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The latest round of international climate negotiations is sputtering into the home stretch this week, with talks crippled -- for the second time -- by a Donald Trump victory in a presidential race.
More than 65,000 participants from nearly 200 countries are gathered in Azerbaijan for the 29th annual United Nations’ climate summit (known as COP-29), a two-week event set to conclude on Friday (though they often stretch a day or even two beyond their scheduled conclusion). The U.S. delegation at the talks includes around 250 negotiators and support staff, even though almost nothing they might agree to will have much relevance starting in January, after Trump returns to the White House.
The 45th and soon-to-be 47th president is well known as a critic of what he calls the “climate hoax,” and with the start of the Azerbaijan gathering coming less than a week after Trump’s re-election the already low-ambition talks got underway cast in doubt. Since then, Trump appointed fellow skeptic and oil company exec Chris Wright as Secretary of Energy, sparking a new round of nervous whispering in Baku.
“There is no climate crisis,” Wright flatly said last year, adding that the notion that the greenhouse gasses that negotiators at COP-29 are trying to limit are dangerous is “outrageous.”
“The talks in Baku are sober because we’re facing the prospect that the world is going to have to move forward on climate without the United States, the world’s largest economy and its second biggest” emitter of greenhouse gasses, a veteran observer of the United Nations’ climate negotiation process told CDM from Baku, asking not to be identified in order to speak frankly. “Our climate goals were already challenging. But now?”
Trump has done all this before -- though the context last time around was much more dramatic.
In 2016, the U.S. presidential election took place on the second day of the United Nations’ climate talks, which were held in Morocco that year. With Hillary Clinton the favorite to win, climate campaigners and other observers gathered in a hotel ballroom for an election watch party that for attendees took an unwelcome turn as key states were called for Trump. When the talks closed nearly two weeks later, organizers insisted they were optimistic, but few were convinced.
They were right. Barely six months later, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, though that status didn’t officially enter into effect until 2020 due to U.N. rules. Other parties to the Paris Agreement limped forward in the intervening years, but U.S. delegations were little more than observers for the rest of Trump’s first presidency.
The U.S. under Joe Biden officially rejoined the Paris Agreement in 2021, but all indications are that Trump will pull out again -- this time without waiting more than six months to take action
Getting underway in the wake of Trump’s latest victory, the COP-29 negotiations in Azerbaijan were expected to be a litmus test for how the world might move forward without the U.S. There are still a few days of talks left until the final gavel Friday or Saturday, but the early reviews aren’t positive.
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