US will not send officials to COP30 climate talks, White House says

The U.S. will not send any high-level officials to the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Brazil, a White House official told Reuters, alleviating some concern among world leaders that Washington would send a team to scupper the talks. Brazil will host a high-level leaders' summit next week before the two-week UN climate negotiations begin in the Amazonian city of Belem.



Earlier this month, the U.S. threatened to use visa restrictions and sanctions to retaliate against nations that would vote in favor of a plan put forward by the United Nations shipping agency, the International Maritime Organization, to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping.



Those tactics led a majority of countries at the IMO to vote to postpone by a year a decision on a global carbon price on international shipping.



The White House official said President Donald Trump has already made his administration's views on multilateral climate action clear in his speech at last month's United Nations General Assembly, where he called climate change the world's "greatest con job" and chided countries for setting climate policies that

he said "have cost their countries fortunes."