World’s quandary on climate change: ‘Who the hell leads’ if Trump wins?

NEW YORK — Pro-climate government officials and environmental activists have had months to think about a strategy for preventing a second Donald Trump presidency from disrupting their efforts to save the world.

They’ve come up with one main idea: Hope Vice President Kamala Harris wins.

“Winning the election is probably the most important thing for the Democrats,” said Catherine McKenna, who served as Canada’s environment and climate minister during the ex-president’s first term, “having seen what it was like to live under a Trump administration.”

Diplomats, ministers, green advocates and businesses alike avoided engaging publicly with the prospects of a Trump win during nearly a week of events at the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week, both held in New York as a catastrophic hurricane was bearing down on Florida and the Southeast. But the lack of a concrete, unified counter-Trump strategy — during dozens of conversations and interviews — illustrates the difficulties that would confront the global climate movement if it had to face another hostile administration in Washington.

Many leaders said it wasn’t their place to comment on U.S. electoral outcomes — even as they acknowledged their deep investment in it given they’ll have to deal with the consequences.

“People all across the globe, certainly also in the European Union, are closely following what happens simply because it matters to the world at large,” EU climate envoy Wopke Hoekstra said at a New York Times event.

Entertaining a Trump victory would invite wrestling with the inevitable: Once he’s in the White House, there’s nothing other nations can do to keep him and the U.S. government at the table. That would present an almost insurmountable obstacle, given the United States’ role as the world’s largest economy, biggest oil and natural gas producer and biggest historical producer of greenhouse gas pollution — whose active leadership was essential to crafting the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Trump has vowed to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement again, as he did during his first term. This time, however, he could do it faster — at a time when the world is already falling well short of the action needed to prevent climate catastrophe.

“Climate is on the ballot with Kamala Harris,” Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in an interview. “If they care about this, they’ll make sure that Kamala Harris is the person they vote for and ultimately becomes president.”

Trump’s return would present an even greater threat than it did last time, given the fact that the world has even fewer years to course-correct before the planet’s warming reaches tipping points that would erode quality of life for billions of people.

“I hope whichever administration comes into office after the November general elections will have a receptive ear and heart to take heed of the voices of the small and the neglected,” Feleti Teo, prime minister of the Pacific island of Tuvalu, told POLITICO in an interview.

Then again, the activists, executives and diplomats who gathered in New York have been on notice since at least June 27, when President Joe Biden flamed out in his lone debate with Trump, that the former president has a strong chance of returning to the White House.

International climate governance rests on a loose set of norms and rules. It principally relies on trust — the Paris climate agreement, which calls for all countries to reduce planet-heating gases, is non-binding, lacking enforcement or rule of law. Countries merely exert diplomatic and peer pressure to compel nations into more aggressive policies to curb warming.

“My expectation is, certainly if Trump wins, that he’ll pull us out,” Todd Stern, who was special climate envoy and lead negotiator for the Paris Agreement during the Obama administration, said during an event hosted by environmental think tank C2ES. “My guess is that there is not a lot of planning going on.”

Besides pulling out of Paris a second time, Trump has labeled Biden’s green policies a “scam,” and promised to claw back unspent money from the president’s climate law. All those actions would hobble the U.S. claims of climate leadership that Biden worked quickly to restore in his first months in the White House, when he rejoined the Paris Agreement on his first day and held a leader-level climate summit within the first 100 days.

Throughout the past week here in New York, U.S. leaders, climate advisers and business executives have spoken confidently about the rootedness of Biden’s climate policies, namely the Inflation Reduction Act and its hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and other incentives to invest in clean energy.

“Lots of optimism, but it’s interesting, there’s still a place for activists to keep us focused. There’s a huge place for politicians to keep us as nations aligned, and then for the private sector to do the hard work that’s needed,” Siemens CEO Barbara Humpton said in an interview. “Regardless of the party, there’s a huge focus on the things that need to be done to fuel the economy and to work on the issues facing us, like climate change.”

International cooperation could take a bigger hit under Trump 2.0 — with consequences that could have ripple effects.

Many business leaders and diplomats dismissed the idea that Trump would completely roll back the IRA given the investment it has sparked in Republican and Democratic strongholds alike. The danger is more about what would happen internationally, said John Morton, a former climate counselor at Treasury who called U.S. retrenchment “seismic and noticeable.”

“When Trump pulls back from Paris, when he stops sending delegations to work with high-emitting countries around the world — whether it’s India or China or Vietnam or Philippines or South Africa, you name it — that agenda lowers in the mind of our international partners, and we lose momentum,” Morton told reporters Thursday. Morton is now managing director and head of the Americas at the climate investment firm Pollination Group.

Trump has not ruled out exiting the broader 1992 U.N. treaty that underlies the entire framework of climate negotiations, which would pull critical funding from the organization and leave the U.S. outside of the annual talks. In the United States’ absence, a more prominent role would probably go to countries such as China, which has aligned itself with a sprawling group of developing countries and emerging powerhouses on a host of climate issues, including the continuing use of coal-fired power.

Hoekstra warned, without using his name, that a Trump victory would spell disaster for cooperation on a variety of other fronts as well, most principally Ukraine.

He hinted that if Trump won, it would fall to “Americans at home” to step up on climate, along with the EU and China, to preserve progress. That would borrow from the playbook deployed during Trump’s first term, when U.S. mayors, governors and businesses proclaimed they still intended to meet the Paris climate agreement’s terms.

Biden administration officials are trying to cement a stable negotiating framework with China on non-carbon-dioxide greenhouse gases that officials hope could survive a Trump takeover. They’re also hoping moves to infuse the World Bank with more financing and change the way it doles out money will support climate investment that Trump could not unilaterally unravel. And governors have once again pledged to step up action if Trump were to return.

Ministers engaged in the upcoming COP29 climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, insisted that the U.S. election has not yet permeated the talks. But the results are likely to have an unavoidable impact on crucial negotiations on climate finance, a key piece to persuading nations to pursue more ambitious national climate plans.

“It is one of the main issues in the broader calculus of this new climate finance goal. We can’t get over it. We can’t get around it,” said Michai Robertson, a lead negotiator on finance for an alliance of small island developing states.

When Trump announced in 2017 that he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, other governments such as China and the European Union stepped up and said they would try to plug the gap, Robertson noted. But economic and geopolitical circumstances are constraining their ability to pull together and pick up the slack this time around.

“I do think they’re waiting to see whether there will be a [U.S.] government that will hopefully stay within the Paris Agreement regime, and then what can they promise?” Robertson said.

Biden pointed to the dangers of a vacuum in climate leadership in an address to business leaders at a Bloomberg hosted forum Tuesday.

“The rest of the world looks to us. And it’s not about my being president,” Biden said. “If we didn’t lead, who the hell leads? Who fills the vacuum without America leading? That’s who we are, that’s our obligation, and it’s our incredible opportunity.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For low-lying nations drowning under growing climate impacts, ensuring not just finance but immediate action to curb emissions could mean their very survival. It’s something nations like Tuvalu drew attention to this past week at a U.N. summit on sea level rise.

Meanwhile, ministers involved in upcoming climate negotiations said they were principally concerned with their own nations’ plans for reducing climate pollution, noting they can’t control the U.S. election. They nonetheless alluded to the importance of plugging a U.S. leadership gap if Trump wins.

“The commitment that we see among colleagues in the rooms is infectious and here to stay,” United Arab Emirates chief climate negotiator Hana AlHashimi said at the C2ES event. “The trust that we have in the process I think will prevail.”

Across the city, environmental advocates banked on renewed optimism driven by Harris’ campaign to keep Trump out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“This is such a critical juncture for domestic leadership, global leadership and ultimately whether or not we’re going to solve the climate crisis,” said Sweta Chakraborty, a Harris campaign surrogate and climate activist. “The timing of it all is why this week is uniquely more intense than I’ve ever experienced since I’ve been here every single year of Climate Week in New York since it began.”

At a small Tuesday evening gathering on the Upper West Side home of Sierra Club senior adviser Loren Blackford, Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Camila Thorndike, the Harris campaign’s climate engagement director, rallied Sierra Club officials and supporters. Thorndike passed out Harris merchandise — including green “vote climate” lapel pins stylized in the format of pop artist Charli XCX’s hit “brat” album cover.

“Because of Joe Biden, because of Kamala Harris, because of the Inflation Reduction Act, we are opening new factories coast to coast for the first time in my adult life,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous told the crowd in a fiery speech.

Still, not all of the activist community is pinning their hopes on a Harris win, particularly those unhappy about the fact that the U.S. has grown to be the world’s largest producer of oil and gas — the very thing driving up global temperatures.

“The IRA has some good things on climate, and by U.S. standards, is probably the best package that we have seen. But the bottom line is they continue to feed the poison that’s driving the crisis,” said Kumi Naidoo, a long-time activist now heading up efforts to promote the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a coalition of 14 countries seeking a legally-binding agreement to end the use of coal, oil and natural gas.

Naidoo said he and other advocates aren’t putting their faith just in federally elected leaders but in broad swaths of American society.

“And we will use all those cities, states, civil society, faith organizations, trade unions and so on, to get those folks to put pressure on their own governments,” he said. “Which is how it should be.”