Despite historic environmental rollbacks under a president who pulled the US from a key international climate treaty – and recently called global warming “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” – US civil society groups say they are gearing up to push for bold international climate action at a major UN conference next month.
“This is a really important moment to illustrate that Trump does not represent the entirety, or even anywhere near a majority, of us,” said Collin Rees, US program manager at the environmental non-profit Oil Change International, who will attend the annual UN climate conference, known as Cop30.
The negotiations will take place in the Brazilian city of Belém near the Amazon delta. It is expected to convene delegations from nearly every government in the world to discuss the implementation of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
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Trump, who began the process of pulling the US from the Paris accord on his first day in office, is not expected to send a delegation to the negotiations. But hundreds of US activist organizations are planning to attend, despite widespread logistical challenges and high accommodation costs in a region with limited tourist infrastructure.
“Yes, the federal administration has changed radically … but the actual US climate movement is still here,” said John Noel, deputy climate director at Greenpeace US.
The conference will take place amid growing awareness that the vast majority of the world’s population – as much as 89%, according to a recent study – want more to be done about the climate crisis but mistakenly assume their peers do not. In the US, the world’s largest historical emitter, three-quarters of those surveyed said their government should do more. But Donald Trump has pushed the country in the opposite direction.
Since re-entering the White House in January, Trump has placed dozens of fossil fuel allies in his cabinet. He has also waged broad attacks on climate and energy policies, as well as renewable energy expansion, despite data showing most Americans support the energy transition and the growth of carbon-free power. And the president has taken steps to dismantle climate research by an array of US agencies, something recent polls show is highly unpopular, even with Republicans.
Trump officials have also shown animosity for multilateralism. During the negotiations, activists will be on high alert for a potential announcement that the president intends to remove the country from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty serving as the structure for intergovernmental climate policies.
But in Belém, said Noel, US-based campaigners plan to “reassure our global comrades and colleagues that there’s still a robust movement in the states to maintain pressure around various forms of climate action”.
That will entail putting pressure on global leaders to commit to ambitious emissions reduction and climate adaptation schemes with vigorous and realistic plans to achieve them.
“We’ve got to show the rest of the world that the administration’s assault on the climate is unpopular,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, who will attend Cop30.
The Trump administration’s anti-climate stance puts it out of step with many governments around the world who have realized that environmental action can deliver economic benefits.
More than 100 countries, for instance, have been able to cut back on fossil fuel imports thanks to renewable energy growth, which has in turn enabled them to save $1.3tn since 2010, according to the International Energy Agency. The expansion of wind, solar and other carbon-free power sources has also created millions of jobs. And many global south countries are upping their sales of electric vehicles, which lower fuel and maintenance costs.
“There are different trends showing that the rest of the world is still working towards getting their economy more resilient for a more prosperous future, and that prosperous future cannot happen without taking into account the climate,” said Yamide Dagnet, the Washington DC-based senior vice-president of international work at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Unlike the US, other countries are also showing an increasing interest in international climate negotiations. Colombia last month offered to host the first-ever International Conference for the Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels in April 2026, after countries pushing for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty called for such a meeting.
At Cop30, climate activists will work to support governments that have undertaken such action and push more officials to follow suit. And they will aim to highlight local- and state-level climate action taking place in the US, such as the successful fight for laws requiring polluters to pay climate damages in Vermont and New York last year.
“We want to put a spotlight on those ‘polluter pay’ mechanisms, and highlight that they are winnable and that other states are considering them,” said Noel. “And Cop presents a good opportunity to market those solutions.”
The Trump administration is urging the courts to strike those policies down, and though it will not officially participate in November’s UN negotiations, climate groups say the administration may also try to pressure countries not to take ambitious international climate action.
It’s something officials did as recently as last week: the US derailed the enactment of a global carbon fee on shipping at an international maritime meeting as Trump called the scheme a “Global Green New Scam” on social media. Washington also threatened to impose sanctions and visa restrictions on nations that supported the deal.
“If there’s a real inflection point and the US sees fossil fuel interests as somehow being constrained, it’s not hard to imagine that there’ll be some type of statements from the administration trying to color the negotiations from afar,” said Noel of Greenpeace.
The US worked to block strong international climate policy long before Trump entered office. It refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and more recently has underfunded international climate finance, opposed language to phase out fossil fuels, and worked to obstruct requirements to phase out fossil fuels.
“The United States … has always been a bad faith actor when it comes to climate action, and the biggest blocker of meaningful progress,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, a research director at Corporate Accountability. “It has walked away from doing its fair share time and time again; the only difference now is that its bad intentions are on public display for all to see more clearly.”
Jackson said she expected that even without an official delegation, the US will still have its “tentacles all over the UN climate talks”, working on the sidelines with other participants such as the EU and Canada to “orchestrate their great escape from climate action. And it still controls the purse strings.”
US campaigners can provide an important counterweight to that kind of pressure, activists say, from both the halls of the official Cop30 negotiations and from the demonstrations expected nearby in Belém. The protests are expected to be the largest seen at any Cop conference in years.
“Those actions can help put pressure on negotiators,” said Rees. “And they can also help build people’s movements, build power and confidence to go back to national capitals and provincial capitals or state level capitals and continue that advocacy from the bottom up.”
Su, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said Cop30 provided a “powerful” opportunity to show the world that climate action is not only necessary, but also popular. Though activists are under no illusions that the negotiations will be the “pinnacle of democracy”, she said they would be an important time to exercise the right to free assembly – something guaranteed in Brazil and the US alike.
As experts – and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – warn that the US and other countries are creeping toward authoritarianism, Cop will allow activists to push for “people power”, Su said.
“During this dark turn,” Su said, “this type of physical collective showing humanity couldn’t be more important.”
