Us Climate Officials Race To Ink A Deal That Trump Could Spurn

BAKU, Azerbaijan — There’s no getting around the awkwardness of these climate talks.

American officials made their travel plans for COP29 and sketched out their negotiating points before they knew who would win the election. Then days before the conference began they were jolted into reverse: U.S. negotiators no longer faced sealing a deal that would be celebrated by President Joe Biden, but agreeing to one whose fate is in the hands of a president-elect who says climate change is a conspiracy.

Republicans who flew to Baku foreshadowed the imminent about-face for U.S. climate policy.

“Any commitments made by the Biden Administration at COP29 will simply be lip service to climate groups,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who led a bipartisan delegation to the summit, said in a statement.

The shockwaves of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory came as U.S. climate experts cycled in and out of this city, sometimes hearing the news about the people that Trump had chosen to lead their agencies along the way.

People in attendance include officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, which could be led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has called for banning fluoride in drinking water. Trump nominated him four days into the talks.

Also here are officials with the Department of Energy, which Trump has chosen Chris Wright to lead. A fracking executive, Wright would oversee permitting of liquefied natural gas export terminals. He has said “there is no climate crisis.”

“Obviously the U.S. is in a very structurally difficult position,” said Todd Stern, the U.S. climate envoy during the Obama administration. Nevertheless, he believes, the Americans’ negotiating skills and established relationships can be leveraged to keep a deal from failing.

American whiplash

The U.S. has long been a key player in shaping the outcome of these annual negotiations, whether for good or bad in the eyes of some countries.

The Obama administration laid the groundwork for the 2015 Paris Agreement, and even after Trump announced in 2017 that he would withdraw from that accord, U.S. diplomats continued to finalize the rules guiding it. Sometimes they had to do “Trump-like things,” said Stern, referring to a coal event held by the incoming Trump administration on the sidelines of the climate talks in Poland in 2018.

The talks this year are taking place not just in Trump’s shadow but as the world breaks heat records, as global climate pollution continues to increase, and as countries remain deeply divided over COP29’s main target: setting a goal for climate finance that could reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually, or higher.

“All of this goes to the question of the role that the U.S. plays in a world where Trump is coming fast, so it’s a little bit complicated,” said Stern.

That means the points U.S. officials are negotiating at COP29 — hundreds of billions in global climate assistance, the rules governing a worldwide carbon market and reaffirming a fossil fuel phase down — are ones the U.S. likely won’t be working to deliver on. At least for the next four years. 

Political appointees here will leave the government, while career diplomats face the unknown: working for a president who continues to call climate change a hoax, being reassigned or, potentially, being fired.

Yet senior officials say they’re negotiating for the future of these talks and what they mean for long-term action as they race to finish their work before the conference ends Friday. They hope those deals will be waiting for the next president in 2029.

“The bottom line from our perspective is the U.S. is here, we are committed to contributing while we are here to a productive conversation, to one that leaves lasting value,” Jake Levine, senior director for climate and energy on Biden’s National Security Council, told reporters.

One problem for the talks is that a U.S. retreat from global climate cooperation over the next four years could put the burden of delivering climate aid on other countries — particularly the Europeans.

“The U.S. has been an active participant, but the EU has a fundamental role in these negotiations,” said a European negotiator granted anonymity to discuss issues around the talks.

The prospect of the U.S. returning to the table is why other countries still take Washington seriously, the negotiator said.

On Tuesday, Biden urged leaders attending the Group of 20 meeting in Brazil to “keep going” in their fight against climate change, calling it the “single greatest existential threat to humanity.”

In the near term, however, Trump has deprived the U.S. of its coveted leadership position even before taking office.

For now the U.S. presence remains highly visible. The U.S. co-chaired a ministerial meeting supporting transparency reports that outline the actions countries are taking to meet their climate targets. Officials from the Department of Energy were spotted in the corridors Tuesday in conversation with Chinese officials.

The U.S. delegation office, nestled along a curving hall in the bowels of an Olympic stadium that has never hosted an Olympics, continues to hold media briefings. The U.S. pavilion — a barebones version compared with earlier years — has regular panels with a rotating roster of American officials who laud the administration’s climate work and call for its continuance.

U.S. diplomats say they still have a stake in whatever gets decided here, since it will likely extend the new finance goal to 2035. If Democrats win back the White House in four years, they’ll be on the hook to meet the new agreement. They want it to be achievable.

“That's on a decadal time scale, so it goes beyond any given U.S. administration over four years,” Rick Duke, one of the State Department’s lead negotiators, told POLITICO.

One senior administration official speaking to reporters on background said there seems to be more urgency from some countries to finalize an agreement because of U.S. uncertainty — even if the U.S. itself says its priorities haven’t changed.

And the relationships and expertise of U.S. climate officials give the nation good standing with other governments, even with the White House changing over to Trump, say past and present officials.

“When it comes to finding text to a conundrum, the United States has Sue Biniaz,” said the lead negotiator of another G7 country, referring to the State Department’s longtime climate negotiator.

Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a bloc of small island states, said U.S. officials have acknowledged the awkward position they’re in, noting during negotiations that the U.S. will likely recede from the global stage when Trump returns.

“It's really sad that one country, because of its system, can decide multiple times when to leave the Paris Agreement and then come back into it,” Robertson said. “This sort of ‘in and out’ kind of behavior is not helpful to the ambition.”

Zia Weise contributed reporting.