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Viewpoint: Trump to overshadow UN climate conference
Donald Trump’s election victory last week will loom large in the minds of delegates at this year’s UN climate conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The government, corporate, and civil society representatives meeting from Nov. 11-22 will be forced to reckon with the return of the climate skeptic who withdrew the world’s largest economy from the Paris Agreement during his first administration. We asked Eurasia Group expert Herbert Crowther how the prospect of Trump’s return to office will affect COP29 and UN efforts to mitigate climate change more broadly.
What has Trump’s attitude generally been toward climate concerns?
Trump was largely dismissive of climate change as a pertinent economic or political issue during his first administration. Though not prominently on display during the recent US election cycle, his attitude toward the issue has not changed since his first term – which will likely become more evident when he takes office next year. He will almost certainly move to scale back programs to develop new low-carbon technologies championed by President Joe Biden’s administration, including those created by the Inflation Reduction Act. That will put more burden on state and local-level officials, who helped fill the climate policy void during Trump’s first term and kept the US energy transition moving forward.
How will Trump’s election affect the mood at COP29?
Trump’s election will significantly dampen the atmosphere at COP29, both in terms of negotiating priorities and broader sentiment among negotiators. Trump’s election will make it harder to reach a consensus on ambitious new targets, particularly for climate finance. Delegates will not regard any commitments made by the outgoing Biden administration as very credible; consequently, other governments will be more reticent to make ambitious promises of their own. In terms of broader sentiment, many negotiators will already begin turning their attention to where the COP process will go next year when Trump takes office and likely withdraws the US from the Paris Agreement again (Biden’s administration rejoined the agreement). The COP process has been largely focused on advancing the key Paris aim of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Given this context, what COP29 objectives are likely still feasible?
One area where negotiations can still likely move forward involves the so-called Article 6 rules for the sale and purchase of carbon emissions credits. Talks around Article 6 have resumed this year after their very public breakdown last year at COP28. They will not be dramatically altered by the US election result and are still trending in a positive direction. For the issue of carbon market rules, the US has stuck to a negotiating position that is more aligned with that of emerging markets, meaning it is not a hurdle to reaching a deal in Baku.
What objectives are not?
Negotiations on assistance from developed economies to emerging market economies to finance climate change mitigation efforts is likely an area that will suffer the most at COP29 as a result of Trump’s victory. There was already limited room for consensus on a new umbrella target for global climate finance – the so-called New Collective Quantified Goal, or NCQG. Trump’s election will likely move the conversation even further away from targets like the $1 trillion in annual climate finance deployment that many emerging markets had been pushing for. Another important topic that will be affected by Trump’s election is the next round of country-level climate plans – the so-called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs. By next February, all parties to the Paris Agreement must submit new plans covering their emissions goals until 2035. With Trump’s election and a worsening outlook for agreements at Baku, more of these plans are likely to present cautious targets, which bodes poorly for medium-term efforts to combat climate change.
Where does the COP process go from here?
A second Trump administration will almost certainly withdraw from the Paris Agreement again. Though the COP process already survived one US absence during Trump’s first term, the global climate policy environment faces greater challenges today. The timeframe to meet targets is shorter, and tensions have intensified between industrialized and emerging markets over who bears the most blame for climate change and should pay for mitigation efforts. Many US states, corporations, and financial institutions will remain relevant players at COP and will continue to push the US energy transition forward, but they will not be able to compensate fully for the lack of federal policies. Meanwhile, the US absence will place greater pressure on China and the EU to assume more of a leadership role in COP and shoulder greater financing commitments. This year’s conference will provide some early signals about that, but 2025 — especially the buildup to COP30 — will be the real litmus test.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor, Eurasia Group
UN Secretary-General: Rising seas mean rising “misery”
UNITED NATIONS – For the first time, the United Nations convened a high-level meeting to address the global threats posed by rising sea levels. Secretary-General António Guterres warned attendees on Wednesday that “rising seas mean a rising tide of misery.”
Nations define themselves by their territorial boundaries. But those participating in the high-level meeting were seeking to update international law to reflect the reality of a warming planet and sinking coastlines. The Permanent Representative of Trinidad and Tobago to the United Nations Dennis Francis described the mood as “one of consensus and solidarity.”
Astudy cited by the IPCC — the UN’s top climate change body — projected that the island nations of Tuvalu, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Nauru, and Kiribati may become completely uninhabitable by 2100. If that projection comes true, around 600,000 citizens will become climate refugees.
Creating a new global consensus is essential to address this crisis, but how does one convince people who live far inland, or climate change deniers, to care about this issue?
Francis described sea level rise as a “hydra” affecting “everything,” far more than just coastal and island communities. Displaced persons, food insecurity, and groundwater salinity are likely to affect much more than the roughly one billion who currently live in low-lying coastal areas.
In an interview with GZERO Media, Dr. Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer — who directs the NASA Sea Level Change Team — offered a simple answer: by using data for “clarity.” Even if someone doesn’t believe they’re sick, a fever doesn’t lie, she told us.
NASA released thisinteractive tool using previous tide gauges to predict future sea level rise scenarios through 2150. Spoiler: It’s not good.Graphic Truth: Carbon in context
The US and Canada are both racing against the clock to lower their greenhouse gas emissions. As the effects of climate change become more apparent and deadly, countries are grappling with how to curb their emissions without curbing economic growth.
Canada, a resource-rich nation, is at a crossroads. Along with transportation and industry, the oil and gas sector dominates the country's emissions profile. Still, Canada has embarked on an ambitious journey to redefine its environmental legacy with one of the boldest climate commitments: pledging to reduce emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030. Policies such as carbon pricing, identified as the top driver of emissions reductions, will prevent 226 megatonnes of carbon pollution from being released by 2030.
Meanwhile, the US energy sector, primarily powered by fossil fuels, is the largest source of emissions, contributing significantly to the nation's carbon footprint. Transportation, industry, and agriculture follow closely behind. But the US has made strides in addressing its emissions through a combination of federal mandates, state-level initiatives, and private-sector innovation. The Clean Power Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, are meant to incentivize the private sector to lead the way in renewable energy innovation and adoption.
Places where oil and gas are produced, however, may experience the most economic upheaval from the clean energy transition, while local communities near fossil fuel industries are more likely to experience environmental degradation and health impacts.COP28’s challenge: growing problems, shrinking credibility
As 60,000 delegates gather today in Dubai for the opening of COP28, scant progress on longstanding climate goals and an emerging scandal over the fossil fuel industry’s influence over the UN climate conference is undermining COP’s credibility.
On the eve of the summit, leaked documents suggested that the UAE, a major oil producer which is hosting the summit, has been using the occasion to press for oil deals. Talk about foxes in the hen house ...
What’s more, the heads of the world’s two largest and most polluting economies won’t even be there: US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are skipping the event altogether.
So what’s on the agenda? One major aim is finding money for the so-called “loss and damages fund” that delegates agreed to create last year.
By 2030, the fund is meant to disburse $100 billion to help developing countries recover from climate-related disasters and adapt to a worsening trend of climate change that they themselves played almost no role in bringing about.
But so far the fund has been hamstrung by disagreements about how much major polluters like the US, EU, India, and China should have to contribute – the Chinese and Indians don’t want to put up nearly as much money as other major polluters. There’s also no agreement about how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. The US and EU want to move more quickly on those phaseouts than many emerging market countries in Asia and Latin America are comfortable with.
But it’s not all bad COP, there’s some good COP too. All the major players appear ready to commit to tripling renewable energy capacity worldwide by 2030, for example. An agreement to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050 also appears promising, though some EU member states, like Germany, are likely to object.
And some important topics are new to the agenda, including addressing growing water scarcity and finding ways to balance the needs of food production with emissions reduction (also the focus of this week’s GZERO Live event “High and Dry: Tackling Global Water Stress”). That’s good news according to Shari Friedman, Eurasia Group’s managing director for climate and sustainability.
“If you approach climate separate from water, separate from agriculture, separate from biodiversity,” she warns. “You end up creating problems that then you have to fix later.”
Still, the biggest challenge for COP28 is about something bigger than any one policy area: More than a quarter of a century after the first COP was held in Berlin, does the UN-backed climate agenda still have credibility?
The world is making agonizingly slow progress on carbon emission reductions, and its targets to reach net zero emissions by 2050 will require changes so large as to be unrealistic.
For more on what to expect from COP28, don’t miss our interview with Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who was a part of Canada’s delegation when the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21 in 2015.
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Who should pay to fix our warming planet?
Global leaders are gathering in Dubai for COP28, the 28th annual United Nations climate summit, starting tomorrow through Dec. 12. But before the meeting even begins, I can already tell you one thing: Just like every COP that came before it, COP28 will fail to resolve the central debate on “solving” climate change.
At the heart of this failure lies a trillion-dollar roadblock: disagreement between developed and developing countries over who’s to blame for the problem – and who should foot the bill to fix it. The US and Europe blame Chinese and Indian coal plants and call for their immediate phase-down. China and developing countries blame the West’s historical emissions and insist on compensation for their mitigation and adaptation efforts. Africans and Indians assert their right to develop their economies as Westerners did. Vulnerable nations demand reparations to cope with the harmful consequences of the global warming that’s already baked in. Neither side wants to make concessions.
While they bicker, the planet is cooking. Cumulative emissions since 1850 – when humans started burning fossil fuels at scale – have already caused global temperatures to increase by about 1.2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels. Scientists believe we have nearly reached the point where limiting the planet’s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (and therefore the most extreme consequences of climate change) becomes physically – not just politically or economically – impossible. 2023 will be the hottest year on record, and climate-related extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and heat waves are becoming more frequent and deadlier.
The good news is that we’re already moving in the right direction thanks to technological advancement, demographic changes, and market and geopolitical incentives. Looking out two or three generations from now, the global energy complex will be almost entirely post-carbon: renewable, cheap, decentralized, and abundant.
The bad news is that decarbonization is not happening fast enough to get there sooner. And unless developed and developing nations can bridge the climate finance gap, the path to global warming below 2 degrees Celsius – let alone 1.5 degrees, the current goal – will remain out of grasp. This puts the debate over equity and burden-sharing squarely at the heart of the planet’s ability to curb climate change.
So, who’s right? Who’s wrong? And what will it take to break the stalemate?
Climate justice by the numbers
Carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. Unlike shorter-lived greenhouse gases such as methane, CO2 doesn’t go away – at least not on a human timescale. This means that all the carbon that we’ve pumped into the air in the past is still heating the planet today and will continue to do so in the future. And because CO2 is a “well-mixed” gas, it doesn’t matter where or by whom it is emitted. Whether caused by an LA traffic jam in 1999 or a Mongolian coal plant last Tuesday, it’s all the same to the atmosphere – and it’s all still up there.
In total, we have released roughly 2,500 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) into the atmosphere, mostly in the last 40 years. The United States is responsible for about 25% of cumulative emissions, while Europe (the 27 members of the European Union plus the United Kingdom) contributed 22%. China comes in third with nearly 15% of historical emissions. Many of today’s largest emitters such as India and Brazil have not contributed significantly to global cumulative emissions, with 3% and 1%, respectively. The whole African continent is responsible for less than 3% of historical emissions.
Adjusting for population size, the US has burned almost eight times more carbon per capita than China and over 25 times more than India. This makes it clear that Americans (and, to a lesser extent, other Westerners) are disproportionately responsible for causing climate change.
But while the US is historically responsible for more global warming than any other country, it is no longer the world’s largest polluter. China surpassed it in 2006, and its annual emissions are now more than double America’s and over one-quarter of the global total. India will pass the EU in the short term and the US in the medium term. And even as emissions in the industrialized world have been declining for over a decade, they are still growing in developing countries, which account for two-thirds of global emissions.
Yes, the average American still burns more than twice as much carbon as the average Chinese and 10 times as much as the average Indian. That’s pretty unfair. Not only did rich countries get rich by burning fossil fuels – we are also able to maintain living standards other countries can’t even dream of by continuing to burn much more than them. But just as the atmosphere doesn’t care about where or when carbon gets burned, it also doesn’t care about fairness.
‘Fair’ is off the table
In order to have an even chance of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, scientists estimate that cumulative CO2 emissions cannot exceed 2,900 GtCO2. That’s our carbon budget. The problem is we’ve already used up most of it, meaning global emissions would have to go down by 43% by 2030 to stay on budget – a nearly 10% reduction every year from now until then (for reference, the COVID-19 pandemic caused only a 6% reduction in global emissions in 2020).
Putting aside the question of whether this is even physically possible, who should bear the brunt of this burden?
The obvious answer is developed countries. Most developing countries are well within their fair share of the carbon budget relative to their population size. Conversely, the US and other wealthy nations have long since exceeded their fair share, such that even if they reach net zero by 2050 (a big if), their emissions will still overshoot their fair share by three or four times. In fact, Americans used up their fair share of the carbon budget in 1944 (!). Whatever little budget space remains belongs entirely to developing nations.
Beyond the fact that they’ve been living on borrowed emissions since D-Day, there’s another compelling reason why rich countries should be expected to do more than poorer nations to curb climate change: They can. Developed nations are, well, developed, so they have more than enough resources to meet their citizens’ needs already (even if these are unevenly distributed). That means that they can afford to engage in aggressive decarbonization without compromising their economic development. By contrast, for developing countries, paying for decarbonization out-of-pocket at the needed pace would require condemning much of their population to poverty.
Expecting wealthy nations to take on more than poor ones is not just about retribution, then. It’s also about not depriving billions of people of the right to develop – a right that industrialized countries exercise to this day. Had rich countries not emitted (so much) more than their share, developing nations would have plenty of room left to develop like industrialized nations did.
What it’ll take
Unless scientists figure out a way to suck carbon out of the air at scale, the only way that the world can ever reach net zero is if all countries – poor and rich alike – reach net zero. Forget right and wrong – that’s simple math.
So, to answer the earlier question: Should developing nations pay for the sins of much wealthier countries? Absolutely not. Must they? Barring a breakthrough in negative emissions technologies, unfortunately yes. They cannot pursue the fossil-fueled path to development rich countries enjoyed and keep the planet from warming much further.
But for developing nations to ever agree to get on board with the program, industrialized countries will first have to credibly commit to doing four things in return. First, accelerate their own decarbonization to maximize the carbon budget available to the rest of the world. Second, invest whatever it takes to develop and deploy technologies that exponentially reduce the cost of decarbonization abroad. Third, aggressively fund the large upfront costs of decarbonization and adaptation in developing countries. And fourth, compensate vulnerable nations for the losses and damages they’re already experiencing due to climate change they didn’t cause.
Mustering the political will to make these things happen in wealthy nations is a huge challenge. We have consistently failed to meet our 2009 promise to shuttle $100 billion a year in climate finance to the developing world by 2020, a puny amount compared to the estimated $1 trillion price tag to decarbonize emerging economies. We are also still off-track to meet our own decarbonization goals. If we want developing countries to pony up, there can be no more empty promises and unmet pledges.
Unless we’re willing to put our money where our mouths are, we’re going to see not 1.5 C warming, not even 2 C, but rather closer to the 2.7 C the planet is currently on pace for – not an existential scenario for life on Earth, but certainly a life-changing one for billions of people around the world and especially in the Global South. We need to do better.
Trudeau may have to give up the carbon tax stick
After years of staring down opponents to his national carbon tax – which puts a price on emissions and sends taxpayers rebates as a way of encouraging the reduction of climate-harming pollution – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has finally blinked, putting his whole emission-reduction plan in jeopardy. The move raises questions about whether it’s possible to use carrots and sticks to change voter behavior.
The problem started a month ago when a Liberal party member of Parliament from rural Newfoundland voted with the Conservative opposition for a motion to repeal the carbon tax. Turns out, voters in Canada’s rural Atlantic region, many of whom heat their homes with oil, have been letting their representatives know that they don’t appreciate the extra cost of the tax, which comes on top of higher global oil prices. They want carrots, not sticks, from environmental policies.
Ken McDonald, the MP for the riding of Avalon, voted with his people instead of his government. “Everywhere I go, people come up to me and say ... 'We're losing faith in the Liberal party,” he said.
Atlantic voters have been reliable Liberal voters since Trudeau was first elected in 2015, but the polls show support in the region collapsing, putting withering pressure on his MPs. So last week, Trudeau backed down, announcing a three-year pause on the application of the carbon tax to fuel oil, which came as a huge relief to his Atlantic MPs, but not to people in other parts of the country, who heat their homes with cleaner natural gas.
Axing the tax
Trudeau saved himself some pain in one part of the country, but he has undercut the arguments for the tax. His government has always insisted that most people get bigger rebates than it is costing them, but he has now acknowledged it is causing hardship for some, opening the door to similar complaints. It looks like political favoritism. In fact, one of his own ministers gave an interview saying that if Westerners want their fuel tax cut, “perhaps they need to elect more Liberals.”
Strangely enough, Westerners have not welcomed that message, and people in the rest of the country are crying foul. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is so upset that he has threatened to stop remitting carbon tax charged on natural gas.
Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is poised to benefit, since he has made getting rid of the carbon tax the centerpiece of his leadership, holding well-attended “Axe the Tax” rallies in rural Canada, where resistance to the tax is greater than in cities. Poilievre has enjoyed a double-digit lead over the Liberals for months.
“This is not going to convince anybody who was gonna vote for Poilievre because they didn't like the carbon tax to come back,” says Graeme Thompson, a global macro-geopolitics analyst with Eurasia Group. “But they also now risk alienating some of their supporters, maybe more in the center and on the left, who really support action on climate change. I wonder if they've kind of just opened up a bit of a two-front war.”
Not only in Canada
As voters face cost-of-living pressure around the world, politicians are under growing pressure to back away from emission-reduction measures. In September, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak postponed measures designed to bring Britain to net zero by 2050.
But Canada is facing a unique challenge because of US President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is providing huge subsidies to green-tech projects. This provides an opportunity for the Conservatives, who can campaign on dropping Trudeau’s carbon tax and adopting Biden’s plan by subsidizing green projects, says Thompson.
“Take the Biden policy, make it the Conservative policy, say, ‘We’re going to incentivize investment. We're going to incentivize energy production. That’s going to produce jobs. We’re going to get growth, and we’re going to eliminate the carbon tax, and there’s our platform.’”
A problem of design
The Trudeau government has promised there will be no more carve-outs, but the pressure will not stop. Environmentalists are disappointed that Trudeau backed down. Tim Gray, executive director at Environmental Defence in Toronto, worries that the design of Canada’s carbon tax makes it hard to sustain politically because voters notice the increase in their fuel bills and tend not to notice the rebates.
“The way that the carbon pricing system in Canada was designed at the retail level gives you the worst way to go forward in terms of building political support, based on our experience and knowledge of where people arrive on these kinds of issues.”
When he announced the three-year pause, he also announced an Atlantic pilot project for heat pump rebates. Gray thinks the government should have done more of that and paid for it by taking money from the oil companies profiting from the high prices.
“It would have been better to pair deeper investments in fossil fuel transition — not just for oil but also natural gas, etc. — with a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry because it’s a narrative that is easily explained.”
Trudeau’s carbon tax is one of the government’s signature accomplishments, which enjoyed wide support from environmentalists and climate-conscious voters, a political message that he managed to sell in three election campaigns and that his lawyers successfully fought for in court cases.
But it is starting to look like using sticks as well as carrots to bring down emissions is not going to work, and Canada may eventually be forced to match the American policy, which is all carrot and no stick.
Amazon nations can't agree on deforestation goal
Leaders of eight Amazon nations converged in Brazil this week for the first time in 14 years to devise a plan to save the Amazon rainforest, but they appeared to fall short of finding common ground on how to end deforestation.
A joint statement released after the summit implied that countries would set out their own conservation goals rather than adhere to a shared regional policy. There was also no consensus on how to end illegal gold mining in the Amazon.
Ahead of the summit, Brazil's President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva proposed an agreement to end deforestation by 2030.
But a key striking point has been oil exploration. Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro has called for a complete end to oil exploration in the Amazon, which has been a point of contention in Brazil as the country’s state-run Petrobras company has been trying to get a license for an oil drilling project near the Amazon River.
Indeed, ending deforestation comes at a significant cost for Amazon countries, which will have to forgo profits from ranching, agriculture, and new oil and mining projects. Lula says he hopes some of these costs can be offset by international contributions and carbon credits. Norway and Germany are already funding Amazon preservation, and the Amazon nations believe they could convince other countries to contribute if they show a united front -- an effort that appears to have fallen short.
In addition to international contributions, Amazon nations hope to take advantage of the growing carbon market, where an organization that pollutes can buy a credit worth one ton of carbon dioxide, which then goes toward carbon-lowering efforts in Amazonian communities. The World Bank currently estimates that the carbon credit market in the rainforest is worth $210 billion a year.
3 key Supreme Court decisions expected in June 2023
As the 2023-2023 Supreme Court session comes to a close, a flurry of major decisions are expected by the end of the month on the EPA, affirmative action, and student loan forgiveness. Emily Bazelon, Yale Law School Senior Research Fellow and host of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast, stopped by GZERO World with Ian Bremmer to discuss some of the big cases argued before the court this term.
SCOTUS already issued a ruling in Sackett v. EPA, limiting the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect US wetlands and waterways. It’s the second ruling in a year where the justices significantly rolled back the federal government’s authority to regulate the environment.
“Millions of acres that have been regulated up till now won't be anymore,” Bazelon says, “And when you think about the record of the Clean Water Act for preserving and cleaning Americans’ waterways and rivers, now the EPA has a lot less reach to do that.
There are also two important cases in higher education––affirmative action and President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Bazelon thinks that SCOTUS is ready to end race-based affirmative action in the US based on justices’ questioning in oral arguments. How the court will rule in the student loans case, however, is trickier to predict because loan forgiveness is somewhat tied to national emergency declaration for COVID, which ended in May.
For more on the Supreme Court and what to expect from anticipated rulings this year, tune into GZERO World with Ian Bremmer. Check local listings.
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