No leaders remain to check Trump’s climate wreckage

The last time Donald Trump entered the White House and menaced efforts to stop the climate from overheating, affronted world leaders closed ranks against him.
Such defiance and unity are practically unthinkable this time.
Trump’s peers are disunited, focused inward and have already largely abandoned the vanguard of the fight to stop the planet from burning up. 
Their list of excuses, in fairness, contains many serious matters. Wars and trade disputes have eroded international cooperation. A pile-up of global and domestic challenges has pushed climate change down — or off — the agenda when world leaders meet. The European powerhouses that eagerly claimed the climate mantle after Trump’s 2016 election are now fumbling through a house of mirrors as they confront economic decline, populism and what French President Emmanuel Macron warns could be the failure of the EU project. Many of these problems, by the way, will likely become even more daunting during a Trump presidency.
Simply put, leaders are distracted. The global order of recent generations is crumbling. It is, lamented U.N. climate change chief Simon Stiell in a recent speech, a “moment of profound fracture between nations and within them.” 
It’s an inauspicious backdrop for the annual U.N. climate summit, which begins on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan. The COP29 conference is doomed to be defined not only by Trump’s return to power, but also by the absence of those who might resist him.
What else to make of the list of leaders planning to miss the talks? Joe Biden is skipping. As is Macron, who once reveled in countering Trump’s gleeful climate denial. The European Union’s top executive, Ursula von der Leyen, who has made it her personal mission to deliver world-leading climate targets for 450 million people, is also a pass. Germany’s Olaf Scholz was supposed to go, but his government collapsed a day after Trump’s election, leading to his quick withdrawal. The host of next year’s climate talks, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is out thanks to a minor brain hemorrhage — and no, that’s not a metaphor. 
Trump won’t be there either, of course, having a whole government to set up in Washington.
“Is there any leader that sees climate as a key driver of contemporary politics and society?”  asked Luca Bergamaschi, founder of the Italian climate think tank Ecco.
“Probably not.”
Trump’s return finds the world’s leaders more Star Wars cantina than Plato’s Symposium. And it raises a question that will shape not only this year’s global climate talks but also the future of humankind: Do political leaders really matter when it comes to stopping the planet from burning up?
A more optimistic view — one climate diplomats, Biden administration officials and environmentalists will readily offer — is that these days government leaders are helpful, but not essential, to the lucrative business of saving the world.
“No matter what Trump says, no matter what, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable in the United States,” Gina McCarthy, who served as Biden’s national climate adviser, said on a call with reporters on Thursday.
Trump or not, there are big bucks to be made from cheaper, greener alternatives to fossil fuels. Governments are also throwing money at these sectors, seeing it as a way to win the economy of tomorrow.
“More of the action on climate change has shifted into the economic marketplace,” said Robert Orr, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and an adviser on climate change to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. “Political leadership decisions in the United States or elsewhere may not have quite the same import they would have [had] even 10 or 15 years ago.”
Trump’s first go-round bore that out to some degree. Like Canute with a $100 haircut, Trump could do little to hold back the tide of green investment and technological advancement. Nor could he stop U.S. state governments, mayoral offices and green-minded corporations. 
China, Orr said, used Trump’s first term as an “opportunity” to leapfrog the United States in clean energy markets. In his second presidency, Trump will find that structural economic transformation even further advanced.
“The context today is very different to 2016. There is powerful economic momentum behind the global transition, which the U.S. has led and gained from, but now risks forfeiting,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and one of the authors of the Paris climate agreement.
But such outcomes are not inevitable. 
Fossil fuels stubbornly remain 80 percent of the world’s energy supply. Governments still subsidized them to the tune of $620 billion in 2023. Companies are still estimated to spend $1.1 trillion on them in 2024 — a figure that keeps rising post-pandemic.
Yes, renewable energy is growing at a record clip, but energy demands are accelerating as well. That’s also helping keep fossil fuels around. 
Investors are picking up on the political ambivalence. Hedge funds are betting against the green transition, Bloomberg recently reported. And the day after Trump’s election, European and U.S. renewable energy stocks tumbled.
This is where the less upbeat view comes in, the one that says leaders — and leadership — are elemental. That those at the top are the only ones who can suddenly shift the political realities of climate change, creating steep changes in the planned emissions of entire economies with the power of their voices.
For example, without Biden’s pursuit of climate action, the U.S. would not have the Inflation Reduction Act, the near half-trillion dollar green subsidy splurge that gave the nation a fighting chance of meeting its climate goals. That was “an enormous step forward with respect to global climate action, and he should be commended for that,” said Canadian Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson this week. 
Leadership, of course, cuts both ways. Trump has vowed to dismantle Biden’s achievements. 
Lessons from Trump’s first term bear this out.
When he announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement in June 2017 — a move he has promised to repeat if granted a second stint in office — many wondered if it would precipitate a stampede out of the 2015 deal signed by almost 200 countries.
In Europe, national leaders mobilized. Their responses ranged from the noisy and superficial — France’s Macron sent a Facebook live video that closed with the riposte: “Make our planet great again” — to the quietly strategic. Macron, Germany’s Angela Merkel and European Union officials turned their diplomatic attention to Beijing, aiming to reassure Chinese President Xi Jinping that Trump was an outlier. 
European officials hinted to China that acting on greenhouse gases would open the door to broader engagement on economy and security.
And while Trump promised — to little discernible effect — to bring a coal boom back to America, a series of East Asian leaders signaled for the first time that they could envision a day without the fuel. 
South Korean President Moon Jae-in in 2020 set a goal for “net-zero” emissions by 2050, meaning his country would release no more carbon than it could soak up through its forests or suck from the air using a range of novel technologies. Japan also agreed to end coal project financing outside its borders and to set a net-zero target as well.
Then, in 2020, Xi told the United Nations that China would be carbon neutral by 2060. His speech stunned the world and announced Beijing as a sudden frontrunner in a new race for clean energy industrial dominance.
Leaders, argued Nick Bridge, the U.K.’s climate envoy from 2017 to 2023, have an almost unique power to leap over supposedly impassable hurdles.
Indeed, that’s what happened in Britain. In 2019, Prime Minister Teresa May made the decision, unprecedented in any major economy, to write a 2050 net-zero goal into law. 
Almost overnight, net zero went from a loopy fringe idea to a broad political consensus across Europe. A cluster of similar targets followed. The EU eventually adopted it for all 27 members. 
Scanning this landscape, the U.N. downgraded its prediction that the world would warm by 3 degrees Celsius — a truly calamitous path — to around 2.5 degrees. Not a safe future, but a huge improvement. 
That parade of climate-eager leaders is petering out, however. 
France’s Macron is essentially a lame duck atop a barely functioning government. And by the end of Trump’s second term, the French far right could easily be in power. On Wednesday, Macron called Trump to congratulate him, but climate was absent from the French summary of the call. Contrast that with Macron’s first call with Trump in May 2017, when he explicitly urged him to stick with the Paris Agreement.
In Germany, Scholz’s governing coalition has fallen, presaging a deeply uncertain period and a potentially greater influence on policy for the country’s climate-skeptic far right. 
“What we lack, compared to 2016, is basically Germany and France,” said Bergamaschi, the Italian think tanker.
That leaves the European Union, which is clinging to its binding climate targets. But the EU’s executives in Brussels are adrift in a year-long process of transferring power after this summer’s election — the reason von der Leyen, the EU’s top executive, gave for skipping COP29. Economic malaise, migration and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are at the top of most minds in European capitals.
Many emerging economies in Asia are straddling a political and development divide between the West and BRICS, an alliance that China and Russia are cultivating with other major oil and gas producers ambivalent about how fast emissions should be cut.
“It’s not that climate has become less important — I’d say it’s more important — but there’s lots of other things that are more urgent,” said Nick Mabey, the chief executive of the E3G think tank and a former adviser to the British government.
For anyone still willing to listen, the world’s climate is sending increasingly alarming signals. 
This year will break the record for the hottest in human history, which was set just in 2023. The ramifications are deadly: In June around 1,300 people were killed by extreme heat during the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, while superheated oceans have triggered a mass bleaching of coral reefs the world over, threatening whole underwater ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people rely on for food and income.
And it’s not just the heat. Climate change is making extreme weather more extreme — and more frequent. In just the last several weeks, back-to-back hurricanes ripped through the American Southeast, killing hundreds and causing billions in damage. And in Spain, torrential floods left hundreds dead, tearing at the country’s social fabric.
These calamities are a mere precursor of what may come.
Last year more than 200 scientists declared that numerous “earth systems” literally keeping the world’s climate in check were nearing a point of no return. Crossing that threshold would render the habitable world unrecognizable, they said. Seas would swallow coastlines. The climate would gyrate wildly. 
“Plenty of leaders,” said Todd Stern, who was the U.S. climate envoy under President Barack Obama, “don’t really know the magnitude of what we’re facing on climate.”
The timing truly could not be worse for the climate focus of politicians to drift. 
Buried in leaders’ stuffed in-boxes is a fast-approaching United Nations deadline in February to deliver new national climate targets. It sounds banal. It’s anything but.
These documents will determine what planet-warming emissions we’re pumping into the sky until 2035. At which point only 15 years will remain until the deadline that most advanced economies have set for being completely carbon neutral. 
That’s a recipe for claustrophobia from tight timeframes. The middle of the century, after all, could be as few as four U.S. presidents away (including Trump). At this time next year the world will be closer in time to 2050 than to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. 
What that means, in practical terms, is that the plans laid out in the coming months will serve as the clearest signal yet of humanity’s collective climate future. Changing course later on is not impossible, but desperately little time remains for playing catch-up.
U.N. boss Stiell has called the plans, with only mild hyperbole, “among the most important policy documents produced so far this century.” 
When it comes to these national climate plans — which will dictate how fast old polluting technologies are replaced in every home, office and factory — leaders are the “essential tier,” Orr said. Drafting them “requires an all-of-economy and an all-of-society approach,” he added. “And often, depending on the political system, that requires an individual leader.”
A handful of these new plans are expected to be announced at COP29 in Baku, alongside a hoped-for deal on financial resources from wealthy governments to help developing countries clean up their industries. But with budgets strained everywhere, landing a new finance goal will again require a signal from leaders that international climate efforts are where treasuries should focus some largesse.
Some leaders are gripping — or at least talking about gripping — the moment.
In Brazil, Lula has made it his personal mission to ensure that next year’s U.N. climate conference in Belém delivers a major step forward. In the U.K., new Prime Minister Keir Starmer was elected on a promise to make Britain’s electricity system completely carbon neutral by 2030.
British and Brazilian diplomats have discussed a coordinated announcement of their new climate plans at COP29, according to one person familiar with the talks, granted anonymity in order to discuss the private negotiations.
China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, is in many ways the largest reason for optimism. The streets of Shanghai, according to a recent visitor, are silent with the electromagnetic whir of electric cars. China’s domination of clean vehicles, batteries, mineral supply chains and other climate-friendly technology has spurred an international great power race to build out such industries. For those seeking more concrete motivation than securing their grandchildren’s future, beating China is proving a compelling reason to go green.
Climate-focused leaders are elsewhere as well. Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a climate scientist. Colombian President Gustavo Petro is talking to other Latin American leaders about a future economy without fossil fuels.
There is one further fact from the recent past that might provide a key to unlocking this problem: What leaders find compelling or important can be recalibrated from below. 
The last Trump presidency was also the era of the youth climate movement, of Greta Thunberg and mass popular protests — with many of the big leadership decisions beginning on the streets. 
“We created the conditions where it didn’t feel so scary to be courageous,” said one of the youth movement’s leaders, German activist Luisa Neubauer. That went for both the most powerful and powerless, she said. 
On U.S. election night, Neubauer waited with thousands at a would-be victory party for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Eventually, the mood turned sour. 
“Everyone was lost for words,” she said. Then the search for a scapegoat began. To Neubauer, it looked like the response to a bad breakup: “You don’t want to cope with your feelings and you start punching around.”
That sentiment will be hard to control. Last time, climate activists channeled it into action. This time it risks curdling into despair. A second Trump term won’t automatically spark another uprising.
This is the moment, Neubauer said, “to train thousands of activists to be more strategic and to not fall for cynicism.” This is the moment, she said, for “working and chipping in when it’s getting really dark and when there is no miracle in sight.”
Karl Mathiesen reported from London. Sue Allan contributed reporting from Toronto. Clea Caulcutt contributed reporting from Paris.