“We will ‘drill, baby drill'”
Donald Trump, in reference to the desire to extract oil and gas, during a speech in Des MoinesIowa, January 2024
Only 6 days separate the November 5 elections in the US from the start of COP29, the twenty-ninth United Nations conference on climate change, the multilateral space where decisions are made, or should be made, to tackle the runaway global warming. The calendar has wanted it that way and, without a doubt, the US race will mark both the COP and the future of the climate, especially if Trump is elected.
Trump, Trumpism and climate
That Donald Trump is a self-confessed denier is nothing new. His electoral campaign has received large donations from Big Oil, the oil and gas industry, which has injected more than 14 million dollars to promote his new election. Although Trump is pissed: the amount represents just over 1% of what he wanted to get from fossil companies. In April, the Republican leader asked about twenty executives of the Big Oilwith companies like Chevron, Exxon and Occidental at the helm, a quid pro quo consisting of a contribution of 1,000 million to boost his campaign in exchange for, literally, eliminating barriers to drilling, ending the pause in gas exports and reversing new laws aimed at reducing pollution from cars.
Without a doubt, the former US president will not have consulted the IPCC reports or the recent Nature article “The atlas of oil that cannot be burned” which, given the narrow window of opportunity to avoid the worst consequences of the climate emergency, states that approximately 97% of coal resources, 81% of conventional gas and 71% of oil must remain underground. But Trump doesn’t understand how to count carbon molecules, he handles dollars better.
Although the worst thing about a possible victory for the American magnate is the loudspeaker that Trumpism would have, that phenomenon that hegemonizes the reactionary galaxy to propagate and legitimize their racist, sexist and denialist ideas. From Milei’s Argentina to Ayuso’s Madrid, the international far right anxiously awaits the supreme leader to regain his throne in Washington. And, returning to the topic that motivates the article, that would be very bad news for the climate because his fervent followers yearn to exploit national resources, whatever they may be, to feed their radical right project. It is therefore not surprising that in Europe, Reform UK glorifies British fracking, the Freedom Party glorifies Dutch gas, the Finnish Party glorifies Finnish peat, Alternative for Germany glorifies German lignite, National Regrouping French nuclear energy. and Law and Justice Polish coal and anthracite. Furthermore, this exaltation of the exploitation of natural resources is accompanied by a racist and xenophobic explanatory note: The ethnic group that owns the resources and their best managers are the white natives.
The reactionary and denialist impulse of Trumpism torpedoes the waterline of the complex and fragile climate multilateralism. If the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change generated “insufficient miracles” for the magnitude of the problem, such as the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Agreement, it was thanks to a downward negotiation so that the Parties, the countries that make up part of the Convention, will sign some type of global agreement. The international context in which the COPs are inserted is always in competition, with countries looking askance at each other so as not to lose positions in the world market, and in tension, with numerous open conflicts and military confrontations. It is unknown where the necessary increase in the climate ambition of the Parties will be, if they are crossed by the Trumpist and his discredit to multilateralism. Let us remember that the Trump administration left the Paris Agreement following the Bush tradition of ignoring these types of global agreements.
Kamala Harris, social democracy and the green transition
The Democratic option does not represent a guarantee for the climate fight either. Quite the opposite. The four years of the Biden-Harris tandem government have not led to a change in the fossil evolution of the United States after the call boom of non-conventional fuels, which led to a considerable increase in extraction starting in 2010 in the United States, during the administration of Barack Obama. Fracking oil and gas developments in North Dakota, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia have positioned the US as a leader in global oil extraction, with a record average of 22 million barrels per day in 2023 and 22% of world production, and natural gas extraction, with more than 1,000 bcm (billions of m3) in 2022 and 25% of the global. An example of this trend is the approval in 2023 of the controversial Willow oil project of ConocoPhillips in northern Alaska: 8 billion dollars to extract 180,000 barrels per day with a clear impact on the climate and Arctic ecosystems.
But the real workhorse for Kamala Harris is the continuation of the Biden administration’s star project, the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. Under that unintuitive name, the IRA generates great incentives for the green transition of the industry Made in US YoIncluding ambitious objectives for the expansion and manufacturing of so-called clean and renewable technologies, without questioning the system of capitalist production and consumption. Its $369 billion is an instrument to capture the green business and challenge Chinese hegemony in this field. What the IRA represents, just like the Green New Dealis the 21st century social democracy project, a neo-Keynesian attempt to address the climate crisishence the importance of its continuation or defeat.
Although the IRA is a flight forward that responds more to economic and commercial interests than to the fight against climate change itself, Trump has assured that will freeze money that has not yet been spent: “To further defeat inflation, my plan will end the Green New Deal –Green New Deal- which I call the Green New Scam –New Green Scum“Your animosity toward any Green Democrat policies will have to contend with the republican leaders who have expressed support for the IRA because it benefits their districts with “green jobs,” such as the $13.9 billion for Toyota Corp to build a new battery factory in Greensboro, North Carolina.
To demonstrate that he wants to control public spending, the former president’s solution has been to promise his new ecomodernist friend Elon Musk to lead the Government Efficiency Commission to audit the finances of the federal government with the goal of undertaking drastic reforms. Musk, who has become the Trumpist megaphone, has accepted with a “I look forward to serving the United States. if the opportunity arises. “No payment, title or recognition is needed.” Trump has added another quid pro quo with succulent donations from the owner of Tesla for the Republican campaign while he has softened his anti-electric car speech.
COP29, climate multilateralism and the future of the climate.
Everything mentioned will come into force at COP29. The inertia of the US elections and their results will fully affect what has been called “the Finance Summit” in Baku, Azerbaijan. If Harris wins, everything will continue the same – just as complicated. If Trump wins, Trumpism will add fuel to our burning house.
As shown by a report of the European Council on Foreign Relations 2023, Democrats and Republicans agree on the reindustrialization model and their confrontation with China, but they differ in their role in international institutions, which range from conservation and reform, with a clear capacity for hegemonic control, on the Democratic side, to ignore and erode them, for the Republicans.
Source: ecfr.eu
In any case, at COP29 we will surely be able to observe how the national withdrawal is not exclusive to the extreme right. Countries are skimping when it comes to providing money for people in the Global South severely affected by the climate crisis. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities does not translate into a transfer of resources that allows the most impoverished territories to alleviate the effects of extreme weather phenomena and adapt to inevitable changes. The astronomical figures of the IRA or the more than 800,000 million euros of the Next Generation funds contrast with the 700 million dollars that the Loss and Damage Fund has managed to raisethe mechanism to compensate for the current ravages of the climate crisis in the most vulnerable countries. Furthermore, the unfulfilled promise of the transfer of 100 billion annually from industrialized countries to the Global South for adaptation and mitigation is already totally insufficient. It is estimated that They will need between 5.8 and 5.9 trillion dollars until 2030 to meet climate goals.
If the great challenge of COP29 is New collective quantified climate finance goal –NCQG for its acronym in English-, a new, more concrete and operational framework for financing mitigation and adaptation, we will see how the major responsible parties, who should also be the major donors, behave. The European Union is taking its toll on the expenses of the pandemic and its new tax rules They will surely appear at the COP to negotiate downwards. The US may wait and kick ahead for COP30 in Brazil and, of course, if Trump is re-elected it could become an insurmountable obstacle to global collective action.
Although the results of the COPs have always been shown to be insufficient, blowing up this multilateral climate space would be bad news. Both the elections in the US, the G7 or BRICS meetings, or China’s five-year plans, are exclusive spaces with great power and global impact. Therefore, for the majority of countries in the Global South, small island states and those that do not have a voice in other forums, it is especially important to have spaces for visibility and advocacy such as the COPs, although it is still pertinent to question: where decide the future of the climate?
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