Trump’s extreme positions might invite censure from several of his colleagues in the developed world. (AP Photo)
Jan 21, 2025 12:36 IST First published on: Jan 21, 2025 at 12:36 IST
When Donald Trump announced the US’s exit from the Paris Agreement in 2017, the decision took about three years to come into effect. The US president’s decision to quit the landmark pact, hours after taking oath for a second innings at the White House, in contrast, will take as little as a year to come into effect. This is because the administration will not be bound by the accord’s initial three-year commitment.
Climate negotiators who had assembled at Baku in Azerbaijan for CoP29 could have seen this coming. The US elections had concluded before the UNFCCC event and outgoing President Joe Biden did not attend the meet — the US was represented by Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy, John Podesta. In the run-up to the elections, Trump made his intentions of pulling the US out from the Paris pact clear. Yet, the slogans of “Drill Baby Drill” at Trump’s campaigns did not seem to have imparted a sense of urgency to the proceedings at Baku.
The unfortunate reality is that global climate negotiations have rarely replicated the resolve they showed at Paris 10 years ago. Climate talks are already at a perilous point. The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of individual countries do not add up to make possible the Paris pact’s goal of keeping temperature rise 1.5 degrees Celsius below industrial levels. Countries are expected to announce new plans in the next two months. It’s too early to quantify the effect of the US President’s decision on this endeavour. However, one thing is clear: Even if all other countries upscale their climate ambitions significantly — recent history does not offer much hope on this account — the collective fight against the crisis is likely to be weakened significantly. The US absence from the Paris Agreement will mean that other countries will need to make greater reductions in emissions. With the world’s second-largest GHG polluter walking away, some countries, especially in the developing world, might well question a push to upscale ambition. The Baku CoP didn’t anticipate these dangers.
Baku was billed as the finance CoP because it was intended to focus on augmenting developed countries’ commitment of 2009 to mobilise $100 billion per year by 2020 to support developed countries in addressing the climate crisis. That commitment was honoured two years later. The pledges announced at CoP29 were substantially less than what the developing countries had sought. The question now, after the US’s withdrawal, is: Will other donor countries fill the void? The fear is with the world’s biggest economy abdicating its responsibility, other rich nations might be less inclined to contribute more money. The signs were clear at Baku. Yet the Finance CoP did very little by way of building guardrails.
Addressing the climate crisis requires contributions from all. But some will need to put in more effort and resources than others. That’s not just because the world is unequal. The idea of “Common But Differentiated Responsibility” (CBDR) is not founded on charity. It has a scientific and moral basis. Because of their head start in industrialisation, most developed countries have released far more ozone depleting GHGs than countries in the developing world. The beginnings of this industrialisation were coterminous with colonialism. CBD is, therefore, also an acknowledgement of the ecological debt owed by the North to the South. However, though CBDR was a founding principle of the UNFCCC, its legal status remained ambiguous. Year after year at CoPs, developed countries found ways to keep out references to historic responsibilities out of final declarations. In recent years, especially after Paris Pact’s voluntary national commitment route to address the climate crisis, the principle has been substantially undermined.
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Trump’s extreme positions might invite censure from several of his colleagues in the developed world. But if their record at climate CoPs is indication, they share an uneasy kinship with the US president in believing that the North is “making sacrifices” to arrest global warming, while the South, especially India and China, is getting a “free rider” status. The UNFCCC processes, at best, paid lip service to CBDR, and its moral underpinnings. That’s why developed countries reneged or defaulted on financial commitments, while pushing the Global South to take on more commitments. That’s why CoP after CoP failed to find creative solutions to address the fossil fuel problem that takes care of the South’s developmental imperatives. That’s why the UNFCCC could never build even a modicum of a bulwark against climate bullies such as Trump.
The success of the Paris Agreement could see the world averting catastrophic heat, cold, floods, cyclones, droughts and diseases. The world’s second GHG emitter has marched out of the deal, and with impunity. He has threatened to walk out of the UNFCCC. In a way, Trump has shown a mirror to the UN agency that anchors climate change negotiations: It had a moral bedrock, but chose to chip away at it.
kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
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