Good morning,
Environmental reporter Emily Atkin wrote in her substack newsletter on Wednesday that Trump’s UN climate speech earlier this week was “probably the dumbest of all time.”
I agree. His sole purpose was to make the 80th UN General Assembly appear dumb and useless. Trump dislikes the UN, thinks it’s boring. Mission accomplished.
There’s no need to repeat or debunk all his lies here. If you don’t believe it was dumb, I can heartily recommend Emily’s newsletter. What I would add is that the stupidity was by design.
‘Weaponised incompetence,’ as psychologists call it, is a technique people use to avoid responsibility and push work onto others.
Seen in this light, Trump’s speech was just another version of America First. I’m not the first to make the connection (someone even made a ‘Weaponised Incompetence’ iPhone case with his face on it).
Trump’s tomfoolery wouldn't be so bad if it were just him. But Europe and South America are retreating from climate commitments too. The EU’s 27 member states like to claim climate leadership, yet they can’t even agree on emissions targets for 2035 and 2040.
Another candidate for climate leadership is Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In a searing speech, he attacked Trump’s tariffs and branded “would-be autocrats” like him the enemies of multilateralism.
As the next host of the UN climate summit in Belém in November, what he says is important. Some hope he will become the face of new climate solidarity.
Yet even as he promises a “summit of truth”, at home he has doubled down on oil expansion in the Amazon. In a period of geopolitical rivalry, Lula, like most everyone else, prioritises economic self-interest over multilateral cooperation. He seems to have understood that Trump’s weaponised daftness (pushing responsibility onto others) has become the logic of today.
The question is who is left to pick up the slack.
- Wester van Gaal, economics editor
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