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Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
Every annual UN climate summit struggles to deliver a meaningful outcome. This year’s meeting in Brazil’s Amazonian port city of Belém may truly require a miracle. US President Donald Trump’s opposition to climate efforts and commitment to boosting fossil fuels creates one of the most difficult global contexts the event has faced. There are signs, however, that some leaders are ready to exploit the disarray and join forces in climate “coalitions of the willing”. They should do whatever they can to resist the pressure from Washington.
The world’s biggest economy will be a notable absentee in Belém because Trump is again pulling out of the 2015 Paris agreement. The president’s unmoored belief that climate change is a “con job” had little impact in his first term, but this time is different. His administration is axing green energy projects at home and using America’s economic heft to pressure other nations to abandon their climate efforts. Some delegates fear the Trump team could repeat the hardline tactics they used last month to scupper a historic net zero shipping deal, and push more countries to quit the Paris accord.
Even if this does not happen, last week’s weakening of a plan to cut carbon emissions by the EU, long a stalwart of climate action, adds to the inauspicious backdrop. Global temperatures are meanwhile rising so fast that the UN has conceded that it is “inevitable” that the world will overshoot 1.5C of warming since pre-industrial times, a level already reached for one calendar year for the first time in 2024. The Paris accord was supposed to hold warming to well below 2C, and ideally 1.5C, though these levels are measured over multiyear periods.
There are glimmers of hope amid the gloom. The world has never been closer to a decisive climate turning point. Growth in carbon emissions has slowed fivefold to 0.32 per cent a year compared with the decade before the Paris agreement, thanks to a surge in solar power, wind farms and electric cars. Renewables overtook coal’s share in the global electricity mix earlier this year and predictions of nearly 4C of warming by the end of the century have now been scaled back to around 2.8C or lower.
The energy transition is unambiguously under way — even though it is still not fast enough, still too heavily reliant on China’s domestic efforts, and the progress that has been made occurred before Trump began doing his best to prolong the life of fossil fuels.
Even without Trump, the unwieldy nature of the COP process means meetings still focus heavily on convoluted negotiations rather than practical steps to wean the world off fossil fuels. So it is welcome that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at an opening COP event last week made a concrete call for a road map to reverse forest loss and overcome dependence on oil, gas and coal in a fair and planned way. The absence of the US at Belém may make it easier to agree such a framework; the more leaders who are willing to back such moves the better.
There are other steps that delegates could take to make future COPs more effective, not least when it comes to bolstering the voluntary national country climate plans that lie at the heart of the Paris agreement and are supposed to be regularly updated.
It was heartening, too, to hear other presidents from South America in Belém last week publicly rebuke the leader of the US for denying the reality of climate change. For years after the Paris agreement, activists urged global leaders to “keep 1.5C alive”. Now that goal is at death’s door, the task of delegates in Belém is to keep the COP process alive. Clumsy and cumbersome as it is, the world has no alternative.
