Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
By Lisa Friedman
Nov. 11, 2024, 12:00 a.m. ET
World leaders gathering in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Monday for a global climate summit face a bleak reality: The United States, the country responsible for pumping the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is expected to soon drop out of the fight against climate change.
The climate talks are the first significant United Nations gathering since Donald J. Trump won last week’s American presidential election, and foreign diplomats are looking for any signals about how Mr. Trump might approach multilateral negotiations.
After his victory, American priorities are expected to quickly shift.
As he did in his first term, Mr. Trump, who mocks climate change, intends to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, a 2015 international pact to protect the planet that he has called “horrendous.”
That means the United States will renege on its commitment to reducing greenhouse gases at precisely the moment that scientists say nations must sharply and rapidly cut the heat-trapping pollution to avoid the worst consequences of an overheated planet.
It also means that the country, the wealthiest in the world, is likely to abandon plans to give financial aid to poor countries, which have done little to cause global warming but are unable to cope with climate disasters that are growing more severe. Financial aid for developing nations is a focus of the U.N. talks, which are known as COP29 and are scheduled to last two weeks.
Instead of transitioning away from fossil fuels, as the United States and nearly every other country pledged last year, the incoming Trump administration will soon go in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill,” export more gas to other nations — even as the U.S. is already the world’s biggest exporter — and make it easier to burn coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Donald J. Trump during a campaign event at Alro Steel in Potterville, Mich., in August. Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
“We’re not going to worry about emissions anymore,” said Myron Ebell, a former senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization, who helped lead a transition team in Mr. Trump’s first term. “The United States under the Trump administration will lead the world to a better future, and the sooner you forget all this stuff about reducing emissions the better.”
Mr. Trump will not take office until Jan. 20, but his impending return and broader geopolitical tensions appear to be sapping momentum at COP29 even before it gets underway.
The leaders of the European Commission, Germany, France, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Japan, Australia and Papua New Guinea, along with President Biden, are skipping the event. So are major financiers, including the heads of Bank of America, BlackRock, Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank.
Representatives of the Biden administration in Baku are lame ducks now, with little leverage over any deal. Nations hoped to unlock billions or even trillions of dollars for clean energy and climate adaptation through an agreement, but that is now viewed as harder to achieve. America’s credibility as a reliable partner in the fight against climate change is also on the line.
“We do have some experience from the first term of the Trump administration, when he took the U.S. outside the Paris Agreement,” said the ambassador of Samoa, Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr Pa’olelei Luteru, who leads a coalition of small island nations in the climate talks. “If it’s going to be the same, then we are extremely worried.”
Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, said world leaders are correct to be anxious. “Donald Trump will withdraw America’s leadership on the global stage, and he will bend over backward to help the fossil fuel industry,” he said.
Months ago, foreign diplomats insisted that they were prepared for the possibility of a second Trump administration. This week many acknowledged being stunned by his decisive win.
“To find that suddenly Trump has won the popular vote with a big margin, that is a big question. Why is it so?” asked Laurence Tubiana, who served as France’s climate ambassador during the creation of the Paris Agreement. She called it “a blow for climate action.”
Mr. Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests to discuss his plans for the Paris Agreement, but multiple people close to his transition team said an executive order already has been prepared to start the withdrawal process.
Biden administration officials and environmental leaders insisted that the clean energy revolution is unstoppable, regardless of who controls the White House.
They also are assuring global allies that America’s governors and mayors will help fill the void, as they did the last time Mr. Trump made the United States the only country to withdraw from the Paris accord.
“We’ve been in this position before,” said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat who chairs a coalition of 24 governors that is sending a delegation to Baku. “We are going to continue our commitments.”
Many made the case that circumstances are different from 2017, when Mr. Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris accord. The agreement was then in its infancy, and the global transition to clean energy was just getting started. Today, almost every country has a plan to draw down emissions, and clean energy is big business. Last week, more than 650 investors with $33 trillion in assets worldwide urged governments to enact policies aligned with preventing temperatures from reaching catastrophic levels.
The United States has since passed a landmark climate change law. The legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is pumping at least $390 billion into wind, solar and other clean energy manufacturing.
DTE Energy in Michigan is phasing out coal fired power plants as the company shifts to cleaner, renewable energy sources. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Wind turbines are part of DTE’s renewable energy initiative. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Mr. Trump wants to repeal the law, but that could be politically challenging since about 80 percent of the investment in new manufacturing so far has flowed to Republican congressional districts.
“The investments that were stimulated by this administration not only are good for the economy but they’re quite stable,” said John Podesta, Mr. Biden’s climate adviser, who is leading the American delegation in Baku.
“If you go sector by sector, the new power generation is going to be clean,” he said. “The desire to build out next generation nuclear is still there. The hyper-scalers are still looking for deals with clean energy. The auto companies are still investing in electrification and hybridization. All these trends are not going to be reversed overnight by Trump.”
And yet climate change math is unforgiving. Without the United States working at the national level to slash emissions and galvanize other countries, hope of preventing average global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels is fading. That is the threshold beyond which climate scientists say the risks significantly increase for more destructive storms, drought, wildfires, heat waves and species extinction.
The European Union agency that monitors global warming said last week that 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year in recorded history and the first calendar year in which global temperatures had consistently risen 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
A single year above 1.5 degrees Celsius does not mean the Paris Agreement target has been missed. Under the terms of the pact, for that to happen, temperatures would have to stay at or above 1.5 degrees over a 20-year period.
To constrain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists say nations must cut emissions 40 percent by the end of this decade. Instead, global greenhouse gas emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year and are not on track to decline much, if at all, this decade, according to a recent U.N. report.
The consequences of that warming are being felt on every continent. This year alone, three months worth of rain fell in a two-week period in Brazil and caused disastrous flooding, and torrential rains led to flash floods in Spain that killed more than 219 people. In the United States, Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit in quick succession, killing more than 230 people and causing as much as $34 billion in damages combined, according to an estimate by Moody’s, a financial ratings agency.
“This is the new normal,” said Niklas Höhne, a scientist with NewClimate Institute, a nonprofit group. “It will not go away. Only once we stop greenhouse gas emitting, the temperature will stop rising and the likelihood of such events will stop rising.”
A person walks through a mud-covered street as the area recovers from last week’s widespread flooding in Massanassa in the Valencia region of Spain, on Saturday. David Ramos/Getty Images
By some estimates, compared with Mr. Biden’s policies, Mr. Trump’s plans could add about four billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2030. That’s about equal to the amount produced annually by the world’s 140 lowest emitting countries.
If Mr. Trump withdraws the United States from the Paris Agreement, it would be the third time the nation has abandoned an international climate agreement.
Under President Bill Clinton, the United States joined the Kyoto Protocol, a legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that was a precursor to the Paris Agreement. The Senate rejected it, though, because it set binding emissions caps but only for wealthy nations, letting China off the hook.
President Barack Obama reignited the country’s climate efforts and helped design the Paris Agreement. Under that pact, nations of all levels of wealth and responsibility for causing climate change, including China, agreed to set domestic emissions targets.
The accord essentially ties together every nation’s voluntary emissions pledge in a single forum, with the understanding that countries will set even tougher targets over time. It is not legally binding and there are no penalties for failure to meet climate goals.
Mr. Trump nevertheless saw the Paris deal as damaging to the American economy, and called it “draconian.” He also halted American contributions to a global climate fund. Mr. Biden restored American participation on his first day in office in 2021.
Jonathan Pershing, who served as deputy climate envoy in the Obama and Biden administrations, said no other country followed the United States out of Paris under the first Trump administration, and he believes none will now.
But the erratic American behavior makes it hard to win the trust of allies, Mr. Pershing said. And this could be the moment when America finally loses its ability to convince other nations to act more aggressively on climate. “That to me is the worst outcome,” he said.
Mr. Luteru, the ambassador of Samoa, said he is not ready to accept that the United States would abandon the climate fight. “The U.S., we’re hoping that their conscience will tell them that they are part of this world,” he said.
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