US climate envoy John Podesta on Monday urged governments to maintain faith in the country’s promises to tackle global warming, saying Donald Trump could slow, but not stop, the transition away from fossil fuels when he returns to office in January.
The annual UN climate summit began in Baku, Azerbaijan on Monday, with delegations from many countries concerned that Trump’s victory in the US presidential election on November 5 will hinder progress on limiting planetary warming.
Trump has promised to again withdraw the United States, the world’s largest historical greenhouse gas emitter, from international climate cooperation and to max out the country’s already record-high fossil fuel production.
“For those of us dedicated to climate action, last week’s outcome in the United States is obviously extremely disappointing,” Podesta said at the summit.
“But what I want to tell you today is that the United States federal government under Donald Trump may put climate action on the back burner, but the work to stop climate change in the United States will continue.”
He said the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation providing billions of dollars in subsidies for clean energy, will continue to spur investment in solar, wind and other technologies and help US state governments also cut emissions. Will take it forward. Regulation.
He said, “I don’t think any of this can be reversed. Can it be slowed down? Maybe. But the direction is clear.”
Although Trump has promised to defund the IRA, doing so would require an act of Congress — and that may be elusive due to the support of some Republican lawmakers whose districts benefit from IRA-linked investments.
agenda tussle
Along with the US elections, economic concerns and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are also being discussed in Baku.
This complicates the summit’s ambition to resolve a priority agenda item – a deal for up to $1 trillion in annual climate finance for developing countries, replacing the $100 billion target.
UN climate chief Simon Still tried to build momentum.
“Let’s move away from the idea that climate finance is charity,” he said at the Baku stadium. “An ambitious new climate finance target is entirely in the self-interest of every country, including the largest and wealthiest.”
This year is on track to be the hottest on record. Rich and poor countries alike have been challenged by extreme weather events, including flooding disasters in Africa, coastal Spain and the US state of North Carolina, and drought across South America, Mexico and the US west.
But agreeing on one of the first tasks of COP29 also proved to be a challenge: There was a delay of more than five hours before the negotiating agenda was approved.
Four sources with knowledge of the closed-door discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the European Union and small island states had sought to discuss how nations could implement last year’s agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. How to move forward.
The fossil fuel-producing Gulf states wanted to limit the discussion to elements of last year’s COP28 deal related to finance, the sources said.
In the end, countries agreed that they would discuss a COP28 agreement, but left open where these talks would focus.
He also supported a set of carbon credit quality standards considered key to launching a UN-backed global carbon market to finance projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
And after China asked to include concerns about some countries’ trade policies on the COP29 agenda, the countries sidelined the dispute over trade tensions. Beijing withdrew its proposal and instead held informal talks on the issue with Azerbaijan’s COP29 presidency.
Trade has gained importance as an issue for China, already facing EU tariffs, as Trump’s campaign promise to impose 20% tariffs on all foreign goods and 60% on Chinese goods .
Many also worry that a US troop withdrawal could cause other countries to back out of existing climate commitments or scale back future ambitions.
“People will say, well, the US is the second-largest emitter. It’s the largest economy in the world… If they don’t set an ambitious target for themselves, why should we?” Mark Vanheukelen, the EU’s climate ambassador from 2019 to 2023, told Reuters.
Podesta said China, currently the world’s largest emitter, has an obligation to lead the way by developing a plan to cut emissions that is consistent with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which calls for keeping the planet’s temperatures below zero. -To be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above industrial level.
“He has an important role to play and I hope he plays it,” Podesta said.
Host Azerbaijan has lobbied governments to accelerate its move to clean energy, promoting gas as a transition fuel. Its oil and gas revenues will account for 35% of its economy in 2023, up from less than 50% two years ago. The government says that this revenue will reduce to 22% by 2028.
President Ilham Aliyev has called Azerbaijan’s fossil-fuel bounty “God’s gift”, and Baku has proposed creating a climate finance action fund to voluntarily collect up to $1 billion from mining companies in 10 countries, including Azerbaijan .
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
