‘No big plan B’: A global anti-Trump climate resistance struggles to gain ground

The Biden administration and like-minded governments around the world are racing to secure their global climate strategy against a potential rollback under Donald Trump — an effort that has gained urgency since the ground shifted under the U.S. presidential race a month ago.

The push includes leaning on the World Bank to unleash money for clean-energy projects in developing nations in a way that a future Trump administration could not unilaterally reverse.

U.S. officials are also talking with China about the more difficult task of cutting the huge amount of greenhouse gas pollution wafting from that country’s oil, gas and coal industries. And they’re working with other countries on the details of a $1 billion global effort to cut methane pollution that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic nominee, announced at last year’s U.N. climate summit in Dubai.

Meanwhile, climate diplomats and environmentalists have been holding their first early discussions about ways to persuade deep-pocketed investors that green energy is still the wave of the future — even if Trump wins in November.

Ministers and climate officials from around 40 countries, including the United States, met last week in Wuhan, China, and spoke about the importance of making deeper collaborations without the U.S., according to one person at the talks. Those conversations will ramp up during major summits planned for New York, Azerbaijan and Brazil in the coming months, according to interviews with more than two dozen government officials and climate diplomacy insiders.

Biden’s halting debate performance on June 27 served as an accelerant for planning the resistance. The following morning, climate diplomacy WhatsApp groups lit up in “fear and awkwardness” at the dawning reality that the U.S. president could well lose, said one person with access to those groups who, like others quoted in this article, was granted anonymity to disclose private communications.

Harris’ jump to the top of the ticket lifted some of their cloud of doom, but hasn’t ended the urgency of preparing for Trump.

“Joe Biden has ultimately done a great service to international climate efforts with his decision not to run,” said Jochen Flasbarth, the top civil servant in Germany’s development ministry.

The climate discussions are nowhere near as advanced as the parallel efforts by NATO and other U.S. allies to ease the disruption that Trump’s return would bring to their security and defense relationships.

Climate supporters are up against some unforgiving obstacles. One is the prospect that Trump — who has labeled climate change a “hoax,” condemns green energy spending as a “scam” and pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement during his first term — would have the tools to wreak significant damage to the international climate regime.

A second is the limited leverage that most other governments have over a country that boasts the world’s mightiest economy and, in Trump, an increasingly isolationist foreign policy.

The third is the Earth’s clock: By January 2029, when the next president’s term ends, the warming planet will be even closer to the edge of catastrophe.

Advocates and diplomats are pushing to secure their legacy as best they can.

“[I]n many ways the attitude of the international community is that the Americans are an unreliable partner and we have to be prepared to move ahead without them,” Nigel Purvis, CEO of the consulting firm Climate Advisers and a former State Department climate official, wrote in a text message.

Whatever a Trump administration would do, it’s not clear nations could mount much of a response to counter or corral him, said Purvis. “In other words, there’s no big plan B.”

U.S. officials, meanwhile, have tried to calm their allies’ worries.

Senior White House adviser John Podesta, who leads the Biden administration’s international climate portfolio, said the hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy tax incentives created by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are “well-rooted” — and industry will want to keep those policies in place.

Other governments “ask the question, ‘How permanent is our policy?’” Podesta told POLITICO. “And I am able with great confidence to say I think the structure and the investments being made by the IRA are quite stable and secure.”

Trump has sent the opposite signal, insisting at his convention acceptance speech July 18 that he will choke off the flow of Biden’s green energy spending. “All of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent … we will not allow it to be spent on meaningless Green New Scam ideas,” he said.

Global climate advocates are taking Trump at his word. While they’re optimistic that the global transition away from fossil fuels would survive Trump, his presidency would threaten to torpedo essential steps for making that transition happen fast enough — including investors’ confidence and flows of climate aid.

“He will be a domestic and international climate wrecking ball,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at the E3G think tank. “It would be malpractice to be unprepared.”

Given these multiple evaporating timelines, Biden administration officials are racing to finish diplomatic and technical negotiations while fulfilling commitments made in gatherings like last year’s COP28.

The to-do list is long.

A senior State Department official said Podesta has met several times with World Bank President Ajay Banga as the Biden administration pushed the world’s largest supplier of climate finance to complete changes to unleash more lending capital at its October meeting.

The official said the Biden administration is arguing that the tweaks will create more stable financial flows from countries including the United States. Bilateral aid from the U.S. often faces steep cuts under Republican presidents.

A summit of leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies in Rio de Janeiro, scheduled less than a fortnight after November’s U.S. election, could be an important test of the will of the bank’s other major shareholders to press on with the financing changes, with or without American backing.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Chinese diplomats are hammering out methane emissions standards from the oil, gas and coal sectors in China, said Rick Duke, the State Department’s No. 2 climate negotiator. It needs to deploy the $1 billion in methane reduction investments that Harris announced last year — money pulled from governments, the private sector and philanthropic groups. That effort must work with governments like Turkmenistan, the world’s fifth-largest producer of oil and gas methane pollution, to deploy those technologies.

“There’s a lot of work to do. This work takes time. And we are enthusiastic that over [the] coming years we can make a huge difference,” Duke said at an event in Washington. “I can’t speak to what the other team would do or not do.”

The rest of the world is also scrambling to protect the climate regime, keep alive conversations that Biden officials have driven and try to reassure flighty investors that betting on clean energy remains smart money.

Side meetings to discuss how exactly to respond to Trump are planned in September during the United Nations General Assembly’s meeting in New York, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.

Another important forum is the next U.N. climate summit, known as COP29, where world leaders are scheduled to gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, just days after the United States’ November election. One aim of that discussion should be to coordinate an unambiguous signal to markets that the world is still moving away from fossil fuels, said Camilla Born, who was a senior adviser to previous climate summit presidencies in the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates.

“Business and investment is really affected by moods,” Born said. “That’s why I think it is actually very helpful that the COP is timed shortly after the election because it just focuses the minds of heads of state to draw lines in the sand.”

If the U.S. retrenches, China would be poised for a dominating role over global climate talks. Podesta noted he will visit China later this year to advance work with the country, which is both the world’s top greenhouse gas polluter and a global leader in green energy technology.

Others are already planning to reprise an ad hoc system of secretive and unofficial meetings, hastily built during Trump’s first term, to keep climate diplomacy moving forward in the absence of the U.S.

Between 2016 and 2020, the Asia Society and other think tanks hosted “track two” diplomatic meetings that preserved dialogue between China’s government and a group of former U.S. officials who viewed themselves as an American climate administration in exile.

State department officials such as Sue Biniaz, who left during the Trump administration only to return under Biden, and future climate envoys Podesta and John Kerry, held meetings with counterparts, including then-Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua. A series of such encounters were mediated by the Mandarin-speaking former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, now ambassador to the United States.

“If Trump is elected, track 2 will have to be organized,” said Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, via a text message.

Other, more formal settings are also seen as key for keeping up engagement between China and the West. Last week saw the eighth edition of an annual ministerial meeting set up by China, Canada and the EU in 2017 to stop the U.N. climate process from veering off track after Trump abruptly pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Around 40 countries attended the meeting in Wuhan, but few ministers showed up, sending career diplomats instead. The backroom chatter, according to one attendee, focused on the need to continue the format in response to a change in the White House.

But observers warned that such collaboration would be more challenging than during the last Trump term because of fractious relations among the world’s other major polluters.

“China is not as close to the EU, and the Sino-Canadian relationship has been at the rock bottom,” said Li. “The world has become a much more fragmented and turbulent place. Climate change is slipping away from the priority list. All odds are against climate action, and you add President Trump in, we are in a very different place.”

Climate advocates are also pushing for a prime role by cities, states and captains of industry in the resistance. At last year’s COP28 in Dubai, billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg co-hosted a summit of these so-called “subnational leaders,” where mayors from around the world shared notes on the practical challenges they share in cutting down on diesel and petrol pollution and renovating leaky buildings.

“We’re building those coalitions now,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who leads a global alliance of climate conscious mayors called C40, told reporters on a call. “I’ve been speaking to colleagues in America — governors and mayors. And God forbid Donald Trump wins again, I’m confident we’re going to carry on seeing that sort of bold, brave action.”

In stark contrast to 2016, few in the climate movement harbor illusions that Trump can be talked out of leaving the Paris Agreement, which would lead to the U.S. joining Iran as the only nation not to be a signatory.

However, they acknowledge that keeping up open lines of communication with Trump’s White House on climate change, oil and gas supply and clean energy would be crucial.

U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said he wants the new Labour government to restore Britain’s climate leadership. In May, he flew to Washington to hold talks with Republicans — including Ohio Sen. JD Vance , whom Trump later tapped as his running mate.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — whom Trump has praised as “one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world” — is pitching himself as an intermediary between the former president and advocates of a continued climate effort. Orbán will hold the rotating EU presidency when the U.S. election happens and recently met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence, though they did not discuss climate change at that gathering.

Orbán’s relations with other EU nations are at a nadir over Hungary’s authoritarian slide and his courtship of Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps limiting other governments’ eagerness to use him as an intercessor. Still, the Hungarian leader is willing, said Felix Debrenti, a staffer in the office of Orbán’s political director.

“Given Prime Minister Orban’s good relations with President Trump, Hungary is willing to serve as a facilitator with a possible Trump Administration if needed,” Debrenti said.

Karl Mathiesen reported from London. Zack Colman reported from Washington. Zia Weise contributed reporting from Brussels.