Trump’s power plays overshadow global climate summit

BAKU, Azerbaijan — At the United Nations climate talks bordering the Caspian Sea, a parade of leaders came to the podium this week to urge the world to “seize the opportunities of tomorrow” — in the words of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer — and to avoid disasters that would “put inflation on steroids” — U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell.  

In a cavernous meeting hall nearby, U.S. President Joe Biden’s top climate diplomat (for 67 more days) announced what will almost certainly be a short-lived fee on methane pollution from the oil and gas industry. 

But an ocean and a continent away, Donald Trump was making a rapid-fire series of personnel moves aimed at delivering on his promises to dismember the climate legacy of incumbent U.S. President Joe Biden and erect an alternative vision for government. 

The split screen of events on opposite sides of the world is exposing the stark shift in power over global climate policy taking place in the new Trump era. 

In tapping former Republican lawmaker Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the president-elect opted for loyalty over expertise, energy industry officials said privately after being granted anonymity to express their views freely. Despite being a pro-Trump fixture on the campaign trail, Zeldin never sat on environmental committees during his four terms in the House, though he did join a voluntary bipartisan climate caucus. 

The selection of Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state also signaled a shift in posture toward the United Nations, an institution that the Florida Republican has frequently criticized in unison with other conservatives. Rubio’s hawkish stance toward China also heralds clashes with a nation that many expect to fill the void that the U.S. will be leaving in global climate leadership. Trump’s pick for ambassador to the U.N., Elise Stefanik, has also been critical of the organization.

Trump also announced late Tuesday that he’s tasking billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy with slashing government headcount and spending — immediately raising the prospect of the U.S. being less able to enforce laws and regulations managing the environment. Their work “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media network.

The divide between the news coming out of Mar-a-Lago and from the Azerbaijani capital holds troubling implications for the roles of both domestic and international climate institutions during the second Trump presidency. That’s despite attempts at optimism during Tuesday and Wednesday’s speeches at COP29, including the assessment of Biden climate envoy John Podesta that “the global momentum … is bigger than any one country.”

Biden was also readying himself to send a more concrete signal of U.S. determination to remain on the climate track: His top domestic climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, told POLITICO’s Power Play podcast that the U.S. was preparing to announce a new national goal for cutting carbon pollution by 2035 — setting a marker for what kind of progress is possible, notwithstanding Trump’s return.

Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who worked in the first Trump administration, said a “pretty wide chasm” existed between Trump’s world and the climate officials assembled in Baku, “and it’s only partially about policy.”

“Part of it is about underlying thoughts about how the world should work and does work,” McKenna said. “Those of us who spent our lives in D.C., we are fundamentally conservative with a small ‘c.’ We revere institutions and credentials and process. But team Trump has figured out [that] none of that [will] help them and [that it] actually stands in their way.”

That vision contrasts with three decades of painstaking international collaboration to winch down global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a realm where consensus rules and the competing aims of nations are held in check by the moral suasion of their peers.

But this year, as war and political upheaval posed major distractions, few leaders of major economies bothered to attend COP29. (Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping and European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen were among the no-shows.) Those who did largely brought empty words. In the absence of many Western leaders, authoritarians and the heads of nations deeply reliant on the oil and gas industry for their incomes enjoyed the limelight. 

Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev bridled at the “hypocrisy” of Western countries who have lectured his oil-dependent country on climate while buying up his reserves to feed their industry. On Wednesday, Azerbaijan signed gas supply deals with Slovakia and Bulgaria. 

Then, on Wednesday, Aliyev threw a grenade into the talks. He used a meeting dedicated to small island nations to lecture French and other European delegates about “neocolonialism” and the destructive legacy of their former empires. That prompted France’s ecological transition minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, to boycott the talks and drew bristling responses from the Dutch and the European Union.

Starmer tried to stand against the tide by announcing a goal for the U.K. to slash its emissions by 81 percent below 1990 levels by 2035. Steill, the U.N. climate chief, lauded him as a “powerful example.” 

The United Arab Emirates and Brazil have also announced tough new targets as all three countries seek to zero out their climate pollution by 2050.

Aliyev’s comments on colonialism were doubly charged because the real mission of the COP29 talks is to address the shortfall in the money available in developing countries to build clean energy infrastructure and to protect their communities against climate-change devastation. There, the divide among countries can be measured in the trillions of dollars. Negotiators on Wednesday night were at loggerheads over options for a new annual finance target that ranged from “a floor” of $100 billion — which rich countries prefer — to $2 trillion — a goal being pushed by countries in need.

Creative solutions are being offered to get around that gap. In a strip-lighted meeting room in the temporary venue — the climate meeting is being held in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium in Azerbaijan, a petrostate that has never held an Olympic Games — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Barbadian leader Mia Mottley announced a coalition of countries backing a global “solidarity levy” on aviation, shipping, wealth and fossil fuels. Mottley insisted the levy was “not beyond us politically.” 

Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine told the group that her Pacific atoll nation needed $5 billion just to protect its main two population centers from being overwhelmed by the rising ocean. Her country’s entire GDP is $280 million.

But the coalition is still a germ, joined by just a handful of countries, and one of its founding members, French President Emmanuel Macron, was not present in Baku. 

The prospects for any finance goal agreed at these talks will be limited if Trump decides to curtail contributions from the world’s richest country. The Biden administration provided $9.5 billion during its first three years, up from $1.5 billion when Biden took office from Trump. 

In opening speeches at the U.S. pavilion on Tuesday, Podesta and Zaidi pointed to the durability of the Biden administration’s signature domestic climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump has vowed to halt the law’s billions in unspent dollars, but Zaidi said earlier in the day that it would be economically “destabilizing” to unwind it entirely — pointing to jobs and infrastructure investments the law’s tax breaks and other incentives are overwhelmingly bringing to Republican districts.

They’ve also repeatedly pointed to previous bipartisan cooperation on climate, and spent time lauding the prospects for America’s nuclear industry, a Republican darling though not necessarily a favorite of Trump’s.

“The United States will continue, I think, to show up in one form or another to move the ball forward,” Zaidi said Tuesday.

Yet the prospects for that happening in the halls of the U.N. talks appear dim. Trump has vowed to leave the Paris climate agreement for a second time, and the broader Trump orbit has largely viewed climate diplomacy as a non-factor.

Some within Republican circles have pushed the incoming Trump administration to consider exiting the entire U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1992 treaty underlying the global regime of climate negotiations, according to a former Trump administration energy official. The official said the topic had sparked “healthy debate,” but was of far lower priority.  

“I think there’s a common understanding and agreement that he’s going to start with Paris and then look at other ideas,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss evolving policy considerations.

Mandy Gunasekara, who was chief of staff at the EPA during the last Trump administration, has advocated that Trump follow through this time on leaving the climate framework.

“I think people have a clear picture of how the U.N. process is misused to tie the hands of domestic policy,” she said, inaccurately characterizing the non-binding commitments that countries make under the Paris climate agreement. “And that … creates the type of policy motivation necessary to consider withdrawing from the UNFCCC versus just a derivative issue like the Paris Agreement.”

The U.S. under Trump may still find ways to participate in global climate conversations, particularly with regard to deploying new technology such as advanced nuclear power or carbon capture, said U.S. Energy Association CEO Mark Menezes, who was No. 2 in Trump’s previous Energy Department. But contributing new sums of money to developing country climate projects is likely a non-starter, he said.

“If it’s about the U.S. is going to put up billions of dollars, and other countries won’t contribute to any kind of funds, I don’t think that that’s going to get very far,” Menezes said.

The cognitive dissonance between the goings-on in Washington and Baku was, for at least one leader, too much to bear.

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said he had discarded his “well-prepared speech” after sitting in the lounge set aside for leaders waiting for their three-minute speaking slots. What did it all mean, he asked, “if the world’s biggest polluters continue business as usual?”

“I was watching the silent TV screens,” Rama said. “People there eat, drink, meet and take photos together while those images of voiceless speeches from leaders play on and on and on in the background. To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day. Life goes on with its old habits, and our speeches — full of good words about fighting climate change — change nothing.”