On Monday, a new round of international climate talks will open in Azerbaijan, a country that earns ninety per cent of its export income selling fossil fuels. Depending on how you look at things, this situation is either farcical or grimly appropriate. Last week, in the run-up to the conference, Copernicus, the earth-observation arm of the European Union, reported that global temperatures this year will, for the first time, average more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels. Also last week, the United States elected a climate denier as President.
“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world, more than Saudi Arabia,” Donald Trump crowed in his victory speech, apparently referring to oil. (According to most reliable sources, including the C.I.A., America’s oil reserves are actually only one-seventh the size of Saudi Arabia’s.) In response to Trump’s election, Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, declared the U.S. a nascent “petrostate” and predicted that the country “will, in short order, join an alliance of petrostate bad actors” to “block meaningful progress” on climate change.
Every year, before the start of the annual climate negotiating session, or COP—short for Conference of the Parties—the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) issues an “emissions gap” report. This year’s report was titled “No More Hot Air . . . Please!” and it makes for dispiriting reading. Most countries’ emissions-reductions pledges are inadequate and, in any event, they have failed to meet them. As a result, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—a goal agreed to at the COP held in Paris in 2015—has, for all practical purposes, become impossible. (The goal refers to the long-term temperature average, so, technically speaking, one year above the limit does not yet mean it’s been breached.) Without a huge international effort, the chance to limit warming to two degrees Celsius will also soon slip away.
“Ambition means nothing without action,” the report noted. The emissions-gap report was followed by the “adaptation gap” report, also from UNEP, which estimates that developing countries will need at least two hundred and thirty billion dollars a year to adapt to the climate-change-related disasters that are already taking place. “Everyone must deal with the devastation caused when climate impacts strike,” Inger Andersen, UNEP’s executive director, wrote in the foreword to the report. “But it is the poor and vulnerable who suffer most.”
The focus of this year’s COP, the twenty-ninth, is supposed to be on money; the meeting has been dubbed the “finance COP.” The big issue is how much wealthy countries, which are responsible for most of the emissions now warming the planet, are willing to pay to bridge the “adaptation gap” and also to help poorer ones build clean-energy infrastructure. The money was always going to be hard to raise, and now it will be that much more difficult. The U.S., which is the world’s largest emitter on a cumulative basis and the second-largest on an annual basis, after China—has long been reluctant to cough up what other countries see as its fair share. But, in recent years, President Joe Biden has tried to increase international climate aid, and in Azerbaijan, the U.S. and the European Union were hoping to press China and rich Persian Gulf states, like Saudi Arabia, to start contributing funds. Now, with Trump poised to take over, the U.S. has lost what little leverage it may have had. “The U.S. at this COP is not just a lame duck, it’s a dead duck,” Richard Klein, an expert on climate-change policy for the Stockholm Environment Institute, recently told the BBC.
In his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. The day Biden took office, he moved to reënter the agreement. Trump in his second term almost certainly will withdraw from the accord once again. And it’s possible that the new Administration could take the even more radical step of withdrawing from the treaty that underlies the Paris Agreement, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992. Leaving the U.N.F.C.C.C. would make it virtually impossible for the country to rejoin because the move would require approval by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate.
Just how bad a second Trump Administration will be for domestic climate policy remains, of course, to be seen, but the most likely scenarios are all pretty bleak. During his first term, Trump tried to roll back more than a hundred environmental regulations. And, while the Biden Administration is rushing to try to “Trump-proof” various rules, including a set aimed at limiting oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, this seems unlikely to deter the incoming President, who, through his own nominees, has produced a U.S. Supreme Court deeply sympathetic to his agenda. According to a recent analysis by the British-based Web site Carbon Brief, were Trump to roll back the Biden Administration’s key climate initiatives, the U.S. could emit an extra four billion tons of CO2 by 2030. This, the analysis noted, “would negate—twice over—all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.”
At a dinner in the spring, Trump reportedly told oil-company executives that they should contribute a billion dollars to his campaign and that doing so would represent a good “deal” for them. Following the dinner, the American Exploration and Production Council drew up a kind of wish list for a possible Republican Administration. According to the Washington Post, which obtained the plan, the group was particularly intent on repealing a new fee designed to reduce emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. (Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas, and it’s often released, both intentionally and accidentally, in the process of gas extraction.)
The methane fee was approved as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Administration’s signature climate achievement. Trump has said that he wants to cancel any “unspent” funding authorized by the act. Here, though, it’s unclear whether he will have congressional support. A good deal of the more than sixty billion dollars that have already been distributed under the I.R.A., to, for example, spur battery- and electric-vehicle manufacturing, has gone to red states, and in August, eighteen Republican representatives wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson urging him to maintain the I.R.A.’s clean-energy tax credits. “Energy tax credits have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference,” the group said.
Many experts predict that a second Trump Administration will slow but not stop the country’s transition to cleaner sources of energy, owing to economic forces beyond the President’s control. Since Trump’s first inauguration, the price of solar power has fallen by more than half, and the cost of installing a utility-scale solar or onshore wind farm is now significantly less than that of building a new gas-fired generating plant. As Dan Lashof, the U.S. director of the World Resources Institute, recently put it, “Donald Trump heading back to the White House won’t be a death knell to the clean energy transition that has rapidly picked up pace these last four years.” Still, as the planet blows beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius and the toll of climate-related disasters mounts—see September’s Hurricane Helene, or October’s devastating floods in Spain, or the fires burning over the weekend in New York, New Jersey, and Southern California—slowing progress could well be enough to assure catastrophe. The U.S., not to mention the rest of the world, is long past the point when it can afford to give itself extra time. And yet, here we are. ♦
