As US skips climate talks in Brazil, leaders plead for other nations to unite

BELEM, Brazil (AP) – U.N. climate negotiations began Monday on the edge of the Brazilian Amazon as leaders pushed for accelerating efforts to curb global warming by drastically reducing the carbon pollution that causes it. But top U.S. negotiators were absent.

Negotiators can’t forget that “the climate emergency is an increase of inequality,” host President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told them. He said he picked the host city of Belem instead of “a finished city” to drive home the impact that warming has on the Amazon and on poverty.

“The increase of the global temperature is spreading pain and devastation especially amongst the most vulnerable populations,” he told the conference known as COP30.

This year’s talks aren’t expected to end with any ambitious new deal. Instead, organizers and analysts frame this year’s conference as the “implementation COP.” Countries had homework: Show up with their updated national plans to fight climate change.

Attendees on Monday stressed cooperation. Individual nations can’t cut emissions of heat-trapping gases fast enough, said U.N. climate secretary Simon Stiell.

“Your job is to fight this climate crisis together,” Stiell told negotiators.

André Corrêa do Lago, president of this year’s conference, emphasized that negotiators must engage in “mutirão,” derived from a local Indigenous word that refers to a group uniting for a task.

Complicating those calls is the United States, where President Donald Trump has long denied the existence of climate change. His administration did not send high-level negotiators and is withdrawing for the second time from the 10-year-old Paris Agreement, the first global pact to fight climate change.

The Paris Agreement was supposed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the historical average, but many scientists now say it’s unlikely countries will stay below that threshold.

The United States has put more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas than any other country. China is the No. 1 carbon polluter now, but because carbon dioxide stays in the air for at least a century, more of it was made in the U.S.

Brazil’s president railed against climate misinformation without mentioning absent Americans by name.

“COP30 will be the COP of truth,” Lula said. “They attack institutions, they attack science and universities. Now it’s the moment to impose a new defeat to the denialists.”

Palau Ambassador Ilana Seid, who chairs the Alliance of Small Island States, said the U.S. withdrawal “has really shifted the gravity” of the negotiating system.

Trump’s actions damage the fight against climate change, former U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Todd Stern said.

“It’s a good thing that they are not sending anyone. It wasn’t going to be constructive if they did,” he said.

Though the U.S. government isn’t showing up, some attendees including former top U.S. negotiators are pointing to U.S. cities, states and businesses that they said will help take up the slack.

Lula and Stiell said the 10-year-old Paris Agreement is working to a degree, but action needs to be accelerated. They pointed to devastation in the past few weeks including Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean, typhoons smashing Vietnam and the Philippines and a tornado ripping through southern Brazil.

Scientists have said extreme weather events have become more frequent as Earth warms.

“Climate change is not a threat of the future. It is already a tragedy of the present time,” Lula said.