On July 14, the UN’s Adaptation Committee put fund managers, negotiators, and development bankers on a video call to work through a problem that clearly has them rattled. The money is drying up.
The Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Adaptation Fund all sent people to explain how developing countries can tap them for cash. What they mostly did was ask for more. The reason they are running short, though, is news that ought to please anyone who pays U.S. taxes. In February 2025, the United States rescinded roughly $4 billion in outstanding pledges to the Green Climate Fund. We were the first country to do it. This spring, the United Kingdom followed, halving its pledge from £1.6 billion to about £815 million.
The people on the call treated this as a crisis. For anyone who works for a living and pays the bills, it looks more like a rescue.
It’s worth being clear about what these funds are. They hand out grants, not loans. Hansol Park of the Green Climate Fund said about 80% of its public-sector adaptation money is grant based, and the Adaptation Fund gives grants exclusively. Grant means gift — no repayment, no return, nothing back. When Washington pledged $4 billion, it was pledging to give $4 billion away and call it climate policy.
Where does the money go? The funds prefer to answer that in their own vocabulary. Ask what they finance, and you get “readiness,” “institutional capacity,” “capacity building,” “accreditation support,” “project preparation,” and “locally led adaptation.” Some of it does buy physical things, water systems and farms and flood defenses. A good deal of it, though, pays to build and staff the offices that write the grant applications in the first place.
The Green Climate Fund has placed outside experts inside developing-country governments, with more on the way. It runs multi-year “readiness” programs to prop up national agencies, with eight approved and 93 countries waiting in line. Over at the Adaptation Fund, staff run proposal-writing workshops and report that the workshops produce stronger proposals, which tells you the process is complicated enough to need a training seminar just to fill out the forms. Roxanne Valentine-Donegan of the Development Bank of Jamaica, one of the few speakers who had actually tried to pull money through the system, said getting it is “genuinely difficult,” slowed by shifting requirements and document-heavy applications.
So the recipients themselves say the system is too slow, too technical, and too expensive to navigate. And the answer on offer is not less paperwork; it is more staff and more workshops to process the paperwork. That is how bureaucracies grow. Every new hurdle becomes the reason to hire someone to help you clear it.
“Institutional capacity” is the polite expression that makes reference to the permanent layer of coordinators, accredited entities, and consultants standing between a donor’s check and an actual project on the ground. The Adaptation Fund alone works through roughly 62 accredited entities. The NDC Partnership, which helps developing countries navigate climate finance, says it has received more than 7,000 requests for support since 2016. Yet after nearly a decade and tens of billions of dollars, the people running this system are still saying they need more funding, more staff, and more capacity. The bureaucracy never seems to reach the point where it decides it has enough.
The Adaptation Fund reported an active pipeline worth about $1.9 billion with an appetite that seems to have no ceiling.
Adaptation Fund specialist Alyssa Gomes said flatly, “We do need more finance.” The Green Climate Fund talked up a board decision that could unlock roughly $4 billion in new programming capacity. No number is ever sufficient, because the demand is set by the funds themselves, not by any budget a taxpayer ever approved.
The dialogue ended the way these things invariably do, with appeals for donors to give more, at a faster pace, with fewer strings attached. The honest answer from the American side is already on the record. We are keeping the $4 billion.
Melanie Collette is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation and a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that champions free markets, property rights, and innovation as the keys to protecting both people and the environment.
President Trump has certainly shaken up, if not severely damaged, the climate hoax and Green New Scam in just 10 short months. Here’s a list of his 10 top climate-related accomplishments for which we should all be thankful this holiday season:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed to end the government’s “scientific” basis for the climate hoax by rescinding the Obama EPA’s 2009 illegal and incorrect determination that emissions of greenhouse gases endanger the public welfare. As part of this effort, the Department of Energy issued a report by top climate scientists concluding that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will have no detectable effect on global climate change.
President Trump, again, pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, an unconstitutional effort by Presidents Obama and Biden to adopt a United Nations treaty without ratification by the Senate.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act terminated hundreds of billions of dollars of the climate-related “Green New Scam” spending of the (so-called) Inflation Reduction Act, including all subsidies for electric vehicle purchases.
President Trump has directed his administration to reduce Green New Scam spending that survived the One Big Beautiful Bill by means of bureaucratic review, red tape and delay. The rent-seeking and piratical thieves who want to steal from taxpayers played hardball to save some of their ill-gotten gains. The President is now showing, rather impressively, that he can play hardball right back.
President Trump signed into law a bill terminating California’s electric vehicle mandate. Greens had tried to mandate EVs in California to force carmakers to only make EVs for the entire nation. Thanks to the President, that will not happen in the foreseeable future.
The EPA scored an appellate court victory in its effort to reclaim $20 billion in Biden EPA Green New Scam panic spending made infamous by the Project Veritas video, “We’re Throwing Gold Bars Off the Titanic.”
President Trump halted a number of offshore wind projects and cut funding for many others. There are other projects that deserve to be terminated, such as the largest U.S. offshore wind farm being built by Virginia’s Dominion Energy, but a great start has been made so far.
Stunningly, President Trump stopped cold a U.N. treaty to implement a global tax on shipping emissions by threatening would-be signatories with tariffs. This treaty would have been the first global climate tax.
President Trump boycotted and sent no delegation to the United Nations climate conference (COP-30) in Brazil, rendering the annual meeting even more confused and meaningless than it usually is.
President Trump delivered a blistering speech to the United Nations blasting the climate hoax for about 15 minutes or so. The President summed up his views on climate in this one memorable sentence: “The carbon footprint is a hoax, made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.”
That’s quite a list. But much is left to be done. Some of the big items are as follows:
The EPA must finalize its rescission of the endangerment finding and then successfully defend the rescission in the Supreme Court.
All the Green New Scam spending must be terminated as soon as possible. Every dollar spent is a dollar stolen from taxpayers and invested in making us more energy dependent on Communist China.
It is not enough to withdraw only from the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump must withdraw the United States from the 1992 parent treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
And it would be really awesome if President Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the bogus treaty allegedly addressing the imaginary “ozone hole.” That treaty, the follow-on Kigali Amendment ratified during the Biden administration, and language in the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 signed by President Trump, has only been used to make refrigeration and air conditioning pointlessly more expensive.
I heard Al Gore tell a group of conservatives in January 2006 that the real purpose of the Montreal Protocol was to demonstrate that a global environmental treaty could be implemented. That “success” was then subsequently used as precedent for the UNFCCC and its spinoff climate treaties, the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Climate Accord. The ozone hole hoax paved the way for the climate hoax and Green New Scam. It’s all been a multi-trillion-dollar fraud on American consumers and taxpayers.
America became great before these pointless environmental treaties. It has been greatly harmed and dangerously hamstrung by them since their ratification. If MAGA means anything, it means exiting international efforts to cripple the U.S. with junk science-based environmental treaties. And it would make a great Christmas present to the nation. Just a suggestion.
Starmer’s remarks came as he disembarked from a carbon-spewing jet upon arrival in Azerbaijan to attend the UN-sponsored COP29 climate conference.
The annual COP conferences, remember, are where the world’s elites gather each year to discuss ways to leverage climate-alarm dogma as a means of destroying western democracy and trapping the world’s masses in energy poverty while they consume $1,000 Wagyu steaks and $2,000 bottles of wine over dinner.
“I have repeatedly emphasized the importance of global leadership when it comes to the climate challenge,” said Starmer, “and therefore it is very important for me to come to COP… I see the climate challenge as a huge opportunity for the UK if we get it right, and that is why we have made it one of our missions to have clean power by 2030.”
Among the means Starmer’s government is using to show “global leadership” on the climate alarm front is to provide heavy subsidies for costly, low-efficiency offshore wind farms and cover up vast swaths of the UK’s farmlands and countryside with enormous solar arrays. Starmer’s government has simultaneously presided over the closing of the UK’s last remaining coal power plant and one of its last steelmaking factories as part of what appears to be a focused effort to deindustrialize its once-powerful economy.
Trump has made it crystal clear that his approach to energy policy will be diametrically opposite that of Starmer’s Labor government. Trump has already said he plans to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate agreement again, an action he took during his first term, but which was reversed by President Joe Biden.
Trump has also laid out plans to re-industrialize America’s economy with a carrot-and-stick approach that will include incentives for companies building new factories and assembly plants in the United States and imposing tariffs on those who choose to invest in capacity overseas. In a recent pre-election interview, Trump detailed plans to address instability and capacity shortages on the U.S. electric grid by implementing policies to speed up permitting and building of new natural gas and nuclear power generation.
“We have to produce massive electricity that we don’t have. But the environmental impact statements won’t allow us to do that. The rules and regulations that we currently have won’t allow us to do any of it,” Trump said. “But if I’m president, we’ll be able to do it and we’ll do it through natural gas, which is clean. And we’ll do it through primarily natural gas and nuclear.”
While on the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to bring back his first-term policies designed to stimulate the domestic oil-and-gas industry and return the United States to the position of “energy dominance” it enjoyed under his previous administration.
In kicking off the COP29 festivities, Azerbaijan leader Ilham Aliyev created a stir among the climate zealots who make up the preponderance of attendees by appearing to endorse the Trump approach.
Referring to oil and natural gas as a “gift of God,” the Azerbaijani President said, “Countries should not be blamed for having them and should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market because the market needs them. The people need them.”
At another point, Aliyev appeared to lecture western elitists like Starmer, saying: “Unfortunately double standards, a habit to lecture other countries and political hypocrisy became kind of modus operandi for some politicians, state-controlled NGOs and fake news media in some Western countries.”
In an interview at the summit, Starmer displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness by claiming his government has no plans to “start telling people how to live their lives. We are not going to start dictating to people what they do.”
That is of course exactly what Starmer is doing, and exactly the sort of thing Trump plans to avoid doing regardless of any demands from the globalist climate-alarm industry. Americans stand to be the main beneficiaries from the contrast in policy approach.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
People in states that have signed on to the EPA/ State Climate Action Plan program can no longer say, “it’s only happening in California” because California is the United Nations blueprint for the entire United States.
On September 20, 2023, the Biden administration met at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York with the goal of recommitting to the [United Nations] 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals—SDGs. A White House fact sheet stated, “The United States is committed to the full implementation of 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, at home and abroad. At their core, the SDGs seek to:
Expand economic opportunity – This means public-private partnerships, which is crony capitalism. In this scheme there are winners and losers, where profits are privatized, and losses are socialized on the backs of middle-class Americans.
Advance social justice – This means placating and advancing people based on their skin color. At its core it is discriminatory.
Promote good governance – This skirts our elected form of government and injects unelected special interest initiatives into our lives, where no one gets to vote.
Ensure no one is left behind – This means catering to protected classes and minorities in order to create “capacity building” for initiatives and redistributive wealth schemes. Under Diversity and Inclusion (DEI), these classes are awarded “equity” and “inclusion” based on their skin color.
The Biden administration hired people from California and put them into positions in all federal agencies relating to climate change in order to fulfill his Green New Deal plan. Therefore, the plan mirrors what California has done at the national level.
The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program are through cooperative grants, (Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, CPRG) which have “take it or leave it” terms and conditions. These agreements bind states and local jurisdictions into creating GHG inventories to reduce GHG emissions, which eventually wind their way into administrative law, constraining property and individual rights. These grants force United Nations style Sustainable Communities Strategies (SCS) that addresses the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which the Biden administration has committed to.
The EPA pitches climate action plans as voluntary. This is not true. Once a state agrees to take grant money, they sign on to mandatory elements in the grant terms and conditions contract — They are now in the United Nations/California club.
The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program is between the federal EPA, a “Partner” and unelected state agencies, boards, bodies, or commissions. Therefore, the entire process is being implemented without the consent of citizens and oversight of state legislatures – no one gets to vote. In essence, most states, including so-called conservative states, are selling out for bribes, aka grant money.
According to the EPA, states submitted Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAPs) under President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program was hurried into place because there was concern that there could be a Republican change in the November 2024 election, which could jeopardize the program; hence, the name “priority” climate action plan in the first phase of the plan.
In 2023, under the first phase of the $5 billion program, the EPA made a total of $250 million in grants available to states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, 80 MSAs, four territories, and over 200 Tribes and Tribal consortia to develop ambitious climate action plans that address greenhouse gas emissions. 45 states are now covered by a climate action plan. 5 states: Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, South Dakota and Wyoming decided not to participate.
The program is a two-phase federal grant program that allows the state to develop and implement ongoing community-driven projects that reduce ambient air pollution.
Phase I provided $250 million for noncompetitive planning grants, of which states were eligible for $3 million each to support the development of a climate action plan.
Phase II includes $4.6 billion in competitive implementation grants to execute the projects identified in the climate action plan.
The deadlines for submission of PCAPs are:
Priority Climate Action Plan – Creates an inventory of the state’s primary GHG generators. Due March 1, 2024 (states and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and due April 1, 2024 (tribes, tribal consortia, and territories)
Comprehensive Climate Action Plan – A plan to cut that pollution statewide. Due two years after planning grant award, or approximately mid-2025 (states and MSAs) and due at the close of the grant period (tribes, tribal consortia, and territories)
The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program seeks to create arbitrary greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions in order to install unconstitutional hidden fees and taxes on hard working Americans. This is accomplished by doing a greenhouse gas inventory for carbon (CO2) and methane.
Once inventories for GHGs have been established, reduction goals can be set by States and local jurisdictions. Taxes and fees follow: GHG pricing mechanisms like cap and trade programs for energy producers; congestion pricing and vehicle mileage taxes for cars and trucks; mandatory retrofitting of commercial and existing residential homes to “green” building standards; zero emission vehicle requirements; increased gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil prices. For example, categories for emission controls include:
Transportation
Electricity Generation
Industry
Agriculture
Commercial and Residential Buildings
Waste and Materials Management
Wastewater
Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry
The EPA provided states with an outline template to follow in the development of their PCAPs called the, Priority Climate Action Plan Guidance: An Outline for States and MSAs. Therefore, the State PCAPs are very similar in their presentation. For example, PCAP lists required elements:
GHG Emissions Inventory,
Priority Measures and Reduction Estimates,
Benefits Analysis,
Low-Income and Disadvantaged Communities (LIDAC) Benefits Analysis,
Review of Authority to Implement,
Intersection with Other Funding Availability, and
Coordination and Engagement.
State legislatures did not pass PCAPs. It all happened through interagency coordination: EPA and state agencies, which are under the control of Governors.
Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University for the Arizona Governor’s Office of Resiliency were the lead players in The Clean Arizona Plan: Priority Climate Action Plan State of Arizona. They coordinated the obligatory public outreach required by EPA grants, which included feedback from numerous special interest stakeholders who directly benefit from environmental initiatives, while hard working residents are relegated to answering simple questions on outcome-based online surveys — All of this is at the detriment to Arizona’s residents.
People need to contact their state’s Governor and condemn them for signing on and creating commissions and task forces while utilizing faux stakeholder consensus to justify existing PCAPs and Comprehensive Climate Action Plans already in the works. They need to notify their state legislatures that this is happening and ask them if they know about this EPA program.
Also, people need to remind elected officials of their constitutional oaths to protect individual property rights, as evidenced in a Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone” season one episode: Patriarch John Dutton is confronted by a group of Communist Chinese tourists who are trespassing on his land. He demands that they leave and when he explains that he owns the land, one trespasser states, “It is wrong for one man to own all this.” Dutton responds, “This is America, we don’t share land here!”
People in states that have signed on to the EPA/State Climate Action Plan program can no longer say, “it’s only happening in California” because California is the United Nations blueprint for the entire United States.
Dan Titus is affiliated with the American Coalition for Sustainable Communities (ACSC). Their mission is sustaining representative government; not governance, by collectivist-oriented unelected agencies and commissions.
UNRWA, the “United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” as the name implies, provides humanitarian aid exclusively to Palestinian victims of war. Like all UN agencies, it is purportedly politically neutral and concerned with mitigating conflict, not participating in it. Unfortunately, UNRWA is neither.
UNRWA has a long history of antisemitism in support of the Islamist cause. For example, UNRWA uses books in their schools containing blatantly antisemitic passages. The donor nations that support UNRWA have objected but UNRWA’s promises to remove the offending passages somehow never happen.
A greater concern is that UNRWA allows terrorists to hide their rocket launchers and other weapons in UNRWA facilities, including schools. UNRWA’s staff has failed to call out the practice and in fact, have joined it.
We also know, due to diligent research by UN Watch, that some of the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza pitched in to help with the horrific massacre of Israelis last October 7. These self-described committed humanitarians voluntarily committed rape, torture, and murder on defenseless victims. Other UNRWA members praised their colleagues for the good work.
Now it has come out that senior officials have stolen food and supplies intended for Gazans. One whistleblower working at a shelter tells of agreeing with co-workers to get out the truth about the corrupt administration even though they knew they would be subject to reprisals.
He told how “displaced people in the external shelter do not get their right to food and non-food aid, but rather it is distributed at night and sold in front of our eyes and everyone who speaks is transferred….” Another told of how “district officials rummaged through the aid cartons and stole the items and their brothers sold them.”
Many others have reported extensive profiteering by UNRWA staff, supported by a compliant administration that refuses to call out the thieves and punishes those who report it. Local Gazans are fed up.
UNRWA officials of course deny the charges, lumping them with ongoing criticism they are subjected to from right-wing crazies. Any other agency with the track record of UNRWA would be designated an enemy pro-terrorist organization.
It might not surprise those familiar with the Obama-Biden history to know that the U.S. continues to be a faithful funder of UNRWA, contributing around $400 million last year. Admittedly, this amount wouldn’t cover the annual overpayment in food stamps, but it’s still boneheaded to—again—support an organization that is our deadly enemy.
The outrages of UNRWA present an opportunity to seriously re-examine our relationship with the U.N. School children are taught that the United Nations was formed by the victorious allies at the end of World War II to assure the end of such destructive wars. It was a time of great hope and idealism.
Unfortunately, looking back after nearly 80 years and $1 trillion, the dreams have died. The U.N. is widely regarded, even by many senior officials, as a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy dedicated mostly to its own perpetuation.
It had nothing to do with the great international relations success of our time, the ending of the Cold War. On the contrary, the Soviet Union ignored every U.N. entreaty but had to finally stand down when its socialist economy could no longer protect itself from America’s military might.
The U.N. has grown from 51 original member nations to 192 today. Unfortunately, most of these are small satellite states who supported first Communist dictatorships and now Islamist autocracies. Meanwhile, Russia and China, two of the most aggressive threats to world peace, are permanent members of the Security Council. They veto attempts to counter their atrocities, like Russia’s unwarranted attacks on several former satellites and the Chinese genocide of the Uyghurs.
Meanwhile, the U.N. continues to disappoint when it counts. During the COVID pandemic, the U.N.’s World Health Organization, rather than providing the medical leadership needed, collapsed into politicization, lying to help the Chinese Communists cover up the origins of the virus. Several voting members of the U.N. Human Rights Council still practice slavery.
The world is not a better nor safer place because of the U.N. It resists meaningful reforms. We should just leave.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
