Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the few senior US political leaders to attend this year’s UN climate summit, told AFP on Friday that President Donald Trump’s America is “intentionally” losing the race against China in clean technology.
The 70-year-old lawmaker said he came to Belem, Brazil, to underscore that Trump’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel policies “do not represent the American people” — and that the United States is losing huge economic opportunities.
“Right now we are deliberately losing our competition in solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric vehicles and all the supporting technologies that go with them,” he said in an interview.
“It’s a huge, self-inflicted blow that Trump is delivering, entirely to pay back his fossil fuel donors.”
Whitehouse said that when he arrived in the Amazon city in the early hours of the morning, he passed numerous Chinese electric vehicle dealers — a sight that drove home his message about America’s decline.
The Trump administration declined to send an official delegation to the COP30 summit, leaving only a few prominent Democrats who could attend in an unofficial capacity, including California’s governor and presumptive 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom.
“The Trump administration does not represent the American people on climate,” said the Rhode Island senator, known for his long-running “Time to Wake Up” speeches on global warming in Congress.
“They are doing political work for the fossil fuel industry and the public strongly supports climate action,” he continued, citing a slew of polls to make his point.
For Whitehouse, one of the few remaining paths to climate security lies in carbon pricing, which he says is essential to fueling the innovation needed to cut emissions.
“If it’s free to pollute, there really is no path to safety,” he said, reiterating his support for Europe’s carbon border tax – a key point of contention with developing countries at COP30.
Trump, who received hundreds of millions of dollars from oil and gas giants during his presidential campaign, withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement for the second time on the day he returned to power.
Trump and Republican lawmakers have rolled back clean energy tax breaks and removed incentives for electric vehicles, prompting General Motors to scale back production.
Whitehouse’s team said he will meet with “heads of state, legislators, private sector leaders, environmental champions and civil society leaders” during his visit.
But he cannot participate in the negotiations on the outcome of the COP.
Attending the conference itself was complicated by resistance from the State Department, he said, which forced him to obtain his badge through a nonprofit organization.
“I have never seen the State Department be completely unwilling to support members of Congress traveling with an official Congressional delegation, even to the point of refusing to help us get badges.”
