Trump anti-climate ghost hangs over UN meeting
PARIS: For the first time since Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, UN negotiators gather next week to draft rules to take forward the climate-rescue Paris Agreement he has threatened to abandon.
The mid-year round of haggling in Bonn is meant to begin work on a crucial rulebook for signatories of the pact.
But it risks being sidetracked by mounting uncertainty over the world’s number two carbon polluter, with Trump at its helm.
“This was supposed to be a highly technical and uneventful meeting to flesh out some of the details in the Paris Agreement.
“But, obviously, the speculation coming out of Washington is now at the top of our minds,” the Maldives environment and energy minister, Thoriq Ibrahim, told.
He chairs the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a key negotiating bloc in the UN climate forum which will meet from May 8-18.
The deal was sealed at the 21st so-called ‘Conference of Parties’ (COP 21) in the French capital in December 2015, after years of haggling.
A diplomatic push led by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, and China’s Xi Jinping, saw 195 countries and the EU bloc – 196 parties in total – OK the deal to the popping of champagne corks. Palestine has also since joined.
The agreement sets the goal of limiting average global warming to two degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels — and 1.5 C if possible.
This will be done by curbing planet-warming greenhousegas emissions from burning oil, coal and gas — an objective to which countries have pledged voluntary, nationally-determined ‘contributions’.
Scientists project that on current pledges, Earth is on track for warming of around 3C a scenario that would doom the planet to potentially catastrophic droughts, floods, and rising seas.
Widely hailed as the last chance to stave off worst-case-scenario global warming, the Paris pact was savaged by Trump during his presidential campaign.
He called climate change a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by China, and promised to ‘cancel’ the deal as president.
With the rest of the world on tenterhooks ever since, Trump has said he will make his decision before the next G7 meeting on May 26-27 in Sicily.
“The question of whether this creates a difficult backdrop for the negotiations is clearly a ‘yes’,” said Paula Caballero, who heads the climate programme at the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI).
A State Department official confirmed a US delegation will travel to Bonn, though a ‘much smaller’ one than in recent years.
“We are focused on ensuring that decisions are not taken at these meetings that would prejudice our future policy, undermine the competitiveness of US businesses, or hamper our broader objective of advancing US economic growth and prosperity,” said the official, asked about the negotiators’ brief. — AFP
Some fear a US withdrawal from the agreement would dampen enthusiasm for ramping up national emissions-cutting targets, required to bring them in line with the 2C target.