The Dissonance of Climate Promises at Davos

Each January, business and political leaders descend upon the Swiss ski town of Davos to warn against urgent threats to the global order. Each year, they identify climate change as a one of the top risks that the world faces.

And then, for a few days, they make pledges, speeches and impassioned calls to take rapid action and save the planet.

But does it do any good?

I’ve been coming to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum for a decade now.

I’ve heard presidents pledges to “keep 1.5 alive,” a reference to the dangerous global warming threshold. I’ve heard institutional investors say they will pursue net zero goals. And I’ve heard Marc Benioff, the billionaire and chief executive officer of Salesforce, promise to plant a trillion trees.

All the while, emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, which are the main cause of global warming, have continued their inexorable rise. Last year was the hottest in recorded history, the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial times. And now, many of the corporations that made big climate pledges are walking back their commitments.

The mood at Davos

This year, the dissonance in Davos is particularly acute.

The conference opened on Monday, the same day that President Trump was sworn into office and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement. In a speech broadcast live to the W.E.F. conference Thursday, Trump called the Paris Agreement “one-sided,” attacked Biden’s “ridiculous and wasteful” climate programs and unapologetically promoted fossil fuels.

“The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth and we’re going to use it,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, the shops and restaurants on the Davos main drag have been taken over by corporations promoting their artificial intelligence offerings.

Amazon, Microsoft and other companies that have made ambitious climate goals are this year touting A.I., a technology that is forcing them to walk back their emissions reduction targets and consuming vast quantities of electricity, much of it generated with fossil fuels.

And the fossil fuel industry itself was well represented, too. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil and gas company, hosted a private party. Oil and gas executives are striking deals on the sidelines. JPMorgan, the biggest funder of fossil fuel projects in the world, rented out a museum for a cocktail party.

So, given all of this, what are we to make of the perennial pledges at Davos about global action to slow climate change?

“It makes you wonder, ‘Is this all a charade?’” said Fatou Jeng, climate adviser to the United Nations Secretary General. “The hypocrisy has gone on for a long time, and enough is enough.”

Davos and its values

To be fair, the problem of climate change was never going to be solved in Davos. The World Economic Forum promotes free market capitalism, free trade and economic growth — values that many scientists, economists and even some politicians believe are fundamentally at odds with the preservation of a livable planet.

But that hasn’t stopped those in attendance from trying to reconcile their aspirations for a cleaner planet with their appetite for profits.

Yesterday, I moderated a panel discussion about whether or not global trade could be good for the climate.

When I posed this question to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, she made the case that global commerce was an essential part of the solution.

“It’s absolutely clear to me that you can’t have the adoption of clean energy technology without trade,” she told me.

Seated next to Okonjo-Iweala was James Marape, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea has an abundance of natural resources, including pristine forests and coral reefs, but it’s also one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Marape said he wanted rich nations to pay his country to preserve its nature.

“My recommendation to the world is we preserve the Earth as much as possible in its natural state,” he said. It was immoral, he added, to “deplete the resources that are meant for the entire planet.”

Marape’s pleas for preservation are unlikely to find much purchase in Washington. In his speech on Thursday, Trump emphasized that multilateral efforts to address the risks posed by climate change had no part in his “America First” agenda.

Many countries say they are still committed to reducing emissions, leaving the U.S. as an outlier, as Somini Sengupta reported this week. But the sudden disappearance of American climate leadership left a chill in Davos.

“We can’t wait years for solutions, because the climate crisis is not waiting for anyone,” Jeng, of the United Nations, said. “We know the solutions. We have the manpower. We have the resources. It’s about whether we want to do it or not.”

What to know about Trump’s first week:

Trump’s Retreat From Clean Energy Puts the U.S. Out of Step With the World: Trump’s repudiation of renewable-energy technologies stands to make the United States an outlier in the world. Even as coal, oil and gas still power the global economy, and more fossil fuels are burned year after year, the movement globally is toward heavy investment in solar, wind and batteries, the prices of which have fallen sharply in recent years. — Somini Sengupta

Trump Wants to Unleash Energy, as Long as It’s Not Wind or Solar: Trump is moving to restructure the nation’s energy future to block any transition away from fossil fuels. And he is testing the boundaries of presidential power to do it.

The orders that Mr. Trump signed on Monday would make it easier and cheaper for companies to produce oil and gas and for the government to stop clean energy projects that have been approved. While some actions lie within his purview, others may violate federal law or run counter to judicial decisions. — Lisa Friedman, Coral Davenport and Brad Plumer

Trump Sees National Emergencies Where Experts Say There Are None: Trump issued emergency declarations for the country’s energy sector and the southern border, unleashing broad powers for situations that — in these cases — are hardly in crisis. By any economic measure, the United States is not facing an energy emergency, experts said. — Eileen Sullivan and Coral Davenport

Read more:

Nudging rural areas away from coal

The problem: U.S. coal use has been on the decline for over a decade, but in 2023 roughly 17 percent of U.S. electricity came from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

That number can be even higher in rural areas. Small, nonprofit electricity providers known as rural electric cooperatives got 30 percent of their energy from coal in 2022, according to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

The fix: In the last days of the Biden administration last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it was awarding a total of $4.37 billion to 10 rural electric cooperatives across the country to help reduce the pollution stemming from their operations. That should help some co-ops move away from coal. Overall, the program aims to reduce greenhouse gas pollution by 55 million tons per year.

“This eases the financial burden of the transition,” said Mark A. Gabriel, president and C.E.O. of United Power, an electric co-op in Colorado that was selected as a recipient. Co-ops, unlike investor-owned utilities, are owned by their members, and together serve around 40 million people across the U.S., often in lower-income areas.

Gabriel said that United Power plans to use the federal funding for seven renewable energy projects, including a move away from coal. He estimates his co-op’s energy mix is at least half renewable energy, including hydropower, and less than 10 percent coal, with the rest being natural gas.

The obstacles: There are several reasons these co-ops have been overexposed to coal, according to Frances Sawyer, the founder of Pleiades Strategy, a research and advisory firm. Not only can some coal contracts last decades, but before the Inflation Reduction Act, not-for-profit organizations like co-ops didn’t have direct access to clean energy tax credits, she said.

Sawyer and others also point out that unlike traditional utility companies, co-ops can have a harder time getting access to capital. Daniel Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a nonprofit focused on climate change solutions, called the federal funding “a big, powerful shot in the arm.”

What’s next: It’s unclear how the pivot away from coal will fare under a second Trump administration, but on his first day in office Trump signed an executive order promoting fossil fuels, and called on agency heads to review “agency actions that impose an undue burden” on domestic energy resources like coal.

The coal industry is optimistic about the sector’s prospects under Trump, despite the drop in production during the first Trump administration, according to a recent report by S&P Global. — Allison Prang

More climate news:

Over the past decade, coal power use in the European Union has fallen by 61 percent, according to Carbon Brief. Last year, fossil fuel generation in the E.U. hit a 40-year low.
In a Times opinion piece, Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary under President Biden, argues that China will be thrilled if the Trump kills America’s renewable energy industry.
The Washington Post reports that 70 countries have banned paraquat, an herbicide that has drawn scrutiny for its possible links to Parkinson’s disease. But it’s still for sale in the U.S.

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