Republican Utah Sen. John Curtis is reportedly planning to co-lead a delegation to the annual U.N. climate change conference, which some critics told the Daily Caller News Foundation clashes with President Donald Trump’s energy agenda.
Curtis told E&E News Friday that he and Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons will lead a delegation to Brazil together for this year’s COP30 and that three other unnamed Republicans are also interested in joining the troop. The U.N. climate change conference is set to host several youth-led climate forums and discuss the Paris Agreement that Trump directed the U.S. to abandon through a day-one executive order.
“RINOs like Sen. Curtis are trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of MAGA victory by going to the annual UN climate confab in Brazil,” Steve Milloy, Senior Fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute told the DCNF. “There, they will conspire with China and Europe in trying to subvert President Trump’s agenda of defeating the climate hoax, terminating the Green New Scam and making America energy dominant.”
A spokesperson for Curtis’ office told the DCNF that “plans are not finalized yet for the Senator’s travel,” though E&E News reported Friday that Curtis said “we have an agenda that is really coming together nicely. We’re super happy with it.”
The Trump administration has not announced that it will send a delegation to the November conference and Trump recently called climate change policy the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” in front of the United Nations General Assembly in September. Trump has moved to ax federal support for green energy sources like wind and solar that the Biden administration favored while bolstering conventional resources like coal.
“Leave it to ‘Mitt Romney’ style Republicans like Sen. Curtis to try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. … The UN climate agenda and the UN’s COP30 meetings should be disbanded, not given credibility by GOP senators,” Marc Morano, author and Climate Depot executive editor, told the DCNF. “This is a pathetic throwback to the pre-Trump Republicanism of George H. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. … The UN climate agenda has quite literally overseen the outsourcing of the West’s once dominant industries to China, India, and the developing world. The U.S., Canada, and Europe have boasted about emission accounting tricks, while China builds two new coal plants a week and benefits from the West’s attempts at a ‘green transition.’ The U.S. does not need ‘a seat at the table’ at the UN climate summit, we need to knock the table over.”
Curtis has historically split with many Republicans over climate change policy and has notably advocated against a wholesale repeal of Biden-era green energy tax credits that Trump railed against. Earlier this year, Curtis told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that it is “really important” to have a “Republican voice at that table,” in reference to COP30.
The Senator pointed to nuclear specifically as an energy resource Republicans could elevate at COP30.
Critics like Milloy, Morano and President of the Heartland Institute James Taylor told the DCNF that COP30 should not be endorsed by Republican participation as it runs counter to Trump’s energy policies and suggests that the left-leaning climate talking points the president has fought hold legitimacy.
“Republicans who attend COP30 for any reason other than to mock it are hypocrites and grandstanders,” Taylor told the DCNF. “How much carbon dioxide are they going to spew into the atmosphere merely so they can have a ‘photo op’ at a portion of the Amazon rainforest that was destroyed in order to create a venue for this vacation conference of UN bureaucrats?”
Notably, developers razed portions of the Amazon rainforest to construct a road for COP30, and a 2024 study released right before COP29 showed that emissions rise sharply during major conferences due to private jet travel.
Coons’ office did not respond to the DCNF’s multiple requests for comment.
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