An energy coalition is urging President Donald Trump to rein in Big Tech at a United Nations climate summit.
Six energy and policy groups warn that Amazon, Apple, and Google may hurt U.S. interests and break federal law by making “false and misleading” climate statements at the United Nations’ 31st Conference of the Parties (COP31) in Antalya, Turkey, according to a letter to the president shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation. All three companies profit from federal business despite working against the White House’s withdrawal from U.N. climate efforts, the groups argue. Because all three trade on public markets, the letter notes, they answer to federal oversight through the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Amazon, Apple, and Google each did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment. Furthermore, the companies’ attendance at COP31 was unable to be confirmed at the time of writing.
The letter’s signatories are the American Energy Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Heartland Impact, The Heartland Institute, and Truth in Energy and Climate.
“We applaud President Trump for pulling the US out of the UN climate hoax [sic]. But not all Americans have gotten the message,” Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are concerned that technology companies like Amazon, Apple and Google—companies that are government contractors with national security obligations—are nevertheless participating in COP31.”
“The President should bar federal contractors with national security obligations from participating in a process that only works to the benefit of Communist China,” he added.
Milloy served on Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team after the 2016 election, according to E&E News.
“Not only are these companies misleading the public and potentially violating the law by giving the public and investors the impression that they are doing something about supposed ‘climate change,’ but they are also undercutting U.S. foreign policy and national security by participating in COP31,” the letter states in part.
The letter goes on to call on the president to inform U.S. companies they are legally required to be honest and have a duty not to harm national security.
Cameron Sholty, the executive director of Heartland Impact, told the DCNF that the demand to power AI has pushed Big Tech toward natural gas and nuclear, warning that new climate pledges at the conference could harm those projects.
“Executives should also choose their proclamations carefully,” he said. “A COP31 podium provides no exemption from American law.”
Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told the DCNF that the tech companies produce only a sliver of America’s emissions.
“When they tell investors and the public their climate pledges are making a difference, they are selling a story the numbers fail to support,” he said.
The president’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement would “cancel another 0.1°C of the progress” on projected warming this century, a 2025 U.N. emissions report states.
The U.N.’s 2026 report attributed “about half” of a roughly 0.2–0.3°C increase in its global warming forecasts to the U.S.’s “abandonment” of its climate pledge.
COP31, a conference which runs from Nov. 9-20, is the annual meeting for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, an environmental treaty Trump moved to withdraw the U.S. from on Jan. 7. He similarly withdrew the U.S. from the U.N. Paris Agreement, which aims to limit compliant countries’ greenhouse gas emissions, for the second time Jan. 20, 2025.
Editor’s note: This report was updated with statements from Cameron Sholty and Jason Isaac.
(DCNF)