Climate Brief:  US election fallout on UN COP 29

December 1, 2024

Just days before COP29, Donald Trump won the US election on a campaign promising to roll back climate action and take the world’s biggest historical emitter out of the Paris Agreement once again.

The potential impact of his reelection on the summit’s negotiations – and multilateralism more broadly – instantly became a major focus on the global stage.

(Carbon Brief analysis earlier this year found Trump’s reelection could add 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, GtCO2e, to US emissions by 2030.)

Early on in the summit – before negotiations heated up – US climate envoy John Podesta held a press conference where he tried to reassure delegates that president Joe Biden’s outgoing team would continue to play their role at the talks.

At the same time, senior representatives of the EU, the UK and China suggested that their countries would be willing to step into a larger climate leadership role in light of Trump’s election.

The summit’s first week saw right-wing populist leader Javier Milei withdraw Argentina’s delegation from the talks, with some interpreting this as a bid to woo Trump.

The move ignited fears that Argentina might become the first country to follow the US in leaving the Paris Agreement, with some delegates suggesting to Carbon Brief that this could start a chain reaction of far-right governments withdrawing from the global climate deal.

The Argentinian government later clarified it had no plans to leave the Paris Agreement.

As negotiations got underway, the general sense was that all parties were continuing to work together in good faith despite the uncertainty caused by the US election result, one lead negotiator told journalists at a background briefing.

Some said this demonstrated “resilience” in the COP process, whereas others pointed out that it exposed how the talks are inflexible to react to major global events.

In public, countries made a show of reaffirming their commitment to multilateralism. A call for “strengthened multilateralism” was included in a statement from the G20 released during COP and several countries referenced its importance during plenary sessions.

Despite this, Trump’s victory and its hamstringing impact on US negotiators – who are usually viewed as the “powerbrokers” of the conference – was clearly visible in some of the major negotiating tracks at COP29, negotiators and observers said.

South African environment minister Dion George, who co-chaired negotiations on mitigation along with Norway, told Politico that the US was more “subdued” in these discussions, when “normally they talk a lot”.

The New York Times reported that Saudi Arabia, known to push back on new mitigation measures, were particularly emboldened in their stance against including the fossil-fuel transition pledge agreed last year in the COP29 negotiated text.

Some observers speculated that the diminished position of the US – who reportedly helped to convince parties including Saudi Arabia to agree to the fossil-fuel pledge in Dubai – could have played a role.

Trump’s victory also had repercussions for COP29’s biggest aim of agreeing to a new climate-finance goal, others said.

The summit saw developed countries agree to give $300bn a year in climate finance to developing countries by 2035, an outcome that left many global-south nations bitterly disappointed. (See: New climate finance goal.)

Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for AOSIS, told Politico that Trump’s victory “changed” what the US “could have provided” – as the outgoing Biden team were in no position to commit to an uptick in spending.

A European diplomat added that the looming arrival of the Trump administration made it “more important” for developing countries to agree to a climate-finance deal at COP29, telling Politico:

“The developing countries [were] saying that it is better to have no agreement than a bad one…Normally, that is true, but, in this case, with the upcoming presidency in the US, it should be crucial for them to have an agreement now.”

However, Dr Leon Sealey-Huggins, a senior campaigner at the charity War on Want, said that the “threat of the Trump presidency [was] being used” to try to convince developing nations to agree to a finance deal, exposing shortcomings in developed nations’ approach to  multilateralism. He told Carbon Brief:

“People [were] saying: ‘Well, you better take this money, because when Trump comes, you’re not going to get any money’. And I think that’s a damning indictment of the failure of the political systems in the global north to appreciate that you can’t have a global climate response without global climate justice.”

Moving forward, it is clear that Trump’s victory will continue to affect climate negotiations, observers said – with his administration set to be in place for COP30 in Brazil, a summit being billed as a major moment for increasing global efforts to cut emissions.