Leaders in New York City next week to press for more climate funding and boost clean energy targets will wrestle with another tough subject: the specter of Donald Trump.
Government officials and corporate executives at Climate Week — a flurry of policy panels, closed-door meetings, environmental activism and glitzy product launches — are gathering six weeks ahead of an American election that could undermine the global fight against rising temperatures, Zack Colman and Sara Schonhardt report. The Nov. 5 presidential contest between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will in turn be followed, just six days later, by the COP29 global climate talks in Azerbaijan. Climate Week participants told Zack and Sara that the New York gathering, which falls during the same week as the United Nations General Assembly, is an opportunity to hash out money issues that already plague climate negotiations in November.
“It's the conversations happening now in capitals around the world that are about to happen in the U.N. General Assembly [and] New York Climate Week,” said Melanie Robinson, global climate, economics and finance program director at the World Resources Institute. “These really set the context and the drive for the deal that will take place in COP29.”
Azerbaijan officials hope to set a new financial goal for climate aid to developing countries. The current target of $100 billion per year has ballooned in some discussions to $1 trillion. Yet countries are deeply divided over who pays and how much. President Joe Biden’s negotiating teams — previously led by former Secretary of State John Kerry and now under top aide John Podesta — have remained involved in the discussions. Where those talks go hinges on who steps into the Oval Office in January.
The differences between Trump and Harris couldn’t be more stark. Trump has promised to exit the Paris climate agreement, if not the entire 1992 treaty underlying the global framework of climate negotiations. Environmental groups, meanwhile, are confident that Harris would keep up the flood of U.S. spending on clean energy technology under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
A Trump victory in November would raise a pivotal question: Who steps into the vacuum if the U.S. were to abandon its international role on climate change? “Even in panels, events, where that is not the main topic, it will be the first question that is asked,” said Frances Colón, senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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