It was hardly going to be a sweet-talking session.
Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week was always set to be an enormous shot across the bows, and another platform for the US President to set out his stall on what he sees as the declining influence of the UN in the modern world.
In that respect at last, he did not disappoint. But the speech was also, predictably, used as an opportunity to underline Trump’s view on why the 80-year-old institution’s global sustainability goals, the bedrock of corporate change commitments for many large companies, should also be consigned to history.
Amongst the long list of soundbites, he framed climate change as a “con job”.
With his mood hardly improved by an escalator in the UN building stalling while he was on it — with the likely culprit one of his videographers — it didn’t stop there.
The barbed comments included:
Immigration and green energy policies would be “the death of western Europe”
UN ‘inaction’ on conflict: “empty words don’t end war:
Russia was a “paper tiger” rather than a genuine military power
"I am really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell."
“We have very clean air … but the problem is that other countries like China, which has air that’s a little bit rough, it blows.”
And environmentalists were accused of wanting to “kill all the cows”
Perhaps most contentious of all, the President remarked that his talk has been “well received" by world leaders at the UN event.
As many media outlets concluded, the response from the majority of them was stone silence, a stark contrast to his previous UNGA speech six years ago when many had laughed. As the BBC pointed out, the way that he now wields power and the consequences of getting on his wrong side saw to that.
But as CNN outlined, his rant in New York also offered no answers to the world on its most significant challenges. “One frequent effect of Trump’s speeches to the UNGA is that the rest of the world gets an unabridged look at the disjointed warbling — the president calls it the “weave” — that Americans now take for granted. It would not be surprising if foreign chancellories started to make reassessments of his temperament and his grasp on key issues following Tuesday’s speech,” the article opined.
It was a speech - well, a loose-knit ensemble of remarks - that for the most part piled further uncertainty upon uncertainty. And while the claims and soundbites around the environment and investment in a cleaner economy were nothing new, they came in the context of his belief that the United Nations has become an irrelevant force.
Yet the United Nations, through its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, remains the torch-bearer for collective action to make the world more sustainable, with those focused on mitigating climate change impacts arguably the most important for businesses that have hinged their intentions on them. Yes there are ESG frameworks that aim to bring a consistent, objective framework to investment, action and positive outcomes, but the UN SDGs are the ‘declarations’ that many peg their own goals to.
The UN is far from perfect, as the Financial Times piece on its future outlined this week. “The major faultline is whether to focus on peace and security and cut back on humanitarian initiatives; or whether to hold fast to commitments to sustainable development and combating climate change and inequality, but just find ways of doing them more simply,” it said.
Maybe. But the UN’s level of complexity or effectiveness are not really the point when it comes to the green economic transition. The point is that having set out and updated the goals, it continues to serve as a North Star in a way that other organisations likely couldn’t. The goals give a cohesive sense of direction, and something clear to fall back on, as companies determine their own ambitions, commitments, ways to achieve them and financial logic for doing so.
As the New York Times reported, Trump’s remarks amounted to “familiar grievances”. As they become ever-more familiar, but companies stick to their guns over environmental goals and investments in them, those grievances may start to ring hollow for a corporate world that carries on regardless, with a silent reaction.
