President Joe Biden’s team put on a brave face at UN climate talks this week as the world braces for Donald Trump to rip up US pledges on tackling global warming.
With less than two months left in office, team Biden is using the Cop29 summit in Azerbaijan to trumpet its green record and try to reassure the world that America and its economy are bigger than one man. Although neither Mr Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris is attending, their lame-duck administration has a full negotiating team and programme for the two-week talks in Baku.
“Over the next two months, and two weeks, you will see the Biden-Harris administration lean in with all our might to capture the opportunity on behalf of the country and the world,” White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said on Tuesday at the opening of a US pavilion in Baku.
An upbeat view in the Biden camp is that the drive to go green has such momentum behind it that even Mr Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, cannot stop it. Top US negotiator John Podesta’s refrain is that “the economics of the clean energy transition have taken over”.
The belief is that when factories for electric car batteries open with subsidies from Mr Biden’s $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, even Republican governors “don’t want those factories unplugged from their economies and they don’t want those workers laid off”, Mr Zaidi said.
Before inauguration day, Mr Biden’s team “needs to try to get as much of the money as they have available to them under the Inflation Reduction Act and other authorities out”, veteran Cop delegate Alden Meyer told The National. He said Mr Trump “has made clear he will try to claw back any unspent monies”.
The Biden administration pushed ahead with plans for a new methane levy on Tuesday in another last-ditch move to shore up its climate legacy. In Baku, the US is working with China on cutting methane emissions, a source of greenhouse gases more potent than CO2.
Paris withdrawal
Mr Trump is expected to withdraw for a second time from the Paris climate agreement, which commits the world to striving for 1.5°C or less of global warming. Although it would not take effect for a year, “he will stop doing anything to comply with, observe or try to meet US commitments on day one”, Mr Meyer said.
There is uncertainty over whether Mr Trump could quit the UN climate system altogether without going via the US Senate. If he does pull out of what is known as the UNFCCC, a future president could not press undo as easily as Mr Biden did when he rejoined the Paris Agreement.
Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados and a key campaigner for climate finance, said the Cop system was in need of a shake-up in any case. She said it might be possible to talk to Mr Trump about a climate change-fighting package echoing his Operation Warp Speed push for a Covid-19 vaccine. Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he remained hopeful "notwithstanding some of the woe that you will pick up because politics moves and changes".
"I am not one of those who will come out and say immediately that, with the election of President Trump, all is doom and gloom," Ms Mottley said in Baku on Tuesday. "I don’t believe so and I believe that we need to find mechanisms, even if he does pull out of the Paris Agreement, to have the conversations."
Some aspects of Mr Biden’s policy may be harder to undo. While scrapping green spending plans is one thing, removing tax breaks is a less obvious move for a Republican candidate. Even pro-oil and gas lobbyists such as the American Petroleum Institute and US Chamber of Commerce have hinted they want the incentives to stay.
Biden boasts
The White House boasts that investors have put $450 billion into clean energy during Mr Biden’s term, after he set a target of at least halving emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. The Rhodium Group, whose research is read by Mr Biden’s team, says the US is on track for a 32 per cent to 43 per cent reduction.
The US pavilion plans to show off America’s climate-conscious side, beginning with Nasa astronauts who beamed down a message from space to world leaders. “When we look down on the Earth from 260 miles [418km] above, it’s clear how interconnected we all are,” enthused spacefarer Nick Hague.
Cop29 in Azerbaijan - in pictures
The US, though, has hardly been known for its generous internationalism at Cop summits with or without Mr Trump at the helm, ever since president George H.W. Bush declared “the American way of life is non-negotiable” in talks on the founding global climate treaty.
Mr Podesta is pushing for more countries to pay into climate funds under a new finance deal being negotiated at Cop29. Any promises of increased US funding could be scrapped by Mr Trump, who has said he will renege on a $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund.
With the leaders of France, Germany and Canada also skipping Cop29, there is concern in Baku that others will fail to fill the US void, or even be emboldened to scale back their own green plans. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday said G20 countries “must lead” on climate action and “no group, no business and no government” can halt what he called the clean energy revolution.
