Trump’s return provokes worry, not shock, at world climate talks

BAKU, Azerbaijan — The U.S. and other countries sought to reassure the rest of the world Monday that whatever happens when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, global efforts to arrest climate change will continue.

But lying underneath the show of resolve at the United Nations climate summit was a sense of real worry about how the absence of U.S. leadership will impede the effort — even if Trump’s ascension to the White House is less of a shock than it was eight years ago.

Unlike 2016, when Trump’s first victory lobbed a stun grenade in the middle of that year’s climate talks in Morocco, diplomats are more aware now that he could make real on his promises to walk away from the Paris climate agreement. He has also vowed to gut President Joe Biden’s climate law, which represents the United States’ most extensive effort to deliver on its goals for cutting planet-warming pollution.

That Trump won again wasn’t shocking, said many of the people POLITICO spoke with as the COP29 summit opened on Monday in the capital of Azerbaijan, a Eurasian country that relies on the sale of oil and gas to drive its economy.

“We have seen this story,” said Canada’s former climate minister Catherine McKenna, referring to Trump’s first term. “And when that happened, we saw that the world stepped up.”

What’s generating more anxiety is knowing how far Trump 2.0 could go to unwind U.S. progress at a time when the world needs to be moving even faster to slash its carbon pollution, and not knowing how or whether the rest of the world will step up. This has implications for the blocs of countries seeking to shape the negotiations — including Pacific island nations threatened by the rising seas, developing polluters such as India that have bristled at Western calls for sharper pollution cuts, and European governments that have typically allied themselves with the U.S. in urging faster progress.

Biden’s top climate diplomat, John Podesta, said Monday that businesses, state governments and other important players in the U.S. remain committed to fighting climate change, even if the government under Trump will not be.

“Facts are still facts. Science is still science,” Podesta told a roomful of reporters. “The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country.”

He also argued that the Biden administration’s climate legislation has staying power, in large part because the benefits of shifting to a clean energy economy are starting to take hold. Private-sector energy projects triggered by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are expected to bring more than $150 billion in announced investments and create an estimated 160,000 jobs, overwhelmingly in districts that Trump’s Republican Party represents in Congress.

As the second-largest source of climate pollution worldwide, the U.S. has far-reaching effects on the environment given the massive amount of fossil fuels it produces. That’s likely to be especially true under Trump, who continues to call global warming a hoax and vows to push more oil and gas drilling.

“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, wrote in an email. “He will deliver.”

Podesta and others in the U.S. delegation are “in a difficult position,” said a U.K. government official who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “The one thing they can argue is Trump pulled out of Paris first time around — and look where we are now. A lot is riding on whether Republicans see the value of IRA investments in their states.”

Other climate leaders, observers, activists and officials have echoed similar sentiments in the summit halls at Azerbaijan’s Olympic Stadium near the coast of the Caspian Sea.

Trump’s victory as president of the world’s largest polluter in history threatens to upset the global climate talks, which hinge on getting countries to pledge much greater climate aid to developing nations – on the scale of $1 trillion annually over the next decade.

Prospects of getting even a fraction of the aid out of Congress were always dim, prompting Biden’s diplomats to float various financing schemes that would not rely on the U.S. Treasury.

At the same time, economic powerhouse China and companies around the world, including inside the United States, are investing ever-greater sums into low-carbon technologies such as wind and solar power, batteries and electric cars.

Like McKenna, many leaders say the world has previously survived a U.S. retreat from global climate cooperation. State and city leaders who tried to fill the void say they’ll hold the line this time. Democratic Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, speaking with reporters last week, called Trump a “speed bump.”

“This second time, of course, there is a feeling of frustration, because at the end of the day, this is a global process,” said Sandra Guzman, founder of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean and a former negotiator for Mexico. “And every single party, particularly those that are major emitters like the U.S., play an important role.

“But to be very fair and honest, I don’t see the same sadness and deep concern that I saw the first time,” she added.

Guzman called it overly “U.S. centric” to believe that Trump’s victory would lead to global failure. She said she’ll be looking to see how countries such as China respond, and which governments step up to fill the void.

The U.S. withdrawal could offer China an opportunity to take more of a leadership role in shaping the talks — or at least capitalize on the gains to be made from making the clean energy technologies the world is demanding.

But China’s climate change envoy Liu Zhenmin said Monday that the idea of a U.S. withdrawal still worries Beijing.

“Everybody’s concerned about next steps … whether after the U.S. election, U.S. climate policy will or won’t change,” he told journalists.

For some diplomats, the problem is that at a moment when the world needs more global cooperation, Trump is setting up an environment in which there will be less.

In other words, the vibes are bad.

“I believe the main problem Trump’s election brings is the reduced multilateral cooperation. Also protectionism,” a European diplomat told POLITICO last week after being granted anonymity to share their political views.

Yet things are different from 2016 in other ways, too. The world is battling wars on two fronts, wealthy countries are facing budgetary pressure and European support for the green transition has earned detractors and blowback at the polls.

Each country sets its own nonbinding target for cutting greenhouse gas pollution under the Paris Agreement. But collectively they’re meant to amount to enough action to keep the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, while aiming for 1.5 degrees if possible. Every degree of warming could result in climbing damage. Global temperatures have already risen 1.3 degrees in the industrial era, and 2024 is expected to set another marker as the warmest year on record.

Nations have also agreed that it’s up to the countries with the most money and means – those, such as the United States and nations in Europe, that have contributed the most emissions over more than a century – to take the lead.

Without the U.S. participating in that effort, many countries might be compelled to argue against pleas that they should work harder.

For some of the most vulnerable nations, however, giving up on the climate fight isn’t an option.

When U.S. voters first elected Trump in 2016, officials in the Marshall Islands put their heads down and looked inward, developing a plan to protect the low-lying island chain from rising sea levels and other climate-induced threats, said Kathy Neien Jetn̄il-Kijiner, a negotiator for the Marshall Islands and daughter of president Hilda Heine.

We “developed this really intricate plan for trying to protect ourselves, rather than just waiting for others to tell us how to do that,” she said.

The United States has a complicated role in global climate negotiations. As much as it has tried to push other countries to take stronger action, it has pushed to limit global climate agreements to measures that it knows it can support, often blocking proposals to make governments’ pledges mandatory. It has long taken the position that the U.S. is not liable for compensating other countries for the damages inflicted by its pollution.

But Biden has also injected fuel into the clean energy transition by signing the country’s largest-ever climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, driving demand in the U.S. for greener technologies and pushing allies and competitors alike to follow.

That’s one outgoing message the U.S. administration could send with the potential for a lasting impact.

“This is about optics. This is about the real economy, and if they can actually mobilize and send a very clear, compelling signal on the direction of travel, they will have made a difference,” said Mohamed Adow, founder of the Nairobi-based environmental group Power Shift Africa. “You don’t look for change from politics. You look for change from the energy economy.”

The real economy was also on the mind of other climate leaders.

Simon Stiell, head of the United Nations’ climate body, opened the summit Monday by highlighting how climate disruption could send food and energy prices higher, while countries that chose not to participate in the clean energy transition would lose out to those that are driving it forward.

He also pointed to the importance of global climate cooperation and the need for participation by all nations.

The U.N. climate process, Stiell said, “is the only place we have to address the rampant climate crisis, and to credibly hold each other to account to act on it.”

Zia Weise, Charlie Cooper and Zack Colman contributed to this report.