The United Nations (UN) is a seemingly bottomless pit that the member nations are expected to keep shoveling taxpayer money into. In no area is that more apparent than in the various agencies the UN hosts on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. The UN just keeps asking for money, the agencies and activist groups affiliated with them keep asking for money, and there's just no end to their demands.
They claim they need money to help combat the slightly warming global climate, but you know what? The climate just keeps on chugging, yes, warming slightly, as it has done since the last major glaciation. Despite all the money the climate panic-mongers ask for and spend, nothing changes, not in the data, not in the ever-increasing demands for more and more cash.
Except, now, the Trump administration seems to be looking with increasing skepticism at the money the United States is sending to the UN in the name of climate change, and the United States isn't the only nation that seems now inclined to starve this beast.
On July 14, the UN’s Adaptation Committee put fund managers, negotiators, and development bankers on a video call to work through a problem that clearly has them rattled. The money is drying up.
The Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Adaptation Fund all sent people to explain how developing countries can tap them for cash. What they mostly did was ask for more. The reason they are running short, though, is news that ought to please anyone who pays U.S. taxes. In February 2025, the United States rescinded roughly $4 billion in outstanding pledges to the Green Climate Fund. We were the first country to do it. This spring, the United Kingdom followed, halving its pledge from £1.6 billion to about £815 million.
The people on the call treated this as a crisis. For anyone who works for a living and pays the bills, it looks more like a rescue.
Rescue, indeed; a rescue from continually being asked to pick up the tab for the UN's boondoggles. And where, you might ask, does all that money go? It's a fair question. Here's the answer.
Where does the money go? The funds prefer to answer that in their own vocabulary. Ask what they finance, and you get “readiness,” “institutional capacity,” “capacity building,” “accreditation support,” “project preparation,” and “locally led adaptation.” Some of it does buy physical things, water systems and farms and flood defenses. A good deal of it, though, pays to build and staff the offices that write the grant applications in the first place.
There's an old saying often attributed to corruption in the old Soviet Union, that goes "the left hand washes the right," and that would appear to be what's in play here; billions of taxpayer dollars paying for administrators, bureaucrats, and all manner of other sinecures for people who are producing nothing more than the kind of thing I used to shovel when I worked summers in my uncle's livestock auction barn.
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And get a load of the entitlement mentality that emanates from this "Adaptation Fund":
The Adaptation Fund reported an active pipeline worth about $1.9 billion with an appetite that seems to have no ceiling.
Adaptation Fund specialist Alyssa Gomes said flatly, “We do need more finance.” The Green Climate Fund talked up a board decision that could unlock roughly $4 billion in new programming capacity. No number is ever sufficient, because the demand is set by the funds themselves, not by any budget a taxpayer ever approved.
Ay, that's the rub: No taxpayer ever, directly or indirectly, even approved all this spending.
What more blatant a recipe for corruption might one find? This is the kind of thing that would make a Biden blush for shame. These people demand an unlimited supply of money, and until recently, they've been getting it. They toil not, neither do they spin, and nobody, until recently, ever called them on it.
And, unlike people working in the private sector, they aren't expected to show any progress, or any results, which is good for them, because they have nothing to show for all the billions spent.
You couldn't come up with a cushier gig than this, and with zero expectations to boot.Now, though, the Trump administration and even the United Kingdom are taking back some of the promised spending, which begs the question, "Why not take back all of it?" Better question: Why are we, the United States, still involved with the UN at all? Why are we still sending Americans' hard-earned money to this dysfunctional organization that outlived any usefulness it ever had decades ago? Why are we still part of an international organization that recognizes Iran as a worthy member nation of a panel on women's rights, but screams bloody murder (literally) when Israel detonates a few bloodstained Hamas militants who were involved in the October 7th, 2023 atrocities?
We don't need the UN. Not anymore, if indeed we ever did. We don't need to fund their endless bureaucracies in the name of climate change, or anything else. We don't need their building in New York City; let them meet in The Hague, or in Lagos, or in Beijing, for all anyone cares. President Trump and his administration are right to look skeptically at the amount of money we've been spending on the UN, but it's about time we took the next step and cut them off completely.
