Defund The U.N. Green Climate Fund

The United Nations Green Climate Fund is running out of other people’s cash. Shortly after taking office last year, President Donald Trump rescinded $4 billion Washington had pledged. A few months later, the United Kingdom cut its $2.2 billion pledge by half. As is always the case, what’s bad for the climate zealots is good for everyone else.

Roughly a year after the administration pulled the taxpayer-provided funding, the Treasury Department took the next step, notifying the Green Climate Fund that the U.S. was “withdrawing from the fund and stepping down from its seat” on the fund’s board.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Americans would “no longer fund radical organizations like the GCF whose goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction.” A few of us said “hallelujah” in response.

The GCF has reportedly spent part of the 2026 summer looking for money after losing all of its American funding and half from the U.K., which had been its largest benefactor (or most gullible sap, if we’re being open and honest) over the most recent funding rounds as of March 2025. This reminds us of the sophomoric slogan from another generation that insisted “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” Except in this instance, it’s a great day when climate grifters have to beg for money while someone is looking out for the beleaguered American taxpayer.

The United Nations GCF is nothing but a racket. “It is neither green nor about climate,” it is “a wasteful fraud,” says David Wojick of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. The fund has received and spent more than “$20 billion to date, with more billions coming.” As if in defiance of the extravagance, Earth’s temperature has refused to respond.

Despite its name, the GCF is simply another vendor of foreign aid.

But that doesn’t mean that it does good work. An objective observer would say it’s in the same incestuous family tree as USAID, the corrupt federal agency that was shut down last year by the Trump administration. Under the Biden administration, USAID was weaponized to establish “foreign aid programs to fund abortion, gender and identity ideology, and climate alarmism,” none of which improved anyone’s lives outside of those who administered the con. As the Heritage Foundation has noted, USAID activities under the autopen presidency were “likely to undermine the economic prospects and self-reliance of USAID’s beneficiaries.”

Unlike USAID, which doubled as a taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for Democrats, the GCF hasn’t been taken down. But it needs to be dismantled, just as its parasitic parent, the United Nations, should be shut down and run out of the country. The world would be better off without this meddlesome, venal, and baleful organization. And its many poisonous tentacles.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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