Bill Gates may have jumped off the climate alarmism bandwagon, but that hasn’t stopped the usual crop of cultist climate doomsayers from their annual gathering to launch their latest sky-is-falling prognostications.

This year’s United Nations climate alarmist confab, COP30, is taking place in Brazil. Conspicuously absent this year are any officials from the Trump administration. But that didn’t stop Donald Trump from pointing out some blatant hypocrisy with these self-identified environmentalists.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “They ripped the hell out of the Rainforest of Brazil to build a four-lane highway for Environmentalists to travel. It’s become a big scandal.” Indeed.

An estimated 100,000 trees were felled to make a highway through the rainforest to the city of Belem, Brazil, where the conference is taking place.

Further adding to the climate alarmist hypocrisy is the fact that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has long touted the climate alarmist narrative, has recently embraced a Trumpish “drill, baby, drill” energy plan. While he has vowed to slash Brazil’s carbon emissions, he’s pushing to drill more oil wells near the Amazon. He argues this is an important revenue stream that will be needed to transition the country to more renewable energy production.

Funny how that works. If renewables were the superior technology, why in the world would nations still depend on fossil fuels to go “green”?

As noted above, neither Trump nor any member of his administration is attending COP30, but the presidential-minded California Governor Gavin Newsom is. And ridiculously, he took a private jet to get there.

What is even more damaging to the climate, at least politically speaking, was Newsom’s spewing of his own hot air: “The reason I’m here is in the absence of leadership coming from the United States. This vacuum. It’s rather jaw-dropping. Not one representative. Not one.” He added, “It’s a global competitive responsibility for us to assert ourselves more forcefully in the absence of national leadership.”

What kind of “leadership” was Newsom offering? “The United States of America better wake up to that,” he warned in one of his many on-stage performances. “It’s not about electric power. It’s about economic power. We, as the state of California, are not going to cede that race to China.”

Except that California is not leading the way. Newsom and the Democrats have effectively chased the oil and gas industry out of the state, and the result has been spiking gas prices and energy costs. The Golden State has become a glaring example of what not to do when it comes to energy policies.

With America in a geopolitical race against China for AI dominance, massive, inexpensive energy production is a must. And not only are renewables more costly, but they are also less reliable and can’t keep up with growing energy demands. If Newsom were really leaning into and touting nuclear energy development, then he might have at least a leg to stand on.

COP30 will ultimately go down as yet another summit of fearmongering over climate change as an excuse to demand that governments take more control over their citizens’ lives, all in a fruitless effort to stop the climate from changing.

Trump is wise to avoid giving any serious attention to this group of globalist know-nothings. Next year’s conference will predictably be more of the same: handwringing over projected global temperature increases, as well as warnings that if emissions aren’t cut by x amount, then catastrophe is right around the corner.

What would be nice is dropping the hubris and simply having a conference where no doom and gloom prognostications are made, where there’s a humble and interesting sharing of scientific discoveries, where thoughtful and positive ideas are offered for realistic ways to adapt to the changing climate rather than fruitless demands to end the use of fossil fuels.