BAKU, Azerbaijan — The U.S. has played the powerbroker in more than 30 years of global negotiations on fighting climate change — a quest that has swept in an army of diplomats, the world’s biggest companies and every nation on Earth.
The first climate summit since Donald Trump’s second White House victory underscored the volatile side of that legacy.
In a 14-day conference focused on hundreds of billions of dollars in climate finance, everybody recognized that the incoming U.S. president will refuse to pay any amount the Biden administration agrees to. President Joe Biden’s emissaries helped orchestrate a multinational pledge for “ambitious” carbon-cutting, but they declined to join it. And as the U.S. prepares to recede from global leadership, much of the rest of the world is looking to China to fill the void.
Trump’s upcoming presidency is the most important source of the instability on display at the COP29 summit, despite all the Biden administration’s efforts to send signals that America is still on board with the climate cause, said Carlos Fuller, Belize’s permanent representative at the United Nations.
“This has become the COP of uncertainty because of that change,” Fuller told POLITICO. “Whatever the U.S. says here — now, it could be with the best intentions — will they follow through? Or will they just say, ‘I can give you everything,’ but then it means nothing?”
Trump’s rise and resurgent far-right political movements across Europe were just one of many shadows over the climate talks that ended early Sunday, held in the capital city of oil-rich Azerbaijan. Saudi resistance torpedoed any effort to end the summit with a call to move away from fossil fuels — never mind that a pledge to do just that was the supposedly triumphant achievement of the last climate summit less than a year ago.
All the while, scientific evidence mounted that the Earth’s temperatures are rising toward catastrophic levels.
“The worst part is the unpredictability,” Brazilian climate chief Ana Toni told POLITICO. “The whole world says that on finance, on policy, we need a roadmap, we need predictability.
“And then,” she added, “you have the U.S. going in and out.”
Here are key takeaways from this year’s climate talks, and what they bode for what’s next:
Hopes for meeting ambitious temperature targets are a bust
COP29 began with inauspicious news: The World Meteorological Organization said that this year would eclipse 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming since the pre-industrial age for the first time.
The mark, which set a record for the modern era, is in some ways symbolic: Crossing that threshold for one year is less dire than doing so over a 30-year climatological timescale, the point at which catastrophic effects of warming — runaway ice melt, heatwaves and droughts that make parts of the world virtually uninhabitable, and rising seas that swallow low-lying lands and islands — would become irreversible.
Still, the milestone showed that the world is most likely heading past 1.5 degrees for the long haul, despite nearly a decade of vows by world leaders to avert it.
Even before Trump takes office, the U.S. is already on track to miss Biden’s target of halving its greenhouse gas pollution during this decade, relative to 2005 levels. Trump’s policies, which include vows to leave the 2015 Paris climate agreement, unwind Biden’s climate law, reverse vehicle fuel economy standards and pump more oil and gas, would throttle the pace of emissions reductions and global cooperation.
Some nations at COP29 echoed Trump’s approach. Populist Argentine President Javier Milei openly flirted with exiting the Paris pact, while Saudi Arabia blocked attempts to restate last year’s fossil fuel pledge.
The U.S., meanwhile, declined to join a coalition including the European Union, Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and Norway that promised during the conference to embrace “ambitious” new climate plans by early next year. U.S. officials did not explain their absence from the effort, even though the Biden administration had helped orchestrate the pledge.
Broadly, nations arrived unwilling to move from their “red lines” on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, said South African Environmental Minister Dion George, who co-chaired that negotiating track. He said the U.S. was more “subdued” when “normally they talk a lot.”
Taking hardened positions is “not in anybody’s interest, frankly, but I think that’s a reflection of where we are heading in the world,” he told POLITICO. “What’s required in this type of environment where we are seeing very interesting geopolitical shifts: Leadership is required. And bravery. And I’m not seeing much of it.”
Show me the money (once Dems are back in power)
The summit’s most contentious issue involved how much money wealthy nations would offer poorer countries to help them cope with climate disasters while moving their economies toward clean energy. Factions arrived poles apart — with some rich countries pushing for $200 billion in climate financing each year for the next decade, even though studies indicate the real need is more than $1 trillion a year.
An independent analysis by finance experts said developing nations needed $300 billion per year of public, mostly grant-based funding that charges little or no interest, plus a total of $1 trillion annually provided by other sources such as the private sector.
Senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the looming four years of Trump 2.0 and at least two years of full Republican control of Congress moderated how much climate finance the United States could expect to deliver. Instead, they sought to craft a deal that a future, climate-friendly administration could meet.
The summit ended with a call for at least $300 billion in annual finance, which representatives of developing countries called insufficient to meet their needs.
“The U.S. elections and many other geopolitical events have changed what [the rich countries] could have provided,” said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a coalition of island states.
Trump and congressional Republicans zeroed out climate finance during the president-elect’s first term. Biden spent four years slowly rebuilding those U.S. efforts, hitting $11.4 billion this year and achieving its goal of quadrupling 2016 levels.
But the pendulum will almost certainly swing back. While Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment on the finance talks, the president-elect has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a hoax designed to weaken the United States, and he has put Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of an effort to find trillions of dollars in cuts from government spending.
At the same time, the U.S. took part in a contentious meeting among major economic powers early Saturday, after which it joined Australia and European countries in agreeing to set the number at $300 billion a year.
One European negotiator criticized the U.S. positioning, saying the Americans “behaved as if they have got more influence than they have when they have only got weeks left in power.”
The emergence of Trump in the U.S. and European leaders who complained of fiscal constraints in their capitals led to “a lot of posturing” and blame shifting on finance, said Ruleta Camacho-Thomas, Antigua and Barbuda’s climate ambassador.
“There’s a lot of waiting and seeing what the other country will do and what the other group of countries will do: ‘But if these people are not doing this, then I can’t do that,’” she said. “That is global politicking. And this is about survival for us.”
As wide as the divide on climate was, Trump’s emergence made it more important to not let COP29 fall to pieces, one European diplomat said.
“The developing countries are now saying that it is better to have no agreement than a bad one,” said the diplomat, who was granted anonymity to discuss closed-door talks. “Normally that is true but in this case, with the upcoming presidency in the U.S., it should be crucial for them to have an agreement now.”
China is ascendant
The U.S. receding under Trump amid his likely withdrawal from the Paris Agreement make room for China to take over the global climate leadership role. But how China will lead is a major question.
Beijing’s massive subsidies for its clean energy technology have reduced costs for developing nations’ green transitions, yet its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure lending program has saddled those countries with onerous debt. While reports show China’s greenhouse gas pollution may have peaked, it is still by far the world’s top driver of climate change. Accelerating China’s carbon-cutting is key for staying below 1.5 degrees, but it’s still building more coal-fired power plants.
China also routinely resists pleas for transparency for its pollution-cutting measures. The same is true on climate finance.
“China is a bit complex, but at the same time, we do see leadership from China,” said Harjeet Singh, global engagement director with the environmental group Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.
Trump’s rise will likely give China more of the global market, clean energy analysts have said. Ending Biden’s consumer incentives for buying electric cars, which Republicans have targeted, and subsidies for making batteries, solar panels and wind turbines would curtail burgeoning U.S. efforts to compete in realms that China dominates.
China has also led a backlash against efforts by the U.S. and other wealthy nations to impose industrial policies that would blunt China’s stranglehold over key raw materials and technologies for green energy. It has prodded emerging economies to criticize policies such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and and the EU’s carbon border tariff, arguing they make greening their economies more expensive.
At COP29, Trump’s impending return to power gave the U.S. less leverage to corral China into making compulsory contributions to the finance goals. China — which has the world’s second-largest economy — hung onto a 1992 U.N. determination that it is poor enough to avoid paying into those efforts, though the final agreement leaves the door open for countries that have since grown wealthier to make commitments if they desire.
China, however, sought to disarm criticism when it for the first time offered a figure for the amount of finance it has provided to other nations through its long-touted “South-South Cooperation.” The total is $25 billion since 2016, the Chinese said.
Zia Weise contributed to this report.
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