When Donald Trump won the 2016 election and threatened to undermine global climate efforts, world leaders united to mitigate the blow. This time around, they are divided and distracted, writes Karl Mathiesen. Wars and trade disputes have tanked international cooperation. Economic decline, populism and what French President Emmanuel Macron warns could be the death of the European Union have pushed climate change down, or even off, the global agenda. For evidence, look no further than the shrunken COP29 guest list. President Joe Biden is skipping the climate conference, which is slated to begin Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan. Macron is out. The European Union’s top executive, Ursula von der Leyen, has a conflict. Germany’s Olaf Scholz registered, but his government collapsed a day after Trump’s election. Trump won’t be there either, given his plans to set up a new government in Washington. It’s a critical time for government action to thwart the worst of climate change. Leaders have until February to deliver new national climate targets under the Paris Agreement. These blueprints will determine what planet-warming emissions are pumped into the atmosphere until 2035, at which point only 15 years will remain to go carbon-neutral — the target set by most advanced economies. And the world has a long way to go. Despite record clean energy growth, fossil fuels still make up 80 percent of the world’s energy supply. Governments continued to subsidize them to the tune of $620 billion in 2023. And investors are estimated to spend $1.1 trillion on fossil fuel production in 2024 — a figure that continues to rise post-pandemic lock-down. A more optimistic framing — one climate diplomats, Biden administration officials and environmentalists are fond of — is that the clean energy ship has sailed, and governments, while potentially helpful, are not essential. “No matter what Trump says, no matter what, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable in the United States,” Gina McCarthy, who served as Biden’s national climate adviser, told reporters on Thursday. While that may be true to some extent, governments certainly retain immense power. It was, after all, Biden’s $1.6 trillion investment in a green economy that gave the nation a fighting chance of meeting its climate goals. Trump has pledged to claw back as much of that money as he can.
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