Trump Blasts ‘Stupid People’ Climate Consensus in UN Speech

Current conditions: Typhoon Ragasa slammed into East Asia as the year’s strongest storm to date, killing 14 and leaving dozens missing in southern Taiwan and forcing more than 400,000 to evacuate in China • Hurricane Gabrielle intensified into the second major hurricane in the Atlantic this season, churning rip currents on East Coast beaches in the U.S. and lashing Europe with heavy rain later this week • Argentina is facing an ongoing drought.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to UN: Climate change is ‘the greatest con job ever perpetuated on the world’

President Donald Trump speaking at the U.N. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He complained that scientists used to warn the governments about “global cooling … then they said global warming will kill the world.” Yet “all of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people” from countries with “no chance for success.” He urged other nations that “if you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

Scientists first suggested over a century ago that the carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels could create a greenhouse effect warming the planet and destabilizing the climate norms in which human beings evolved to survive. As global emissions of carbon and other planet-heating gases have surged over the past several decades, the Earth’s average temperature has risen by more than 1 degree Celsius, an increase that the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world attribute to pollution from fossil fuels and agriculture. The Trump administration issued a report written by contrarians who raised the possibility that climate change won’t be as bad as most scientists say, but more than 1,000 peer-reviewed researchers signed onto a letter condemning the findings. In a statement on the president’s UN speech, Gina McCarthy, the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency chief and the Biden administration’s climate policy director, said Trump “continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home. He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.” For more on the basics of climate change, you can consult this explainer by Heatmap’s Jeva Lange.

2. Tune into the Heatmap House Climate Week event

As part of this week’s New York Climate Week, we’re hosting Heatmap House, a live journalism exploring the future of cities, energy, technology, and artificial intelligence. We’ll also be livestreaming all day for those who aren’t able to join in person. Register here and tune in any time from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday to catch Heatmap journalists including Robinson Meyer, Emily Pontecorvo, Katie Brigham, and Matthew Zeitlin, in conversation with the likes of Senator Brian Schatz and executives from Amazon, Microsoft, and Duke Energy. We hope you’ll join us!

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3. Exclusive: New England unions sign historic offshore wind agreement

Rhode Island’s biggest labor federation has brokered a deal for union workers to carry out the construction on the SouthCoast Wind project, a 2.4-gigawatt offshore turbine array — and won what the Rhode Island AFL-CIO called the first agreement in the nation guaranteeing organized labor handles all the operations and maintenance of the facility. On a panel I moderated for the Climate Jobs National Resource Center on Tuesday evening, Rhode Island’s AFL-CIO president, Patrick Crowley, told me the “labor peace agreement” will help the union organize more workers in the offshore-wind industry. “The labor movement is in this to win, and we’re not ready to give up the fight yet,” he told me. “If developers want to have a winning strategy, they have to partner with organized labor, because we’re going to make sure that, come hell or high water, we get these things built.”

After a federal judge lifted Trump’s stop-work order halting construction on the Revolution Wind farm off Rhode Island’s coast, a project that was 80% complete before the president’s abrupt intervention, Crowley said executives immediately directed workers onto boats to restart work on the turbines.

4. Oklo breaks ground on its first nuclear facility

Microreactor developer Oklo’s stock price has been on a tear for months, surging to $21 billion in September despite no revenue or completed facilities. That’s starting the change. On Tuesday, the company broke ground on its debut nuclear plant at the Idaho National Laboratory. The California startup, which is also seeking to construct the nation’s first nuclear recycling plant, is the only company in the Department of Energy’s newly established Reactor Pilot Program to secure two projects in the federal effort to prove that new reactor technologies – Oklo’s tiny reactors use a different and rarer kind of coolant and fuel than the entire U.S. commercial fleet – can successfully sustain fission reactions by next July.

“As advancements in artificial intelligence drive up electricity demands, projects like this are critical to ensuring the United States can meet that need and remain at the forefront of the global AI arms race,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement.

5. U.S.-backed startup looks to break China’s stranglehold on gallium

Earlier this month, the federal Defense Logistics Agency backed Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. to help the Ohio-based startup’s efforts to commercialize a novel technology for processing cobalt for batteries. Now, as I reported in an exclusive for Heatmap on Tuesday, the company is applying its approach to refining gallium, another key industrial metal over which China has a monopoly grip.

It’s not the so-called DLA’s only push into minerals. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the agency is seeking to stockpile up to $40 million worth of scandium oxide over the next five years. The agency plans to buy the rare earth element used as an alloying agent used in aerospace, defense, and automotive technologies from mining giant Rio Tinto.

THE KICKER

A team of researchers in China found a way to turn clothianidin, a widely used pesticide notorious for accumulating in soil and crops and harming human health, into a nutrient for plants that removes the chemical from the dirt. Scientists at Hunan Agricultural University developed a novel biochar-based catalyst that converts the pesticide residues into ammonium nitrogen, a form of fertilizer that helps crops grow. “Instead of simply eliminating pesticides, we can recycle their nitrogen content back into the soil as fertilizer,” Hongmei Liu, a co-author of the study, said in a press release. “It offers a win–win solution for food safety and sustainable agriculture.”