UN chief Guterres warns of a 'moment of truth' on climate before Cop31

A decade on, a climate retreat that reaches abroad

A decade after Donald Trump's first election victory, a commentary weighing his movement's record argues that the damage to climate action runs far deeper than his time in office. The United States, described as the world's richest country and its largest emitter in history, has rejected clean energy subsidies, pollution rules and climate research. The US is set to be the only big economy absent from the Cop31 talks in Antalya. Hopes for climate finance are weak, because USAID, the overseas aid agency, was dismantled in 2025 while developing countries face a strong El Niño.

Why Washington never built a consensus

The US system has many veto points across its legislature, and its fossil-fuel lobby is powerful. That combination kept the country from forming the cross-party climate consensus seen in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Barack Obama's Waxman-Markey Bill, which aimed to impose binding limits on greenhouse gases, died in the Senate. Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act was heavily diluted after objections from Senator Joe Manchin, who represented the coal state of West Virginia. Commentary notes that a new Democrat-controlled Congress will be able to open investigations with subpoena powers into environmental rollbacks, and to block cuts to clean energy, climate research and climate finance.

Anti-climate politics spreads abroad

Trump's influence at home may fade, but the anti-climate politics he helped make respectable will be harder to reverse overseas. Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina's Javier Milei both rose to power while attacking environmental protections and questioning climate action. In Germany, the AfD is making significant electoral gains with a similar approach. The damage, the commentary concludes, extends well beyond America's borders.

Guterres's final warning before Cop31

António Guterres, whose second and last term as UN secretary-general expires at the end of the year, plans to tell leaders at Cop31 that the moment for delay has passed. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, he used the phrase 'moment of truth' three times in 20 minutes. He said:

“This is a moment of truth. We can no longer wait, we can no longer have endless discussions in which everybody tries to push the responsibility to someone else.”

Over a 10-year tenure, Guterres became one of the most visible advocates urging reluctant countries to cut their emissions of heat-trapping gases. He has previously said that the era of global boiling has arrived, and worsening heatwaves, storms, floods and droughts, together with El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern, give his message its urgency.

A scientific shock and a sense of failure

In 2025, before a major speech on climate, Guterres consulted scientists. For nine years he had insisted that the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times was still alive, and he planned to say so again. The scientists told him otherwise, and he called the discovery an enormous shock. He said the UN is now trying to limit how far past that threshold the world goes.

“Scientists told me you cannot say that because that's no longer true.”

He said it felt like a failure, and he placed the blame on governments rather than the planet.

“But it's not the world that's failed, it's the political leadership that's failed.”

Guterres argued that protecting the planet requires a long-term strategic view, a demand he set against the short horizons of many political systems.