CARLA SANDS: 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