The Stupidest Speech in UN History

Everyone's saying so!

Bill McKibben

It was not the longest speech in UN history—that was Fidel Castro in 1960, fulminating against American imperialism for four hours and 29 minutes (a rant vindicated by the Bay of Pigs invasion seven months later

It was not the most provocative speech in UN history—that was Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev, banging his shoe, also in 1960 (good times, 1960!)

It wasn’t even the most dangerous speech in UN history—that was Colin Powell, misleading the global community about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for our calamitous invasion.

But it was definitely the dumbest speech that delegates have ever had to listen to—as the shots of them looking on in stony disbelief as Trump vented about broken escalators, MAGA hats, and his general greatness for nearly an hour (ignoring the 15 minute time limit respected by the mere mortals that rule other nations).

 “Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” he explained helpfully. Just to give you a flavor of his address, he devoted a considerable section to describing the floor treatments he would have provided for the UN if he’d won some contract long ago

It would be beautiful. I used to talk about, “I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo.” The best of everything. “You’re going to have mahogany walls, they’re going to give you plastic.” 

But they decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product. And I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction and that their building concepts were so wrong, and the product that they were proposing to build was so bad and so costly, it was going to cost them a fortune. 

And I said, “And wait until you see the overruns.” Well, I turned out to be right. They had massive cost overruns and spent between two and $4 billion on the building and did not even get the marble floors that I promised them.

But the longest, and dumbest, section of the speech was about climate change. Trump—who fifteen years ago helped take out a full page ad demanding more climate action from Barack Obama (“Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet”)—described it on this day not only a “hoax,” but even more: “the largest con job ever perpetrated on the planet.”

There’s no point refuting his climate denialism; evidence, data, and expert analysis bounce off his bronzed hide like tennis balls off a rhino. 

Everyone sitting in that room has spent decades working the giant problem of climate change—it’s been the defining issue for the UN because it’s the one thing (alongside nuclear weapons) that could actually take down our civilizations. 

But of course that work has always been incredibly hard, because the thing that drove global warming—fossil fuel—was also the thing that drove our economy.

Now that’s changed—and everyone in the room was also aware of the subtext. The five-year-old fact that solar and wind and battery power are now cheaper than coal and oil and gas opens up the sudden possibility for change. And with it the sudden possibility that the power balance that has defined the world since the UN was formed—the U.S. as the dominant nation, first among unequals, is now very much in question.

Trump began, in fact, with an attack on the clean energy sources that are at the heart of this transition

By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it’s actually energy. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can’t put them out without massive subsidies.

By the way, of course, wind is only slightly more expensive than solar power, and both are much cheaper than fossil fuels, which are the things now receiving endless federal subsidy. But everyone knows this, because they are all aware of the second great fact of the world in 2025 (the first being that the US elected an idiot). 

It’s that China is, as we speak, building a vast and powerful economy on the back of windmills and solar panels, electric motors and actuators, digital sensors and controls. (A very useful piece by the great Saul Griffith just described this “electro tech stack.”) 

They’re going to be an electro-state. They’re finally starting to use less coal, because—again—everyone in this world understands that coal is dirty, and that Chinese cities were grossly polluted until a couple of years ago, and now they’re…not nearly so bad. So how weird does it sound for the president of the United States to say

And if you add coal, we have the most of any nation in the world. Clean. I call it clean, beautiful coal. You can do things today with coal that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?

Trump was in salesman mode as usual, of course, repeating that America was the “hottest” country on earth as he worked up to his big sales pitch:

We stand ready to provide any country with abundant, affordable energy supplies if you need them, when most of you do. We’re proudly exporting energy all over the world. We’re now the largest exporter

In order to move product, he has to talk down the competition—in general, he maintained that “your countries are going to hell,” but he singled out Britain, perhaps because he was just there. Along with accusing the mayor of London of trying to impose sharia law, he lit out after his hosts at 10 Downing Street.

A lot of the countries that we’re talking about and oil and gas, such as essentially closing the Great North Sea oil. Oh, the North Sea. I know it so well. Aberdeen was the oil capital of Europe and this tremendous oil that hasn’t been found in the North Sea. Tremendous oil. And I was with the Prime Minister I respected, like a lot. And I said, “You’re sitting with the greatest asset.” 

They essentially closed it by making it so highly taxed that no developer, no oil company can go there. They have tremendous oil left and more importantly, they have tremendous oil that hasn’t even been found yet.

And what a tremendous asset for the United Kingdom. And I hope the prime minister’s listening because I told it to him three days in a row. That’s all he heard. North Sea oil, North Sea, because I want to see them do well. I want to stop seeing them ruining that beautiful Scottish and English countryside with windmills and massive solar panels that go seven miles by seven miles taken away farmland, but we’re not letting this happen in America.

In the real world, the UK is getting a third of its power from offshore wind; it closed its last coal-fired power plant last year. The prime minister, like all relatively normal people that Trump encounters, must just hold his head and wait for it all to pass; why would he ever sign up for an energy supply controlled by this guy.

Climate scientists are long used to weird denialism, but Trump is next level. Think of devoting your life to unraveling this great question, and doing so successfully, only to have the leader of the United States (whose scientists first figured out this mystery) go on a tear like this:

It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler.

I mean, the 1930s were the Dust Bowl. The standard climate denier argument is that the hot temps of those years prove today’s world is normal—he’s even got his nonsense backward.

Or imagine being one of the many climate policy people gathered this week in New York for the round of seminars and conferences that is Climate Week, only to hear Trump say:

In the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable and you have it too.

Forget the cows—the exact point of much of the climate work of the last decade has been to build more factories, for batteries and EVs and panels and all the rest. Factories that are now closing, or being raided by ICE, or taken off the drawing board because who in their right mind would start building a factory in a country ruled by a guy that could decide any day to just demand ten percent of the company.

Americans are somewhat inured to Trump’s speechifying. But some of the diplomates from the rest of the world, which still invests some majesty in the United Nations, were doubtless hearing him in this mode for the first time. 

They didn’t seem exactly angry, as you might have expected given the cruel and insulting attacks—some of them seemed almost embarrassed for Americans, almost sympathetic for the plight of a people ruled by a verbally incontinent and mentally limited codger reduced to repeating the same silliness over and over. It is profoundly embarrassing to have people embarrassed for you.

But this will in the end be a very significant speech—precisely because of its stupidity. When American historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the rise of our off-brand fascism. When world historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the passing of technological, and hence economic, and hence political leadership from the U.S. to China, in the span of eight months. The tape of this address will be the easiest way to explain to people how such a mammoth shift happened so fast.

At least he didn’t make them play YMCA.

In other energy and climate news:

+A sweet account of the way that wind turbines off Block Island made it a nicer place!

“The benefits have been extraordinary,” said Keith Stover, head of the island’s Town Council.

Before the five turbines started spinning a few miles off the coast, this island ran on five big generators. Soot-spewing and earsplitting, the machines burned a million gallons of diesel a year, ferried in from the mainland on tanker trucks and stored underground. Energy costs, tied to the volatile oil market, seesawed so much that local businesses struggled to manage their budgets, residents said. Power surges and dips fried household appliances. Clocks wouldn’t keep time. Those who lived near the power company described scraping soot off their windows and having to wash their curtains every month.

All that, and the cost of electricity is less than a third of what it would be if the island were still running on diesel, according to Jeffrey Wright, the president of the Block Island Utility District. (He is not related to Chris Wright, the energy secretary, who argues that wind energy is expensive and unreliable).

+From two very nimble legal minds, Aaron Regunberg and Zephyr Teachout, comes an interesting antitrust argument that could be employed against the fossil fuel industry

Antitrust laws protect open thriving markets and prevent collusive incumbent-protection schemes that slow down innovation and freeze technologies in place—the very crux of what oil corporations sought to do by working together to block renewable competitors from challenging their control of the energy market.

Internally, fossil fuel companies were explicit about the goal of suppressing competition. Consider a 1988 memo by a senior public affairs manager at Exxon. It acknowledged that greenhouse gases “cause disproportionate warming of the atmosphere,” that “the principal greenhouse gases are by-products of fossil fuel combustion,” and that “climate models predict a 1.50°C to 4.50°C global temperature increase, depending on the projected growth of fossil fuels.”

The memo then suggested that the industry act to cloud the public’s understanding of this scientific reality by “emphasiz[ing] the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” in order to undermine the “noneconomic development of nonfossil fuel resources.”

The industry also used capture-and-kill tactics to shut down the development of alternative energy technologies before they could challenge fossil fuels. Scientists at Exxon invented the lithium battery in the 1970s. The company began developing electric motors, too. But in the 1980s, Exxon shut down the lithium battery program and other related projects, shelving countless promising patents.

Ed Garvey, a geochemist at Exxon during the 1980s, concluded that the company’s goal was suppression of clean energy development. And it wasn’t just Exxon.

Stanford Ovshinsky, one of the principal inventors of solar energy and the founder of Energy Conversion Devices—which was once the largest producer of flexible solar panels in the world—said of his company’s interactions with Texaco Inc. (now operated by Chevron Corp.) that the industry wanted to “put you out of business, rather than building the business.”