COP29: How return of Donald Trump as US president could impact climate talks in Baku

What happens to the fight against climate change in the backdrop of Donald Trump being set to return to the White House in January?

That’s what people are asking at the annual UN climate summit, also known as COP29, which kicked off on Monday in Azerbaijan.

Diplomats from across the world have descended on the capital Baku to discuss how to avoid increasing threats from climate change.

Ironically, this is the place that was one of the birthplaces of the oil industry.

Donald Trump’s re-election comes as the world is on track to set yet another record hot year, and has been lurching from one disaster to the other – droughts, hurricanes, floods and wildfires.

But how could Trump’s return impact climate talks in Baku?

Let’s take a closer look:

What has Trump said about climate change?

First, let’s examine what Trump has said about the issue.

Trump has claimed that climate change is a ‘hoax, con job and a myth.’

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump tweeted in 2012.

“The entire country is freezing — we desperately need a heavy dose of global warming, and fast! Ice caps size reaches all-time high,” Trump tweeted during a 2014 blizzard.

Trump more recently has vowed to ‘drill, baby drill’ and withdraw from the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, as per Bloomberg

Project 2025, a conservative post-election blueprint that the Trump campaign distanced itself from but was written by his allies, called for withdrawing from both that UN framework and the Paris Agreement.

“You are looking at, overall, a ‘drill baby drill’ philosophy,” Dan Eberhart, chief executive officer of oilfield services company Canary LLC told Bloomberg News.

“You are going to see offshore lease sales, you are going to see pipelines move much quicker, you are going to see fracking on federal lands and a mindset that is focused on lowering energy costs for consumers.”

Though Trump’s climate-change denial has become orthodoxy within the Republican Party, it is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of the world’s scientific community and rejects reams of data about how the Earth’s climate is changing.

According to NASA, 97 per cent of the climate scientists agree that the world is getting hotter and that man-made carbon emissions are to blame.

The talks come with fresh warnings that the world is far off track to meet the goals of the Paris agreement.

The climate deal commits to keep warming below 2C compared to pre-industrial levels, preferably below 1.5C.

But the world is on track to top that level in 2024, according to the European Union climate monitor.

That would not be an immediate breach of the Paris deal, which measures temperatures over decades, but it suggests much greater climate action is needed.

Earlier this year, the UN warned the world is on track for a catastrophic 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming this century based on current actions.

“Everyone knows that these negotiations will not be easy,” said Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

“But they are worth it: each tenth of a degree of warming avoided means fewer crises, less suffering, less displacement.”

Negotiations just got more difficult

According to Bloomberg, Trump’s re-election makes negotiations even more difficult at Baku.

This is particularly so when it comes to the rich nations providing financing to the less economically developed ones and pledges on reducing carbon.

As per The Guardian, the less developed nations are hoping to get around $1 trillion a year to cut their emissions and deal with climate change by 2035.

However, they will likely get far less than even $400 million – mostly from overseas aid budgets, the World Bank and other publicly-owned financial firms.

Developing countries are pushing for trillions of dollars, and insist money should be mostly grants rather than loans.

They warn that without the money they will struggle to offer ambitious updates to their climate goals, which countries are required to submit by early next year.

“Bring some money to the table so that you show your leadership,” said Evans Njewa, chair of the LDC Climate Group, whose members are home to 1.1 billion people.

But the small group of developed countries that currently contributes wants to see the donor pool expanded to include other rich nations and top emitters, including China and the Gulf states.

As per BBC, China and the Gulf States until now have been designated as developing economies.

They have thus been exempted from contributing.

Some, including the EU and other wealthy nations, are pushing for that to change.

But that won’t be easy with the current United States officials, representing President Joe Biden, will likely be shunted out come January.

“The US at this COP is not just a lame duck, it’s a dead duck,” professor Richard Klein, an expert on climate change policy for the Stockholm Environment Institute, told BBC.

“They can’t commit to anything and that means that countries like China will not want to commit to anything.”

“The US basically wanted to have China cough up some money for that fund as well. Now they won’t be able to do that. That leaves China off the hook,” Klein added.

One Chinese official warned Sunday during a closed-door session that the talks should not aim to “renegotiate” existing agreements.

Liang Pei, an official at China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, urged negotiators to instead address “the climate crisis collectively, constructively.”

In the months after the COP29, all countries including the US must issue national plans showing how they will increase efforts to limit heat-trapping emissions from coal, oil and natural gas.

Trump’s win could also make the target of limiting the temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius untenable.

“There is just the faintest ray of hope now that the world will limit global warming to 1.5C, but Donald Trump may extinguish it,” Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, told The Guardian.

“We need dramatically raised global ambition to have any chance of staying below 2 — much less 1.5 — degrees,” Alden Meyer, a senior adviser with the climate change think tank E3G, told Bloomberg. Trump’s election has “a real world impact,” he added.

Trump’s return will loom over the discussions, with fears that an imminent US departure from the landmark Paris agreement to limit global warming could mean le ss ambition around the negotiating table.

“We cannot afford to let the momentum for global action on climate change be derailed,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment.

“This is a shared problem that will not solve itself without international cooperation, and we will continue to make that case to the incoming president of one of the world’s largest polluters.”

“It’s hard. It involves money. When it comes to money, everybody shows their true colours,” Adonia Ayebare, the Ugandan chair of a bloc that groups over 100 mostly developing countries and China, told AFP on Sunday.

Ayebare brushed aside the potential consequences of a US withdrawal, noting Trump already took Washington out of the Paris agreement during his first term.

“This has happened before, we will find a way of realigning.”

What do experts say?

Global efforts to fight climate change stumbled but survived the last time Donald Trump was elected president and withdrew the United States from an international climate agreement. Other countries, states, cities and businesses picked up some of the slack.

The UK has now vowed to step up.

“The only way to keep the British people secure today is by making Britain a clean-energy superpower, and the only way we protect future generations is by working with other countries to deliver climate action,” UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told the Observer. “This government is committed to accelerating climate action precisely because it is by doing this that we protect our country, with energy security, lower bills, and good jobs.”

But numerous experts worry that a second Trump term will be more damaging to the fight against climate change.

The United States withdrawing even further from climate efforts could cripple future presidents’ efforts. With Trump, who has dismissed climate change, in charge of the world’s leading economy, those experts fear other countries — especially top polluting nation China — could use it as an excuse to ease off their own efforts to curb carbon emissions.

“There’s no hope of reaching a safe climate without substantive action from the United States, from China, from Europe,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that tracks countries’ carbon dioxide emissions, which have been rising globally. He said he’s certain the world is shooting past the internationally accepted threshold of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. That’s just a couple tenths of a degree away. Others believe the goal is alive.

On Wednesday, Tubiana, the former French official who helped forge the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement that Trump pulled out of, called the election result a setback for global climate action. But she added: “The Paris Agreement has proven resilient and is stronger than any single country’s policy.”

“Donald Trump’s dramatic victory in the US election will drip poison” into the climate talks, Victoria Cuming, head of global policy at BloombergNEF, told the outlet. “Trump’s vow to pull out of the Paris deal and perhaps the entire UN process will widen a divide between industrialised economies and developing ones, adding the potential to undercut progress at subsequent meetings.”

Trump’s victory is “an alarming escalation of climate risk for the world’s most vulnerable communities,” added Harjeet Singh, a climate activist for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “By stepping back from climate commitments, Trump’s actions threaten to unravel trust in a global system already strained by the indifference and inaction of wealthy nations.”

“Baku will be the earliest test of the resilience of the global climate regime,” said Asia Society Policy Institute Director Li Shuo, who foresees the European Union and China stepping up to fill the US leadership void, especially economically. “It should also unite other countries.”

It sort of did that in 2017, when Trump announced that the US would abandon the Paris climate agreement.

“Not a single country followed the US out the door,” said Alden Meyer, a longtime climate negotiations analyst with the European think tank E3G. “We saw the birth and launch of the We Are Still In movement of subnational actors, investors, businesses, governors, mayors and others here in the US”

Meyer and others said a more serious step than withdrawing from Paris is possible. That would be pulling out of an underlying treaty from 1992 that set curbing climate change and saving biodiversity as part of global environmental goals for the 21st century, as well as withdrawing from the United Nations climate change fighting system that fosters negotiations, records emissions and what’s being done about them.

It’s not straightforward, but an exit from Rio and the UNFCCC could make it nearly impossible for the US to get back into climate negotiations, Meyer said.

David Waskow, international climate director for World Resources Institute, agreed. He said withdrawal from the UN agreement “would not only place the US on the sidelines of international climate discussions but would be like ejecting itself from the stadium.”

The Paris agreement calls for nations to submit new and more aggressive plans to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases every five years. Those are due next February and the Biden administration has promised to submit one before it ends “to show what should be done, what can be done,” Meyer said. But the assumption is that the new Trump administration won’t honour it, he said.

Meyer said the United States pulling out of climate agreements in Republican administrations and then trying to lead the world in Democratic ones is like the Peanuts cartoon when Lucy keeps pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.

“The world has gotten tired of this routine,” Meyer said.

Joanna Depledge, a historian of international climate negotiations, said she expected Trump’s new term will mean four lost years for US climate action. But she added: “The rest of the world is used to US flip-flopping now and will not be diverted from their own efforts.”

Because of the 2020 pandemic and the timing of deadlines created by the Paris Agreement, the three United Nations climate negotiations that took place during the first Trump administration weren’t as ambitious as they could have been. Now, urgent action is needed at the summit this year and next, Depledge and others said.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said negotiations continue because “the fundamental facts remain unchanged: global heating is already hammering every nation, hitting national and households budgets harder every year.”

The Biden administration will still represent the United States next week, when crucial negotiations will address financial help that poor nations need to cope with and fight climate change. But Harris’ loss undercuts negotiations because “everyone there knows” the US is unlikely to follow through on any agreement it signs, Stanford’s Jackson said.

One of the dynamics of past negotiations during Democratic regimes was that any US-China deal usually led to a global one. Usually the United States “is able to nudge” a more reluctant China to be more ambitious about fighting climate change, Asia Society’s Li Shuo said.

“Beijing will read the air in Washington and their conclusion is climate does not enjoy the same level of momentum it had a couple of years ago,” Li said.

But despite all this, many in the insular world of climate negotiations somehow remain optimistic.

Lord Stern, chairman of the Grantham Research Institute, told The Guardian, “I was in Marrakech for the Cop22 summit in 2016 when the news came in that Trump had won the election,” he told the Observer. “We knew what that meant, but it was remarkable how strong was the resolve among delegates that we keep going. And we will keep going this time as well.

“His presidency will make life more difficult but we are not going to give up. That would be the worst possible option.”

“There is an antidote to doom and despair,” said former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said. “It’s action on the ground and it’s happening in all corners of the Earth.”

“The outcome of the US elections should not be used as an excuse by world leaders to avoid taking action against climate change,” Mary Robinson, former Irish president and member of The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela told Bloomberg. “It will only bring more death and devastation.”

With inputs from agencies