COP29 and the climate crisis: Navigating a world with Trump back in charge
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Dear reader, Welcome to the first issue of Mint’s newsletter on the climate crisis: Climate Change And You. I am Bibek Bhattacharya, and I will be taking turns in writing this newsletter, every two weeks, alongside my colleague Sayantan Bera.
And what a week to begin! The annual United Nations COP global climate summit has begun in Baku, Azerbaijan (it will end on 22 November). But the spectre that haunts the COP29 banquet is Donald Trump, who has been elected the 47th president of the US. If you remember, as the 45th president, he had taken the US out of the Paris climate agreement of 2015.
His reason? Climate change is a hoax. Also Read Your two-minute guide to COP29... and dystopia Amid his chants of “drill baby drill" and his fondness for the fossil fuel economy, the shadow of another US withdrawal from global climate negotiations hangs over COP29.
The fear is that this time, Trump might withdraw the US from the United Nations climate change framework entirely. This would be really bad news for global climate change mitigation efforts. The US is the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG), and the biggest historical emitter.
The Joe Biden administration wasn’t exactly covering itself in glory by dragging its feet on climate, especially finance, but the outgoing government was one that could be negotiated with. With Trump, all bets are off. And yet, COP29 has to carry on and be a success, because some very important global negotiations on climate finance will need to be finalized this year.
More on that below. Going into COP29, the headline numbers for climate change are pretty grim. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2024 is almost
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