Biden Officials Try to Reassure COP29 Climate Talks

Negotiators at the summit in Azerbaijan fear that the return of Donald Trump will sap momentum for global climate action.

Diplomats from around the world had planned to gather in Azerbaijan this week to focus squarely on raising the trillions of dollars needed to tackle global warming.

But on Tuesday, at least, this year’s United Nations climate change summit was dominated by another topic entirely: the U.S. election and the impending return of Donald J. Trump to the world stage.

When he comes back to the White House in January, Mr. Trump is widely expected to pull out of the Paris climate agreement and renege on America’s commitments to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

That has world leaders and negotiators at the summit wondering how they can possibly strengthen efforts to curb global warming without the support of the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful nation.

For the moment, many countries are trying to put on a brave face.

“Success does not depend on one country alone,” Yalchin Rafiyev, Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister and the lead negotiator at the climate summit, said on Tuesday. “It depends on all of us.”

Yet many delegates and observers gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, conceded that the United States’ looming retreat in the fight against climate change was a major setback. This year’s talks, known as COP29, are aimed at persuading wealthy nations, who have historically pumped the most greenhouse gases into the air, to provide more financial aid to poor countries to adapt to heat waves, droughts and other dangers of climate change.

“It goes without saying that we are in a difficult position,” said Ashlee Thomas, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam America, a nonprofit group that is urging rich countries to set a target of $1 trillion per year in climate finance. That goal could prove exceedingly difficult without U.S. support.

The Biden administration, which has sent a large team of negotiators to the talks, has been trying to calm jittery nerves by highlighting U.S. efforts over the past four years to slash emissions, with officials arguing that a global transition to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar power is now unstoppable.

Yet in remarks on Monday, John Podesta, the senior U.S. climate diplomat, struck a somber tone.

“For those of us dedicated to climate action, last week’s outcome in the United States is obviously bitterly disappointing,” Mr. Podesta said. He acknowledged that the frequent swings in America’s commitment to tackling climate change were “more difficult to tolerate as the dangers we face grow ever more catastrophic.”

But Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s national climate adviser, said that international cooperation on climate change had weathered a Trump presidency before and largely survived intact. In 2017, Mr. Trump previously announced that he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement.

Over the ensuing four years, Mr. Zaidi said, the World Bank and other financial institutions nevertheless enhanced their financial support for countries coping with climate change. In the United States, wind and solar power continued to expand and power plant emissions fell, despite Mr. Trump’s attempts to roll back environmental regulations. Congress also passed a bill in 2020 to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas.

Once the Biden administration came to power in 2021 and rejoined the Paris pact, the world’s richest countries were able to meet an earlier promise to provide $100 billion per year in climate aid to poorer countries, Mr. Zaidi said. And, in 2022, Congress ended up passing “the largest investment in clean energy and climate in the history of the world,” he added.

“My big-picture view on climate finance is, we’ve seen not just the United States but other countries zig and zag,” Mr. Zaidi said. “When you have a country that was pulling at the back of the pack, someone else is able to pick up the pace.”

Some diplomats suggested that Europe could take more of a leadership role on global climate efforts in America’s absence.

Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special envoy on climate, pointed out that the European Union had already provided more climate aid to poorer countries than anyone else had, roughly $30 billion last year, and was ready to provide more, if other donors stepped up as well.

“The global race for clean industries will continue irrespective of elections,” Ms. Morgan said. “Germany and the European Union see the transition to a climate-neutral economy as a cornerstone of our future competitiveness.”

Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, announced on Tuesday in Baku that his country would cut emissions 81 percent from 1990 levels by 2035, a step up from an earlier target of 78 percent.

Later, the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, said that climate change had fueled the floods that recently ravaged Valencia, which he called “the greatest natural disaster of our history.”

Mr. Sánchez said Spain would be carbon neutral by 2050, and called on other countries to accelerate their move away from fossil fuels. “Let us stop dragging our heels and denying science,” he said. “Let us save our citizens and save our planet.”

Others suggested that China, which now leads the world in solar and wind power, was poised to fill the gap left by the United States.

“We need to admit there is a leadership vacuum left by the change in the White House,” said Yuan Ying, a China representative for Greenpeace. “China is leading the way to provide clean-tech solutions on a global scale,” she said.

Yet some analysts said that American influence would be tough to replace. While the United States has sometimes exasperated other countries at climate talks with its reluctance to provide financial aid, U.S. diplomats have played key roles in persuading countries like China, which is now the world’s biggest polluter, to commit to tougher emissions targets.

“Eliminating the role of the U.S. in encouraging China to commit to a more rapid emissions reduction over the next 10 years, that could have major consequences,” said David Waskow, a climate expert at the World Resources Institute. “I think we have to recognize that.”

As the climate talks got underway on Monday in a repurposed soccer stadium in Baku, tensions were already on display. Countries spent hours unable to agree on the formal agenda for the summit, a process that is usually routine.

Late on Monday evening, negotiators announced that they had secured a breakthrough by agreeing on long-awaited rules around carbon markets, which allow nations to offset their pollution by paying for projects that reduce emissions in other countries. Yet some groups said that the rules had been rushed through and contained flaws.

On Tuesday, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, criticized wealthier nations that have called on developing countries like his to reduce their fossil fuel production, pointing out that the European Union was still relying on natural gas from his country.

“Unfortunately, double standards, a habit to lecture other countries and political hypocrisy became kind of modus operandi for some politicians, state-controlled N.G.O.s and fake news media in some Western countries,” Mr. Aliyev said.

James Marape, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea, said he would refuse to attend the negotiations this year because they had become “meaningless talk fests,” unable to provide sufficient funding for countries like his to reduce deforestation.

In an attempt to buoy the talks, Biden administration officials held a joint event with China and Azerbaijan on Tuesday to discuss how to reduce lesser-known but potent greenhouse gases like methane. Mr. Podesta announced that the United States had finalized a new provision that charges oil and gas companies up to $1,500 for every ton of methane that leaks from their systems. (Mr. Trump is expected to try to repeal that rule.)

Some environmentalists expressed alarm that nations might use a second Trump administration as an excuse to abandon their climate efforts.

“It’s also possible that other countries use the cover of Trump to lessen their ambition,” said Dean Bhebhe, a climate activist at Power Shift Africa. “Will the rest of the world follow Trump’s lead and just give up on the planet by default?”