Watchdog Report Shows the High Cost of Giving Away Billions at the COP

The annual ‘climate justice’ shakedown must go on without the U.S. and its billions of tax dollars.

The 30th annual Conference of Parties (COP) on climate begins this week, and even Bill Gates issued a statement moderating the doomsday scenarios the COPs were designed to promote. For his part, President Trump isn’t sending an official delegation to COP 30 in Brazil. That’s a move consistent with what he has expressed regarding both foreign aid and climate policy, unless the intent of a U.S. presence at the annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is to claw back some of the $14 billion we’ve sent them to “fight climate change.”

A new report by federal watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) spotlights this waste and exposes the Biden administration’s further extravagance with bloated delegations and lavish spending at the COP conferences. That’s right, we’ve already given $14 billion in tax dollars to the U.N., mainly to spread some “climate justice” around the third world nations supposedly the most threatened by weather. Had Joe Biden or Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we’d be on the hook for another $8 billion. The kicker: you didn’t vote for it. Nobody did.

The U.S. Senate never ratified Kyoto, and President Obama used an executive end-around to avoid ratification to bypass the Senate on the Paris Agreement. Those are the two major components of the UNFCCC. Under Paris, the developed nations were to fork over $100 billion per year through 2025, increasing to a trillion bucks annually by 2030, so developing nations could construct levees or jack up their sinking nations in the face of rising sea levels. President Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement during his first term. President Biden, whose administration generously tossed climate dollars around (“gold bars off the Titanic,” for instance), re-entered.

This global shakedown is negotiated each year at the COP conferences. Hundreds of private jets augment commercial flights to bring tens of thousands of attendees from around the world for the lavish events featuring menus of beef and seafood – food climate alarmists don’t want others to eat. For that reason, hardcore environmentalists dislike the COPs. So do some developing countries, which are impatient with the pace of the giveaway. Papua New Guinea sat out COP 29, calling it “a total waste of time.”

The Biden administration didn’t think so, sending delegations of about 250 to each COP during Biden’s term, including folks who attended in 2021 despite working from home because of COVID. Not even electoral defeat kept them away or motivated them to express a bit of humility. COP 29 in Azerbaijan occurred in late November 2024 – after the people had elected a president who promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In fact, the size of the U.S. delegation remained about the same. And attending COPs isn’t cheap – except compared to the billions tossed around there.

“The UNFCC is a global wealth redistribution pump and the COPs are a study in the arrogant frivolity of our elites,” said PPT Director Michael Chamberlain. “John Kerry, the Climate Special Envoy nobody voted for, needed nearly three dozen ‘advisors’ at these events to give away billions the taxpayers never agreed to. Officials of U.S. government agencies were giving presentations about ‘indigenous knowledge’ and other questionable science while racking up huge bills. Biden Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s personal tab at COP 29, which occurred after the 2024 election, was more than $19,000, all for the chance to tout the billions his agency had sent to foreign recipients. That’s thumbing your nose at the people paying the bills.”

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