World leaders gathering in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Monday for a global climate summit face a bleak reality: The United States, the country responsible for pumping the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is expected to soon drop out of the fight against climate change.
The climate talks are the first significant United Nations gathering since Donald J. Trump won last week’s American presidential election, and foreign diplomats are looking for any signals about how Mr. Trump might approach multilateral negotiations.
After his victory, American priorities are expected to quickly shift.
As he did in his first term, Mr. Trump, who mocks climate change, intends to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, a 2015 international pact to protect the planet that he has called “horrendous.”
That means the United States will renege on its commitment to reducing greenhouse gases at precisely the moment that scientists say nations must sharply and rapidly cut the heat-trapping pollution to avoid the worst consequences of an overheated planet.
It also means that the country, the wealthiest in the world, is likely to abandon plans to give financial aid to poor countries, which have done little to cause global warming but are unable to cope with climate disasters that are growing more severe. Financial aid for developing nations is a focus of the U.N. talks, which are known as COP29 and are scheduled to last two weeks.
Instead of transitioning away from fossil fuels, as the United States and nearly every other country pledged last year, the incoming Trump administration will soon go in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill,” export more gas to other nations — even as the U.S. is already the world’s biggest exporter — and make it easier to burn coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
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