Is COP30 a Con Job?

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, (UNFCC) each year convenes an international convention on climate change known as the Conference of Parties, (COP). From November 10-21, 2025 COP 30 was held in Belém, Brazil.

President Trump made these remarks in the lead-up to COP30, from which the President had withdrawn the United States—and that provokes the question: is the Conference of Parties itself a con job?

The answer is yes, no and maybe.

Maybe it is the result of using the terms “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” synonymously. I believe the term “Global Warming” is misunderstood by many, especially after a very cold winter this season and the Blizzard of 2026, the term sounds counterintuitive to what we experience. Technically the bombogenesis of nor’easters and rapidly forming hurricanes are a result of warming ocean temperatures, causing climate change.

The COP is not a con job because it deals with setting targets for nations to reduce their carbon emissions—and that’s a good thing. The COP conferences continue to report and monitor carbon emissions and commitments of different nations, as they have done since the beginning, which I see as a very productive aspect of these conferences.

However, it is in how this monitoring is done—and what it leads to—that I believe there is a con job happening. It goes all the way back to the beginning of the COP, and centers around the adding of a social agenda, punishing nations, and including a global redistribution of wealth.

At COP3, which took place in Kyoto in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was established. While many countries signed on to this treaty, the United States’ adoption of the Kyoto Protocol was unanimously defeated in both the House and Senate. One of the main reasons the Kyoto Protocol was defeated unanimously was because of the social programs it contained. The US was the wealthiest country with the highest per capita carbon footprint, so under the Kyoto Agreement, it would have to pay fines, which would go to developing nations so they could start implementing renewable energy infrastructure. The UN and the countries that signed the agreement, most of which are social democracies, saw this as a reasonable arrangement. But in the US, it offended our capitalist, free market way of thinking and operating our economy.

The U.S. is the largest contributor to all these social programs they mix in. If the COP would just deal with climate change alone, without the social implications, without wealth redistribution, I think the U.S.—and other countries as well—would have a very different attitude toward these conferences. As NPR reported, “Wealthy countries have been unreliable funders in the past. Developed nations were late meeting a prior funding commitment. And funds set up to compensate countries for climate-related damages are still mostly empty, according to U.N. Secretary General António Guterres.” This points to how those major donors—larger nations like the U.S.—feel about these mandates. They’ve reached a saturation point.

But there is an insidious con job happening here at an even more foundational level: how we measure carbon emissions, which was also established in the Kyoto Protocol. The COP has repeatedly declared the U.S. to be the largest emitter per capita. However, China is the largest emitter overall—and I think per capita is the absolute wrong way to measure it.

This belief comes from my work in the construction industry. We build according to zoning. When a developer proposes a project, one of the factors considered is density. There is a limited amount of land area on this globe. The greater the density, the greater the impact on our environment. The lesser the density, the less impact on our environment. The same should be held true for carbon emissions. The population density within a country needs to be the defining factor, not a per-capita factor.

When you have a large number of people packed into a small area, it affects the environment. Until the infrastructure is in place to accommodate water supply, sewage, trash, etc., they trend toward squalor. You see this in incredibly densely populated countries like India, and you even see it in big cities in developed countries—including here in the U.S. You need infrastructure in place to have a healthy urban environment.

The problem is density—and I believe there is a direct correlation between density and carbon emissions. I believe the metric was established in this way because the COP looked at the United States—the richest country in the world—and, knowing Americans would never reduce their per capita rate of carbon emissions, knew they could always penalize the U.S. And these penalties would then help fund a global redistribution of wealth.

This, I believe, is why we reacted so forcefully to the Kyoto Protocol—and why we continue to react so forcefully. I believe the problem is this redistribution of wealth, based on that per capita metric. If, instead, we were to measure carbon emissions per square mile or square kilometer, I think we would come up with very different valuations of whose carbon emissions are higher—because the more densely populated a country is, the greater the environmental impact is. Compare the density of New York City to the same area upstate New York, in the Adirondacks. It is common sense, the carbon footprint of New York City is much higher, by a long shot, when the density metric is used.

I believe this has never been taken into consideration. I don’t believe anyone has calculated countries’ carbon emissions per square mile. I don’t know why not—but I believe it is an idea that needs to be considered. I believe it could change the whole conversation.

If the U.S.—the largest, most sophisticated and technologically advanced country in the world— continues to boycott the COP, it will eventually make these conferences a non-event, irrelevant. These Conferences of the Parties need to focus on climate change itself and bring the United States back into the fold.

Frank Dalene, an Amazon Best Selling Author in Green Business & Environmental Economics titled, Decarbonize The World: Solving The Climate Crisis While Increasing Profits In Your Business, and Founder of the Hamptons Green Alliance, a 501(c)(3) Public Charity. Learn more at frankdalene.com and hamptonsgreenalliance.org.