When the COP29 climate conference comes to an end next week, it will have concluded without an appearance by President Biden. This is not because Donald Trump just won the election, supplanting the outgoing American head of state on the world stage. The president-elect isn’t attending, either. Neither is Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he defeated on Nov. 5.
It’s not just the Americans who are AWOL. Hardly any of the world’s most powerful leaders will be making an appearance in Baku, Azerbaijan — yet another year that the annual Conference of the Parties, convened to stem the problem of warming, has been hosted by a petrostate. President Xi Jinping of China won’t be there, and neither will Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. President Emmanuel Macron of France, the bedraggled face of Western liberalism, is skipping the conference, too. Also missing will be Lula da Silva, who is the leader not just of Brazil but also of the Group of 20. As recently as the Glasgow summit in 2021, the annual climate confab was a who’s who of global power politics. These days, it’s more about who’s missing.
Trump’s election may look like a black dawn to climate activists. And indeed it is: When the timelines of climate action are so short, and the paths to climate stability so narrow and difficult, any setback is a disaster. In 2018, considering a world 1.5 degrees warmer than in preindustrial times, the world’s scientists issued an unignorable warning about the consequences; in 2024, according to a Carbon Brief analysis, we have already surpassed 1.5. And now we know, almost surely, that the United States will be leading the world more quickly and belligerently into that danger zone, not helping to chart a way out of it.
But the skeptic’s election is also a confirmation of an international turn in the politics of warming as much as it is a sharp or distinctly American break. Yes, a global renewables boom is well underway, with worldwide investment in clean energy reaching $2 trillion this year and total solar capacity doubling since 2022. But the climate logic of that transition increasingly goes unspoken in all but the most committed corners, replaced by chin-scratching about energy politics. Governments have retreated from even their legally binding promises to decarbonize, trusting markets to deliver comparatively meager emissions reductions instead, and activists have been unable to generate meaningful public outrage at the walkback.
Partly this is a sign of some success. When Trump was first elected in 2016, clean energy was something of a niche concern, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer pointed out last week; now it is “central to modern economic development and to geopolitics” almost everywhere, even those places where political debate has moved on.
In Europe, for instance, where politicians terrified of “greenlash” have pulled back from their climate push, emissions nevertheless fell by more than 8 percent last year — nearly as fast as in the year of pandemic lockdowns, though probably not fast enough to meet the most ambitious global targets. Globally, national policy commitments are actually lagging behind market forecasts for renewables, though forecasts aren’t destiny: Many of the tech companies that won admiration for their world-leading decarbonization plans have watched their emissions rise instead — some by as much as 30 percent in four years, thanks to the astronomical energy demands of artificial intelligence.
In the United States, the presidential race featured little direct debate over the Inflation Reduction Act, a historic climate investment on which President Biden wagered much of his legislative legacy; in campaigning, his vice president spent more time boasting that the country had set records for oil and gas production. In his first term, Trump got an awful lot of mileage out of denouncing the Paris agreement and the Green New Deal. On the trail this time, he made token references to the “great scam” of warming, but he focused his closing argument on fear-mongering about gender surgeries for inmates — of which, in total under Biden, there have been two in federal prisons.
The president-elect’s energy and climate agenda remains murky, like so many of the plans he tossed off on the campaign trail. In the spring at Mar-a-Lago, Trump promised a group of oil and gas executives that for a billion dollars of campaign contributions, he would grant them regulatory rollbacks in return. He has separately promised to claw back unspent funds allocated by the I.R.A., but plenty of fossil fuel companies have lobbied on behalf of the bill and its handouts.
Some energy modelers have published research showing expected emissions backsliding from the United States, though others have argued that the I.R.A. is hardly accelerating the country’s pace of decarbonization, instead merely piggybacking on historical trajectories proceeding independent of energy policy. Trump is bad news for offshore wind power and regulatory action on methane. Some environmentalists fear even worse setbacks for protections unrelated to climate warming: against lead pollution, and PFAS contamination and the many other hazardous chemicals leaching from fossil-fuel plants and industrial agriculture and into our soils, our waters and our air.
But for all his anti-environmentalist bluster, Trump’s most conspicuous aide-de-camp is a clean-tech billionaire, Elon Musk, and the fact that congressional districts that voted for him in 2020 received three-times as much I.R.A. spending as those that went for Biden suggests at least the possibility of a near future more in line with the “all of the above” energy policy of Barack Obama and Biden. There will be many new liquefied natural gas export terminals approved, in defiance of the energy modeling of climate science, which has repeatedly shown that even existing fossil-fuel infrastructure is incompatible with the world’s climate goals. Coal, at least, is not is not making a comeback, but there may be something of a nuclear revival under Trump. And it’s even possible that some efforts at permitting reform could produce green-energy progress alongside the fossil-fuel bonanza such deregulation would unleash.
On the global stage, Trump’s victory looks like an effective surrender in the green tech arms race with China, which not that long ago formed the cornerstone of America’s new industrial strategy — a confused hodgepodge of geopolitical rivalry and domestic economic repair that promised to restore U.S. manufacturing might and secure an imperial share of the world’s clean-energy future. In China, emissions may have already peaked — a miraculous turn of events that has forced American hawks to present Beijing’s commitment to clean energy, rather than the opposite, as the larger geopolitical problem.
This, too, may look in retrospect like a simple confirmation of past trends. Over the past five years, as China has bet its economic future on green energy, American business has grown increasingly enamored of artificial intelligence instead — a pattern that looks set to intensify under the watch of a Trump White House barnacled with Silicon Valley accelerationists whose main energy concern is how to power a whole armada of new data centers.
In “Overshoot,” a rageful, radical and timely new history of the ecological present, the activist scholars Wim Carton and Andreas Malm ask how it is — how it could be — that the world seems to be surrendering to climate breakdown. “What do we do when catastrophic climate chaos is a fact?” they ask. The apparent answer is “Let it continue for the time being.”
They drew the title for their book from the word scientists have applied to the hope that having crossed intimidating warming thresholds, the world could ultimately be pulled back from the brink and the legacy climate gradually restored. For the time being, at least, we’re still moving in the wrong direction: “The warmer the globe became, the more fossil fuels were poured on the fire,” Malm and Carton wrote. “The higher the temperatures, the larger the emissions.” Just a few years ago, the temperature levels enclosing us represented no-go zones. But “the time had come, it was said, to postpone the lost cause. If the house was on fire, putting that fire out would have to wait.”
In the meantime, the signals that once alarmed us have continued to bleat: hundreds of deaths and possibly $250 billion in damages from Hurricane Helene; hundreds more deaths and “car soup” in Spain’s Valencia region in the aftermath of Europe’s deadliest floods of the past half century; wildfires in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the smoke joining clouds of toxic ash carried from flames in New Jersey to blanket New York City in unbreathable air for the second year in a row. Perhaps some futures are scarier to imagine than they are to live through. But not very long ago, any of these events might have been taken by climate-conscious liberals as forbidding signs of a kind of incipient climate apocalypse. Now it all feels like old news.
More striking, perhaps, has been the climate signal on the global right, which comes not in the form of concern for future warming but what the Marxist theorist Richard Seymour calls “disaster nationalism.”
The causes of the global rightward wave are many — the pandemic, inflation, mass immigration, alienation from the neoliberal politics of the past decades. But it also follows precisely the pattern that those studying the political economy of climate change have been predicting now for decades: intuitions of ecological hardship yielding an increasingly zero-sum view of the world, civilians embracing a “lifeboat ethics” vision of politics and a dog-eat-dog approach to national identity that invites all of us, on both sides of the aisle, to shrink our circles of empathy smaller and smaller — defining success, and failure, in increasingly relativistic and tribal terms.
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