The U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly stopped the participation of the country’s scientists in key U.N. climate change assessments.
Quoting two sources familiar with Trump’s latest action, Reuters reported today that the move was part of the stop-work order United States’ broader withdrawal from climate change mitigation efforts and multilateral cooperation.
According to the news report, the affects staff members of the U.S. Global Change Research Programme and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who engage with a key working group of the U.N team.
This implies that the United States will not attend a major IPCC plenary meeting in Hangzhou, China, next week, to plan the seventh global climate assessment, said one of the sources.
Commenting on the development, a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Delta Merner, said: “The power of the IPCC is that governments, businesses and global institutions can operate with shared conclusions. The U.S. being completely removed from that process is concerning.”
Reuters reported that the White House declined to comment and that the State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Staying with developments in the United States, oil and biofuel groups in the country banded together to urge the Trump administration to increase volumes of renewable fuels that must be blended into the nation’s fuel mix in 2026 and beyond, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The news report indicated that the move was unusual because the oil and biofuels industries are frequently at odds with each other on issues related to the Renewable Fuel Standard programme.
Both industries’ interests, however, align in opposition to electric vehicles, which pose a threat to any form of liquid fuel.
The groups stated in a letter to the new administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, that “while our organizations have not always agreed on every detail, we have joined together in recognition of the critical role liquid fuels serve in the American economy, to advance liquid fuels, and ensure consumers have a choice of how they fuel their vehicles.”
