Above photo: Participants walk and network in front of the main entrance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) held at Baku Olympic Stadium in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 14, 2024. Dominika Zarzycka / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images.
During his first administration, Trump withdrew from the landmark Paris Agreement.
He’s pledged to do so again.
For decades, making progress on global climate action has felt like trying to tunnel through a mountain with only a spoon and some elbow grease. When people suggest alternative tools that are perhaps better equipped for tunnel-digging, or maybe even float the idea of climbing over the mountain, they’re dismissed and demeaned as too idealistic. Other people will stare straight at the mountain and declare that it doesn’t exist. And some other people think that instead of creating the tunnel, we should just strip the mountain, sell the tinder and build a casino on top.
Meanwhile, the mountain is growing. And the spoon is broken.
It is against this backdrop that roughly 100 world leaders are convening in Baku, Azerbaijan, this week for the 29th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29. Attendees are primarily focused this year on determining how much money to raise and invest toward helping poorer countries adapt to the climate crisis and curb greenhouse gas emissions. This round of climate financing is meant to address the fact that the world’s wealthiest nations bear disproportionate responsibility for the climate crisis, yet poorer countries often face its most devastating impacts. The U.S. has emitted a greater share of climate-warming greenhouse gasses than any other country since 1850 — but notably, the leaders of the world’s top polluting countries, including the U.S. and China, aren’t in attendance this year.
What’s more, as negotiators meet to hash out a deal, they do so with the knowledge that any work they do could be quickly undone: President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House means that the U.S. will likely pull out of any pact in just a few short months.
Trump has already pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement — for the second time. Since the international treaty was enacted at COP21, it has set guiding principles for global climate action — namely, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing climate financing to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
After Trump formally announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the agreement in 2017, Joe Biden made rejoining the Paris accords a key part of his administration’s climate agenda. But historical memory is all too short — and it is bitterly ironic to note that the agreement was itself decried as ineffective by climate activists when it was passed.
“The Paris Agreement is a death sentence for many people,” Pablo Solón, a former chief climate negotiator for Bolivia, told Democracy Now! in 2015, arguing that the emissions cuts outlined in the pact wouldn’t limit warming to less than 3 degrees. “A world with temperature increases more than 3 degrees Celsius is a world where not everybody will survive.”
Thousands of climate activists protested outside of COP21 to call for more aggressive climate action, highlighting that even the 1.5-degree limit would not stop countries in the Global South from being decimated by extreme weather and rising oceans. Now, nearly 10 years later, as Solón predicted, the world is on track to exceed that threshold.
Meanwhile, this year, COP29 is convening in the petrostate of Azerbaijan, where the national economy is heavily dependent on the same fossil fuels stoking the climate crisis. During the conference’s opening ceremony, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev called oil and gas “a gift from God”; the country plans to expand gas production by up to a third over the next decade. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg notably skipped the conference, calling the choice to host a climate summit in a petrostate “beyond absurd.”
While attendance at this year’s COP has plunged, last year’s choice of location wasn’t much better. That summit was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates — another petrostate — and was presided over by the chief executive of ADNOC, a state oil company. An analysis by the NGO Global Witness found that ADNOC used its spotlight at COP28 to seek nearly $100 billion in oil, gas and petrochemical deals.
COP faces a crisis of credibility, but it still remains the primary path for coordinating a global approach to fighting the climate crisis. And there have been some improvements since the 2015 Paris accords: The rate of greenhouse gas emissions growth has slowed, clean energy has expanded and global coal production is expected to decrease as a growing number of financial institutions implement divestment policies. In the U.S., Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated nearly $400 billion to clean energy funding in a record climate-spending package (one that still paved the way for future oil and gas projects).
As the world’s top carbon emitter, and as a wealthy nation with global imperial power, the U.S. should bear the responsibility of taking aggressive action to fight the climate crisis. But even under Democratic presidencies, the country has consistently shirked that duty. U.S. oil production rose to record highs under the Biden administration, and this year is slated to go down as the world’s hottest on record. We are still tunneling with a spoon, and we have a long way to go.
Trump’s second presidency is shaping up to be even more catastrophic for climate and the environment. On November 11, Trump announced that former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin will be the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), promising Zeldin will “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions.” Deregulation will likely have devastating impacts for the predominantly Black, Latinx and low-income Americans living in the country’s “sacrifice zones” — areas heavily polluted by fossil fuel infrastructure.
“We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI,” Zeldin wrote on X. “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.” As a congressman, Zeldin voted against Clean Air Act protections; Suffolk County, which is in Zeldin’s former district, has some of the worst air quality in New York State.
It is also telling that the incoming EPA administrator would mention expanding artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which, in passing, seems out of place in discussions about environmental policy. But AI notably takes a massive climate toll: “The training process for a single AI model, such as a large language model, can consume thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emit hundreds of tons of carbon,” notes the Harvard Business Review. “This is roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of hundreds of households in America.” One study by researchers at University of California, Riverside predicted that global AI-related infrastructure may consume six times more water than the entire nation of Denmark by 2027.
Presented with these figures, and with the overwhelming magnitude of the climate crisis, it’s difficult to not feel despair. But climate nihilism will not save the world from destruction.
In a November 6 statement on Trump’s reelection, the nonprofit environmental law group Earthjustice noted that it had fought back against the previous Trump administration when it “denied the climate crisis, denied justice to communities long overburdened by pollution, and gave industry open season to pollute our land and waters.”
“And we won,” wrote Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen. “We are even stronger now, and we’re ready. We will see Donald Trump in court.”