearly explained to Trump what is well known, namely that it is an independent Nobel Committee, and not the Norwegian government, that awards the prize,” Mr. Store said.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly challenged Denmark’s claims to Greenland, but in decades-old agreements that the United States has signed with Denmark, the United States has recognized Denmark’s close connection to the island.

A 2004 amendment to an older defense pact between Denmark and the United States, which grants the United States broad military access, explicitly recognizes Greenland as “an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark.”

And in 1916, Denmark sold what are now the U.S. Virgin Islands to the United States for $25 million in gold. In the treaty for that deal, a clause reads, “The United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.”

In the past year, as Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to “get” Greenland, Denmark has repeatedly rebuffed him. Denmark’s position is that it does not have the authority to sell the self-governing territory and that Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants will decide their own fate. Polls and interviews show that an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders strongly oppose joining the United States.

On Saturday, Greenlanders staged the biggest protest of recent months. Hundreds marched through the snowy streets of Nuuk, the capital, chanting, “No means no,” “Greenland is already great” and “Yankee, go home!”

In the past few days, Denmark and other European countries have sent more military forces to the island. Small groups of Danish soldiers dressed in green camouflage and dark woolen hats have been walking through downtown Nuuk. Beyond the harbor, a 200-foot-long Danish warship capable of breaking through ice has been patrolling the shoreline.

A much-anticipated three-way meeting last week of the United States, Denmark and Greenland, hosted by Vice President JD Vance in Washington, did not produce any breakthroughs and seemed to instead create misunderstandings.

It was the first time Greenland had been included in such high-level discussions, and the Danish and Greenlandic officials left saying that a working group had been formed to explore possibilities for a solution. But the Trump administration said afterwards that the two sides would begin “technical talks on the acquisition of Greenland,” a statement that raised even more concern in Greenland, in Denmark and across Europe.

Patrick Kingsley, Jeanna Smialek and Steven Erlanger contributed reporting.

Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 20, 2026 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Links Failed Bid For a Nobel Peace Prize To His Greenland Push. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe