Trump victory seen as blow to climate action ahead of COP summit

Donald Trump’s victory in the US election was seen as a blow to global climate action and is set to cast a pall over the UN COP29 summit next week, but leaders of the historic climate agreement struck in Paris said they believed the momentum behind decarbonisation would not be halted.

The Trump campaign had said the incoming president would again withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement, as he had in his first term in office.

The world’s most important climate talks were already facing waning attention from political and business leaders, with many dropping out of the event in petrostate Azerbaijan ahead of the US election.

EU President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron are among those not expected to go to Baku, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer are still due to attend.

The chiefs of Bank of America, BlackRock, Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank will also be absent, as well as financial sector climate alliance leader Mark Carney, who has been prominent since being appointed a UN special envoy in 2020. One senior US energy executive said he was deterred by Azerbaijan’s closeness to Russia.

One climate negotiator from a G20 country said: “Should we all even go to COP now? It does become harder. [Trump] has been clear on his position on climate change. It makes things difficult. He is not a keen fan of globalisation or multilateralism. He is very much for America first.”

At this year’s COP29, countries are due to agree a new climate finance goal, to helping developing countries create green energy systems and adapt to a warming world. The US, as the world’s richest country and key shareholder in international financial institutions, is viewed as crucial to that goal.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the preparations for COP “continue apace” as limiting global warming was necessary for all economies. “Unless all countries can cut emissions and build more resilience into global supply chains, no economy — including the G20 — will survive unchecked global heating, and no household will be spared its severe inflationary impacts.”

Eamon Ryan, the Irish climate minister who will co-lead adaptation talks at COP29, said the Trump victory made it even “more important” to agree new finance goals and focus on “fundamental reform of the financial system to bring climate and development together”.

“It doesn’t change what we need to do in Baku, it probably makes it more difficult, but it doesn’t change the strategic reason we need to take action.”

He said it was in each country’s interest to protect their people from climate change, with an imperative for many to transform their economies and ensure they did not rely on imported fossil fuels.

During his campaign, Donald Trump voiced support of the fossil fuel industry, among his big donors, and also vowed to repeal what he called the “socialist” Inflation Reduction Act.

The legislation has delivered an estimated $450bn in private investment into the US energy sector, according to the Clean Investment Monitor. Consultancy BloombergNEF estimated a repeal of the IRA would result in a 17 per cent drop in new renewable capacity additions from 2025 to 2035, with offshore wind falling as much as 45 per cent.

But an estimated three-quarters of all manufacturing projects announced in the first year of the law’s passage benefited Republican districts, according to a Financial Times analysis, and 18 Republicans in the House of Representatives argued in a recent letter against “prematurely repealing energy tax credits” supporting new IRA investments.

Rajani Ranjan Rashmi, a former climate negotiator for India, said Trump’s approach to the domestic energy transition was “more important” than his stance on the Paris agreement.

The alliance with Tesla founder Elon Musk might also mean that “Trump may not totally outlaw” the IRA, he noted. “Although he is likely to weaponise trade, it will be interesting to see how he reacts to the Europeans using the threat of carbon-based tariffs. Overall, the signals appear to be mixed.”

Christiana Figueres, who led the Paris agreement as UN climate chief, said she did not believe the changes under way to decarbonise the global economy would stop.

“Clean energy technologies will continue to outcompete fossil fuels, not just because they are healthier, faster, cleaner and more abundant, but because they undercut fossil fuels where they are at their weakest: their unsolvable volatility and inefficiency,” she said.

Another key architect of the Paris accord, Laurence Tubiana, said the agreement had proven resilient and would withstand any withdrawal by the US. The global economic context had already changed, she added. “There is powerful economic momentum behind the global transition, which the US has led and gained from, but now risks forfeiting.”

But Tubiana noted that responsibility would fall to the EU to step up its action “to show that ambitious climate action protects people, strengthens economies, and builds resilience”.

Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said Berlin would work with the next US administration “wherever possible . . . to deal with shared security challenges, including the climate crisis”.

One European negotiator noted that the US had always been a difficult partner in climate finance talks. “Biden didn’t deliver on climate finance either,” they said.

Scientists were downbeat about the likely impact of the presidency on limiting global warming. “It will put the pause button on climate action for four years — can we afford that? The answer is no,” said Potsdam Institute’s Johan Rockström.

Additional reporting Amanda Chu