NEW YORK — U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told Breitbart News exclusively of how President Donald Trump and his cabinet rallied at the 11th hour to thwart globalists from creating a “global green tax” that he argued would have created a “U.N. climate slush fund.”
Waltz’s comments came during a lengthy exclusive on-camera interview in late October at the United Nations, where Breitbart News joined the newly-confirmed Ambassador for his first major interview since his U.S. Senate confirmation. The broader interview, focused on U.N. reform, is forthcoming. But this piece of it is particularly important, and Waltz’s efforts and the efforts of the president and the rest of the president’s cabinet shows just how effective Trump’s administration in his second term is in terms of stopping other countries from imposing costly green agenda insanity on the United States. Waltz said Trump’s final Truth Social post on this was like a wrestler coming off the top ropes to finish off an opponent.
“They were this close to mandating that we basically have a Green New Deal in our global shipping fleet,” Waltz told Breitbart News on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly in the interview taped on Thursday, Oct. 23. “Eighty percent of our economy is based on trade. It would have been devastating. In fact, it would have added a billion dollars a month to the cost of sending our goods around the world or receiving goods. We got fired up as a cabinet — the EU, Brazil, and others thought this thing was a done deal. We got everybody involved, including the president. He came in off the top ropes, and we defeated that vote. I think we just saved the American consumer a massive, massive — what would have been the first U.N. tax in global history just this past week. So that’s the kind of fighting that we’re doing in the types of these organizations, and the kind of wins that we have to deliver for the American people.”
Waltz points to this victory as a major reason why the U.S. should engage in these global institutions like the U.N. and similar organizations because if the U.S. had walked away entirely then the globalists there would have gone forward with their plans. Since the U.S. engaged and fought and won, their plans were thwarted — thanks to Trump.
“Look, if we just walked away, they would have done it,” Waltz said. “We would have ignored it. But you know what? Whether it’s our farmers exporting our crops or our manufacturers bringing in certain parts they need or what have you, everybody would have been affected. So I’m squarely in the camp of let’s fight — let’s fight for the American consumer and the American people and American industry. To the extent our economy is touching the world, we have to be engaged in these organizations.”
Waltz described the effort to stop this thing as a whole-of-government approach from the Trump administration, specifically noting that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Energy Secretary Chris Wright had joined him and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as Trump himself to fight it.
“It was also Secretary Duffy at Transportation, Secretary Wright at Energy, right?” Waltz said. “ It was, of course, Secretary Rubio. It was really an across-the-board [effort], a number of senators that were raising the alarm bells as well especially [those in states] with big ports and where shipping and trade really matter to their states and districts. So it was one of those things which was kind of bubbling along, and we’re ringing the alarm bells, and then we just grabbed a hold of it, and the President brought what only he can do with a powerful Truth and this is what they’re not used to with Biden and the previous administration. We said there will be consequences if you do this and we laid out what those consequences were. Now, we were accused of being diplomatic gangsters and bullies and what have you. But look, it was they who are being the climate bullies and we’re not going to allow them to do that to our shipping fleet. If it had happened, here was the real secret. The EU was subsidizing all the biofuels that they wanted to push our ships to and the only place we could retrofit our ships were in Chinese ports and shipyards. So this would have been a win for the EU, a win for China, a loss for the United States. We said, ‘We’re not going to have it,’ and we got in there and won.”
Waltz further explained that the tax that would have been created would have targeted U.S. ships and forced them either to pay billions in global taxes or go through retrofitting in China to use European-backed power sources — but ultimately this has been stopped. He does expect the globalists who pushed this effort to try again, but he said next time the Trump administration will be even more prepared and will stop it again.
“If we had coal, fired gas, fired oil, fired ships, this global organization was going to impose a fine on those shipping companies, of course, and that would have been to the tune of a billion dollars a month globally that would have been passed on to the consumers, obviously,” Waltz said. “That money then would have would have formed a U.N.-run green climate slush fund to the tune of $12 to $15 billion a year that would have turned around and done more and more of this. It really would have been the first global green tax and I think we would have felt it through inflation. We would have felt it on our consumer shelves and it would have been yet another assault on the American oil and gas industry. So, are they trying again? Of course they’re going to try again. As we came at this, frankly, a little bit last-minute, we won, but we delayed the vote until next year. We’re going to make our position crystal clear, and I don’t think this thing is going to get through now. This is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what’s happening in these over 80 organizations around the world. What it really amounts to is a climate ideology that is nonsensical. It’s an ideology that just doesn’t make sense. For example, in AI [artificial intelligence], a big piece of that is power. You can’t power AI through wind and solar — you just can’t — and we already know the President’s problems with wind. We already know that the vast majority of solar panels are made where? In China. But we need an all-of-the-above solution. We need nuclear, we need gas, we need oil, we need coal, and those other renewable forms of energy in order to win. But what we find is even when we reach, say, some kind of trade deal with a country or with the EU, then they try to back door these regulations in favor of them and against us through these international organizations that are often under the U.N. umbrella. That’s why we need fighters in here. I have Tammy Bruce who will be going to the Senate to be the Deputy Ambassador here. We have myself, and we have other members of the team that 100 percent believe in the President’s America first agenda. We’re going to start fighting and blocking and tackling in these organizations.”
The rest of Waltz’s interview with Breitbart News at the U.N., focused on U.N. reforms the Trump administration is seeking, is forthcoming very soon.
