From Tilak’s Substack
Tilak Doshi
On September 23rd 2025, President Donald J. Trump strode to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and delivered a speech bold and uncompromising in its excoriation of the fictions hoisted by the elites of the collective West — ‘a world without borders’, ‘man-made catastrophic climate change’. In a world awash with sanctimonious platitudes about mass migration and climate change, Trump dubbed them the two forces “destroying a large part of the free world”. Directing his remarks to his hapless West European allies, he said: “You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you’re going to be great again. … This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer.”
With characteristic bluntness, he declared the global climate change movement as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, a multi-trillion-dollar scam foisted upon nations, economies and ordinary people by a cabal of self-serving elites, bureaucrats and green ideologues. This was no mere rhetorical flourish — it was a gauntlet thrown at the feet of the globalist establishment, a rallying cry for reason and a defiant stand for energy realism. This time, there was no sniggering from smug German delegates as had occurred during a previous speech Trump gave at the UN in his first term.
Drawing on the fearless spirit of the honey badger, as energy analyst David Blackmon aptly describes him, Trump’s speech was a root-and-branch repudiation of the climate industrial complex, exposing its contradictions and hypocrisies with unapologetic clarity. Manufactured climate hysteria got its greatest challenge to date by a President that frankly didn’t give a damn what Western delegates at the UN thought of him.
The Climate Con: A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Mirage
The climate change narrative, as Trump articulated, is a house of cards built on shaky science, political opportunism and economic predation. For decades, the world has been fed a steady diet of apocalyptic predictions — rising seas, burning forests and collapsing ecosystems — designed to instil fear and compliance. Yet, as President Trump pointed out, the promised catastrophes have consistently failed to materialise. The polar bears are not only still here but multiplying and getting fatter, the Maldives stubbornly remain above water with some islands even growing in size, and global food production continues to rise. The climate industrial complex, however, thrives not on evidence but on narrative, propped up by a web of NGOs financed by the Left-wing billionaire class, ideologically-driven academics prone to pushing ‘noble lies‘, and pliant mass media which serve as willing transmitters of propaganda.
Trump’s speech laid bare the economic toll of the climate con. The United States alone has spent hundreds of billions on renewable energy subsidies, tax credits and ‘green’ infrastructure projects that deliver paltry returns. Wind turbines and solar panels, heralded as the saviours of the planet, provide only weather-dependent intermittent energy flows but require vast land area and depend on fossil fuel backups to keep the lights on. In his inimitable way, Trump had this to say about wind and solar energy:
We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. 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, 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 subsidise, you can’t put them out without massive subsidies.
The so-called energy transition is not a transition at all but a costly addition to an already robust energy mix dominated by fossil fuels. Trump echoed this sentiment, citing the absurdity of policies that vilify oil, gas and coal — the very fuels that power over 80% of global energy needs — while funnelling taxpayer money into inefficient technologies that cannot scale without crippling economies. The case of a rapidly de-industrialising Germany, the world’s leading ‘green energy’ proponent, comes to mind.
In his speech, Trump highlighted the manipulation of science to serve political ends. He spoke about an earlier period of ‘global cooling’ scares morphing into ‘global warming’, all encompassed by the generic ‘climate change’ in which every weather event can be construed as direct evidence of ‘crisis’. He said that the so-called scientific consensus on global warming was created by “stupid people”.
It is now apparent to objective observers that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – via its ‘Summary for Policy Makers’ report which gets full press coverage with the usual scare quotes of extreme weather and impending doom – is a political machine. It cherry-picks data and models to justify predetermined conclusions. The ‘97% consensus’ mantra, endlessly parroted by climate alarmists, is a statistical sleight of hand, ignoring the diversity of scientific opinion on the extent and impact of human-induced warming as opposed to natural variability.
Trump’s Energy Counter-Revolution
Since his inauguration in January 2025, Trump has unleashed what can only be described as an energy counter-revolution. His administration, led by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has systematically dismantled the anti-fossil fuel edifice erected by the Obama and Biden administrations. From withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement — again — to halting funding for the UN’s climate initiatives, Trump has made it clear that America will no longer subsidise a globalist agenda that undermines its economic sovereignty.
The breadth of the Trump administration’s policy shifts have been extensively documented in these pages: defunding Left-wing NGOs and universities that promote DEI and ‘climate justice’, scrapping ‘efficiency’ mandates that restrict consumer choice and slashing regulatory barriers to energy infrastructure development. Trump’s team has prioritised energy security and affordability, greenlighting pipelines, refineries and drilling projects that had been stalled by bureaucratic red tape.
Trump accused European leaders of hypocrisy — pushing aggressive carbon targets on others – while itself being “on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda”. He mocked the folly of Germany’s Energiewende, which shuttered nuclear plants and doubled down on wind and solar, only to see energy prices soar and coal use rise. Yet, he also praised Germany for its decision to move away from purely ‘green’ energy policies and reopen fossil fuel and nuclear plants. The climate con, Trump argued, is not just a financial scam but a geopolitical one, weakening nations by forcing them to rely on unreliable energy sources while China and India build coal plants at breakneck speed.
Turning to his ‘special relationship’ ally Great Britain, President Trump humiliated Prime Minister Starmer as he slammed the North Sea oil tax regime and its support for wind farms. He said he regretted that the UK Government allowed mass migration and green energy to wreck the country. Leaving aside Trump’s attack on Sadiq Khan’s management of the great city of London, it is worth repeating Trump’s excoriating words on UK’s green policies:
They’ve given up their powerful edge, a lot of the countries that we’re talking about in oil and gas, such as essentially closing the great North Sea oil. Oh, the North Sea, I know it so well. Aberdeen [in Scotland] was the oil capital of Europe, and there’s tremendous oil that hasn’t been found in the North Sea. Tremendous oil, and I was with the Prime Minister who I respect and 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 is 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, English countryside with windmills and massive solar panels that go seven miles by seven miles, taking away farmland. But we’re not letting this happen in America.
The Honey Badger of Climate Geopolitics
David Blackmon’s characterisation of Trump as “America’s Honey Badger” could not be more apt. Like the fearless, tenacious creature that takes on lions and hyenas without flinching, Trump has shown an uncanny ability and a moral courage to confront entrenched interests head-on. His UN speech was a masterclass in this approach, blending defiance with plain-spoken truth. He didn’t mince words about the climate-industrial complex a.k.a. the Green Blob — a sprawling network of NGOs, rent-seeking and subsidy-farming ‘renewables’ companies and zealous bureaucrats who perpetuate the myth of an imminent climate catastrophe. As Blackmon notes, Trump’s willingness to say what others dare not — whether it’s calling out the corruption in climate science or exposing the economic folly of Net Zero policies — sets him apart as a leader unafraid of the Establishment’s wrath.
This fearlessness was on full display when Trump addressed the UN’s role in perpetuating the climate con. He accused the organisation of serving as a mouthpiece for globalist elites, using climate change as a pretext to redistribute wealth from developed nations to unaccountable bureaucracies. By pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement and defunding UN climate initiatives, Trump signalled that America would no longer play along with this charade. His message would have resonated with nations like India, Brazil and others in the Global South, who have long bristled at the West’s attempts to impose climate mandates that stifle their economic growth.
The climate movement thrives on a manufactured consensus that suppresses dissent and ignores inconvenient truths. The obsession with carbon dioxide — a trace gas essential to life — has been elevated to a near-religious dogma, despite evidence that its impact on global temperatures is far less certain than alarmists claim. Indeed, as physicist William Happer argues, more CO2 is much more likely to be good for the world. The push for Net Zero emissions, with its attendant costs in jobs, energy reliability and economic growth, is a solution in search of a problem, one that enriches green energy tycoons while impoverishing ordinary citizens.
Trump’s speech urged nations to prioritise their people over abstract ideals, to embrace energy abundance over artificial scarcity and to reject the fearmongering that has held global policy hostage for too long. By doing so, he positioned himself not just as America’s honey badger but as the world’s most consequential leader in dismantling the climate con. President Trump’s UN speech was a watershed moment, a bold declaration that the era of climate alarmism’s unchallenged dominance is over.
By calling out the climate change movement as history’s biggest con job, he has given voice to millions who have long questioned the wisdom of sacrificing prosperity on the altar of green ideology. His administration’s actions — dismantling subsidies, freeing energy markets and restoring scientific integrity — demonstrate that this is not mere rhetoric but a coherent strategy to reclaim energy security and economic sanity.
Exposing the Emperor’s New Clothes
Like the fabled emperor who paraded naked while his courtiers praised his invisible finery, the climate industrial complex has convinced the world that its costly, impractical solutions are the only path to salvation. Trump, like the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, stood before the global elite and declared the obvious: the emperor is naked, and the climate con is a fiction sustained by fear, greed and groupthink. The analogy is not mere rhetoric. The boy, like President Trump, lacks the filters, self-interest and fear of embarrassment that adults have, so he speaks directly. This is often read as a symbol of uncorrupted truthfulness.
Like the boy in the fairytale, Trump has dared to speak the truth that others feared to acknowledge. The climate emperor stands exposed, and the world now faces a choice: continue to applaud the illusion or embrace the reality that affordable, reliable energy is the backbone of human progress. As Trump’s honey badger spirit continues to reshape global energy policy, one thing is clear: the days of the climate con’s unchallenged reign are over.
This article was first published in The Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2025/09/28/trumps-un-speech-the-climate-emperor-now-stands-exposed/ )
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.