OPINION
During a World Economic Forum session, Melissa Fleming, U.N. undersecretary-general for global communications, declared that on climate change: "We own the science, and we think the world should know it." Her statement is true.
Unlike almost every other scientific endeavor, where universities and public laboratories lead scientific activity, the United Nations is the main entity correlating the data and research and publishing the policy recommendations on climate change. Most governments, including currently the U.S. government, and companies base their assessments and policy decisions on climate and energy on U.N. reports and data.
When you hear, "listen to the science," you are actually being referred to the U.N. The United Nations is an inherent political body, and its climate activity reflects international politics, not science.
If the Trump administration is going to make fundamental and sustainable changes in U.S. energy policy, Washington must make massive funding cuts to the U.N.'s climate institutions. Pulling out of the Paris agreement, as President-elect Donald Trump did during his first administration, is not sufficient, and as was shown under President Joe Biden, is completely reversable.
The Trump administration's plan to unleash American energy production will face headwinds from the U.N. climate activity, since the U.N. reports serve as a basis for lawsuits aimed to stop fossil fuel production. The incoming administration must also prohibit U.S. government agencies from basing their climate assessments on U.N. reports and data and obligate the agencies to conduct independent research and analysis.
Moreover, if the U.S. wants to provide financing to developing countries for energy projects, it should do so directly and not through U.N. institutions, which often funnel them to undeserving countries such as China.
Climate science is exceptional in that the main entities assembling data and publishing research reports are explicitly political organizations, not universities or laboratories.
The United Nations authors the main reports that inform governments and the wider public on the state of the climate through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most of the leads of the IPCC research teams are individuals that have spent most of their careers in U.N. and other multilateral public institutions, not in universities or scientific laboratories.
The IPCC is composed of 195 members, one from each U.N. member country. This system inherently gives more weight to China and its allies in the Global South than the United States and its allies.
Chinese citizens form a large percentage of the research teams, and the IPCC reports frequently reference Chinese studies. A large portion of the climate policy recommendations of the United Nations promote the interests of China.
Moreover, U.N. climate officials frequently praise the role of China in combating climate change, despite China serving as the single largest source of emissions, while criticizing U.S. Republican administrations for their climate policies.
In the U.N. climate reports, political goals are presented as if they are scientific assessment: "Adaptation and mitigation actions that prioritize equity, social justice, climate justice, rights-based approaches, and inclusivity lead to more sustainable outcomes, reduce trade-offs, support transformative change and advance climate resilient development ('high confidence')."
How did the U.N. test this thesis? Which scientific methodology was employed?
It is hard to imagine how this recommendation is the result of scientific testing.
Frequently, there is a major gap between the data presented in the IPCC reports and their executive summaries, which tend to present a much more extreme interpretation of the data. Political interests come into play in crafting the executive summaries.
Often, U.N. officials exaggerate the claims in the IPCC reports or remove the probability assessments, if they are low. For instance, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres frequently refers to current occurrences of floods as resulting from climate change.
In contrast, the most recent IPCC report stated, "Several climatic impact-drivers are reliant on many factors beyond their associated primary climatic phenomenon. For example, river flooding is heavily dependence on river management and engineering."
The U.N. not only publishes climate research, but its institutions collect data. U.N. reports regularly cite U.N. data, thus there is little outside oversight.
The data-providing agencies include the Climate and Air Coalition under the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP), and the UNEP's International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO).
A major thrust of U.N. activity to avert climate change is diverting trillions of dollars from the West to China and the Global South.
The Biden administration transferred $9.5 billion of U.S. funds to the U.N. for climate adaptation and renewable energy adoption and plans to transfer additional funds before departing the White House. The Trump administration needs to identify how and via which organizations U.S. government funding is funneled, since some of it is indirect.
The executive director of one of these funds — the Green Climate Fund (GCF) — stated recently that "climate finance involves millions of organizations, and it is not solely managed by climate-related bodies."
It is hard to fathom that the United Nations — an institution that appoints China to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Iran to chair the U.N. Disarmament Commission, and Saudi Arabia to the U.N. Women's Rights Commission — will promote objective, scientific-based climate policy. Return science back to universities and the excellent U.S. national laboratories for climate assessments.
Professor Brenda Shaffer has been a faculty member at Harvard and Georgetown. She is senior adviser for energy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on energy security and geopolitics; senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center, contributing expertise on energy policy and its intersections with global security; and faculty research associate at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, where she works with the Energy Academic Group on topics like natural gas trade, geopolitics of energy, and energy in conflict regions.