Cop29: Making deals in the shadow of Trump

Diplomats plot a way forward for tackling global warming under America's president-elect

President-elect Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement in 2017. AP

If Donald Trump is the elephant in the room at a UN climate change summit opening on Monday, curbing global warming may depend on high-stake discussions in the corridor outside.

The US will be represented by Joe Biden's administration at the Cop29 talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, where rich, polluting countries will be pushed to offer trillions of dollars to a climate-fighting financial deal.

But hard-fought agreements could be ripped up on January 20 once the climate-sceptic President-elect returns to the White House. While Nato has already tried to "Trump-proof" military aid to Ukraine, rewriting climate deals between almost 200 countries is a far more delicate business.

During Mr Trump's first presidency, the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the accord that commits nations to striving for 1.5°C or less of global warming. Mr Biden restored the US signature but the Trump campaign says he will pull out again.

"For me, the biggest question of all is the global hegemon not playing a leadership role on managing the climate crisis," Sir David King, a former British climate change envoy who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement to make it palatable to the US, told The National.

"Whether the meeting is in Baku or whether it's in Brazil is almost secondary to this problem of managing this situation while the United States is a non-player," he said. "We have to look at alternative ways of taking things forward."

Green-minded diplomats are looking to discuss these alternatives at Cop29. Talks on strategy for dealing with the incoming Trump administration will need to take place on the sidelines of the negotiations in Baku, an official from Germany said.

The EU will need to deepen ties with partners in Africa and South America who can provide raw materials and clean fuel, said the official, who described electric cars as a possible bright spot in the US due to Tesla owner Elon Musk's connections to Mr Trump.

"There's no conceivable sensible alternative to the meeting because doing anything else would send a disastrous signal," they said of the Cop29 talks. Germany will be represented by lame-duck ministers after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's green-minded government.

"It's important now for us to go to other states and share responsibility with them," the official said. "Europe will have a leadership role to a certain extent. We cannot orient ourselves solely by what the Americans do. In climate finance they haven't played the single decisive, outstanding role so far either."

Side deals

Coalitions of the willing are nothing new at a Cop summit. Host countries typically embark on an "action agenda" of initiatives and declarations that do not have the force of a 197-nation UN agreement but still send important signals.

The UAE's Cop28 presidency got 50 oil and gas companies to sign pledges on CO2 and methane, while more than 100 countries put their name to declarations on health and food. Azerbaijan's Cop29 team is planning initiatives on tourism, farming and hydrogen. Mr Biden's team wants to talk to China about methane.

The key negotiating item in Baku is a financial pledge for vulnerable countries called the New Collective Quantified Goal. Even under Mr Biden, the US has baulked at some of their financial demands, especially the idea of compensating them for climate disasters.

An initial US pledge of $17.5 million to a disaster fund set up in the UAE was widely seen as paltry. New money may be hard to come by under Mr Trump, who says he will renege on a $3 billion pledge to the UN's Green Climate Fund. He attacked the Paris Agreement as unfairly stymying the US economy.

"The NCQG is obviously a critical conversations in the negotiating rooms this year, but outside of those, countries can be coming forward with pledges to scale up finance," said Katrine Petersen, an adviser at environmental think tank E3G.

"The thing to look out for is: are there new pledges that will create additional finance, and making sure that finance actually goes to the projects where it’s needed? So not repackaging existing finance in a different way or talking in fairly vague terms, but looking very specifically at what’s needed."

Unstoppable momentum?

Beyond making side announcements in Baku, a second hope of environmentalists is that green action will continue apace whether the Trump administration supports it or not, both in America's states and businesses and in the global economy.

The Cop28 deal, known as the UAE Consensus, was hailed as a signal to investors that a shift to clean energy and a "transition away" from fossil fuels is the way the world is headed. Solar power continues to grow rapidly in China, and global investment in clean energy is nearing $2 trillion a year.

"The US has never been a great team player at Cops, regardless of which party is in government. People don’t go to Cops expecting the US to push for more ambition," said Friederike Otto, an Imperial College London lecturer on environmental policy.

"When Trump quit the Paris Agreement in 2017, many governments still stuck to their plans. As always, other countries need to step up at Cop29," she said.

Dan Lashof, the US director of the World Resources Institute, said most of America's state, local and private sector bosses were "committed to charging ahead". He said Cop29 delegates could "count on a chorus of world leaders confirming that they won’t turn their back on climate and nature goals".

"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," he said. "Trump has every reason to build on transformations already under way."

Pledge deadline

Nonetheless, America's CO2 emissions remain high and Mr Trump will take over what is "essentially an oil, gas and coal economy", Sir David said. He said Cop30 in Brazil next year will be "the world's most important meeting" when each country must hand in a new climate plan based on the UAE Consensus.

The idea of "nationally determined contributions" towards a common goal was a key plank of the Paris Agreement, meant to bring the US on board because then-president Barack Obama could sell it to Congress as a non-binding treaty that kept power in Washington's hands.

But Mr Trump abandoned the NDC submitted by the Obama administration, and could so the same in his second term even if Mr Biden submits one before inauguration day. The 197-nation Cop process also makes it possible for the US and other polluters to block the way internationally, Sir David said.

"What we need to is get major countries around the world to agree on actions whether or not they're agreed in the Cop process," he said. He suggested this could include the transfer of technologies between Europe and China and putting money on the table for climate-related loss and damage.

"The Cop meetings, I'm not writing them off, they're critically important. But nevertheless I do think it is important for us to recognise this is a major challenge and the willing countries need to take hold of it and do what they can."