It’s been a decade since the U.S. and Europe pushed the world to embrace a historic agreement to stop the planet’s runaway warming. The deal among nearly 200 nations offered a potential “turning point for the world,” then-U.S. President Barack Obama said. Eventually, almost every country on Earth signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, a pact whose success would rest on peer pressure, rising ambition and the economics of a clean energy revolution. But 10 years later, the actions needed to fulfill those hopes are falling short. The United States has quit the deal — twice. President Donald Trump is throttling green energy projects at home and finding allies to help him undermine climate initiatives abroad, while inking trade deals that commit countries to buying more U.S. fossil fuels. Europe remains on track to meet its climate commitments, but its resolve is wavering, as price-weary voters and the rise of far-right parties raise doubts about how quickly the bloc can deliver its pledge to turn away from fossil fuels. Paris has helped ingrain climate change awareness in popular culture and policy, led countries and companies to pledge to cut their carbon pollution to zero and helped steer a wave of investments into clean energy. Scientists say it appears to have lessened the odds of the most catastrophic levels of warming. On the downside, oil and gas production hasn’t yet peaked, and climate pollution and temperatures are still rising — with the latter just tenths of a degree from the tipping point agreed in Paris. But the costs of green energy have fallen so much that, in most parts of the world, it’s the cheapest form of power and is being installed at rates unthinkable 10 years ago. World leaders and diplomats who are in Brazil starting this week for the United Nations’ annual climate talks will face a test to stand up for Paris in the face of Trump’s opposition while highlighting that its goals are both necessary and beneficial. The summit in the Amazonian port city of Belém was supposed to be the place where rich and poor countries would celebrate their progress and commit themselves to ever-sharper cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Instead, U.S. contempt for global climate efforts and a muddled message from Europe are adding headwinds to a moment that is far more turbulent than the one in which the Paris Agreement was adopted. Some climate veterans are still optimists — to a point. “I think that the basic architecture is resistant to Trump’s destruction,” said John Podesta, chair of the board of the liberal Center for American Progress, who coordinated climate policy under Obama and former President Joe Biden. But that resistance could wilt if the U.S. stays outside the agreement, depriving the climate movement of American leadership and support, he said. “If all that’s gone, and it’s gone for a long time, I don’t know whether the structure holds together,” Podesta added. Other climate diplomats say the cooperative spirit of 2015 would be hard to recreate now, which is why acting on Paris is so essential. “If we had to renegotiate Paris today, we’d never get the agreement that we had 10 years ago,” said Rachel Kyte, the United Kingdom’s special climate representative. “But we can also look to these extraordinary data points, which show that the direction of travel is very clear,” she said, referring to growth of clean energy. “And most people who protect where their money is going to be are interested in that direction of travel.” THE PARIS PARADOX One thing that hasn’t faded is the business case for clean energy. If anything, the economic drivers behind the investments that Paris helped unleash have surpassed even what the Paris deal’s authors anticipated. But the political will to keep countries driving forward has stalled in some places as the United States — the world’s largest economy, sole military superpower and historically biggest climate polluter — attacks its very foundation. Trump’s attempts to undermine the agreement, summed up by the 2017 White House slogan “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” has affected European ambitions as well, French climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana told reporters late last month. “I have never seen such aggressivity against national climate policy all over because of the U.S.,” said Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement. “So we are really confronted with an ideological battle, a cultural battle, where climate is in that package the U.S. government wants to defeat.” The White House said Trump is focused on developing U.S. oil and engaging with world leaders on energy issues, rather than what it dubs the “green new scam.” The U.S. will not send high-level representatives to COP30. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda,” said Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” Trump is not the only challenge facing Paris, of course. Even under Obama, the U.S. insisted that the Paris climate pollution targets had to be nonbinding, avoiding the need for a Senate ratification vote that would most likely fail. But unlike previous climate pacts that the U.S. had declined to join, all countries — including, most notably, China — would have to submit a pollution-cutting plan. The accord left it up to the governments themselves to carry out their own pledges and to push laggards to do better. An unusual confluence of political winds helped drive the bargaining. Obama, who was staking part of his legacy on getting a global climate agreement, had spent the year leading up to Paris negotiating a separate deal with China in which both countries committed to cutting their world-leading pollution. France, the host of the Paris talks, was also determined to strike a worldwide pact. In the year that followed, more than 160 countries submitted their initial plans to tackle climate change domestically and began working to finish the rules that would undergird the agreement. “The Paris Agreement isn’t a machine that churns out ambition. It basically reflects back to us the level of ambition that we have agreed to … and suggests what else is needed to get back on track,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a negotiator for the United Kingdom during the Paris talks. “Whether countries do that or not, it’s essentially then a matter for them.” Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former environment minister and a lead negotiator of the Paris Agreement’s carbon crediting mechanism, called the deal an “incredible feat” — but not a self-executing one. “The problem is now it’s really up to countries as well as cities, regions, companies and financial institutions to act,” she said. “It’s not a treaty thing anymore — it’s now, ‘Do the work.’” WHEN GREEN TURNS GRAY Signs of discord are not hard to find around the globe. China is tightening its grip on clean energy manufacturing and exports, ensuring more countries have access to low-cost renewables, but creating tensions in places that also want to benefit from jobs and revenue from making those goods and fear depending too much on one country. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former United Nations climate envoy, eliminated his country’s consumer carbon tax and is planning to tap more natural gas to toughen economic defenses against the United States. The European Union spent the past five years developing a vast web of green regulations and sectoral measures, and the bloc estimates that it’s roughly on track to meet those goals. But many of the EU’s 27 governments — under pressure from the rising far right, high energy prices, the decline of traditional industry and Russia’s war against Ukraine — are now demanding that the EU reevaluate many of those policies. Still, views within the bloc diverge sharply, with some pushing for small tweaks and others for rolling back large swaths of legislation. “Europe must remain a continent of consistency,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after a meeting of EU leaders in October. “It must step up on competitiveness, but it must not give up on its [climate] goals.” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in contrast, said after the same meeting that he felt vindicated about his country’s long-standing opposition to the EU’s green agenda: “In most European capitals, people today think differently about these exaggerated European climate ambitions.” Worldwide, most countries have not submitted their latest carbon-cutting plans to the United Nations. While the plans that governments have announced mostly expand on their previous ones, they still make only modest reductions against what is needed to limit Earth’s warming since the preindustrial era to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Exceeding that threshold, scientists say, would lead to more lives lost and physical and economic damage that would be ever harder to recover from with each tenth of a degree of additional warming. The U.N.’s latest report showing the gap between countries’ new pledges and the Paris targets found that the world is on track for between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees of warming, a marginal difference from plans submitted in 2020 that is largely canceled out when the U.S. pledge is omitted. Policies in place now are pointing toward 2.8 degrees of warming. “We need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions now in an ever-compressing timeframe and amid a challenging geopolitical context,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme. But doing so also makes sense, she added. “This where the market is showing that these kind of investments in smart, clean and green is actually driving jobs and opportunities. This is where the future lies.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message Tuesday that overshooting the 1.5-degrees target of Paris was now inevitable in the coming years imploring leaders to rapidly roll out renewables and stop expanding oil, gas and coal to ensure that overshoot was short-lived. “We’re in a huge mess,” said Bill Hare, a longtime climate scientist who founded the policy institute Climate Analytics. Greenhouse gas pollution hasn’t fallen, and action has flat lined even as climate-related disasters have increased. “I think what’s upcoming is a major test for the Paris Agreement, probably the major test. Can this agreement move forward under the weight of all of these challenges?” Hare asked. “If it can’t do that, governments are going to be asking about the benefits of it, frankly.” That doesn’t mean all is lost. In 2015, the world was headed for around 4 degrees Celsius of warming, an amount that researchers say would have been devastating for much of the planet. Today, that projection is roughly a degree Celsius lower. “I think a lot of us in Paris were very dubious at the time that we would ever limit warming to 1.5,” said Elliot Diringer, a former climate official who led the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ international program during the Paris talks. “The question is whether we are better off by virtue of the Paris Agreement,” he said. “I think the answer is yes. Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not.” GREEN TECHNOLOGY DEFYING EXPECTATIONS In addition, the adoption of clean energy technology has moved even faster than projected — sparking what one climate veteran has called a shift in global climate politics. “We are no longer in a world in which only climate politics has a leading role and a substantial role, but increasingly, climate economics,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. “Yes, politics is important; no longer as important as it was 10 years ago.” Annual solar deployment globally is 15 times greater than the International Energy Agency predicted in 2015, according to a recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a U.K. nonprofit. Renewables now account for more than 90 percent of new power capacity added globally every year, BloombergNEF reported. China is deploying record amounts of renewables and lowering costs for countries such as Brazil and Pakistan, which has seen solar installations skyrocket. Even in the United States, where Trump repealed many of Biden’s tax breaks and other incentives, BloombergNEF predicts that power companies will continue to deploy green sources, in large part because they’re often the fastest source of new electricity. Costs for wind and batteries and falling, too. Electric vehicle sales are soaring in many countries, thanks in large part to the huge number of inexpensive vehicles being pumped out by China’s BYD, the world’s largest EV-maker. Worldwide clean energy investments are now twice as much as fossil fuels spending, according to the International Energy Agency. “Today, you can actually talk about deploying clean energy technologies just because of their cost competitiveness and ability to lower energy system costs,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at the research institution Energy Innovation. “You don’t actually even have to say ‘climate’ for a lot of them, and that just wasn’t true 10 years ago.” The economic trends of the past decade have been striking, said Todd Stern, the U.S. climate envoy who negotiated the Paris Agreement. “Paris is something that was seen all over the world, seen by other countries, seen in boardrooms, as the first time in more than 20 years when you finally got heads of government saying, ‘Yes, let’s do this,’” he said. “And that’s not the only reason why there was tremendous technological development, but it sure didn’t hurt.” Still, limits exist to how far businesses can take the clean energy transition on their own. “You need government intervention of some kind, whether that’s a stick or a carrot, to push the economy towards a low-carbon trajectory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary general of policy at the International Chamber of Commerce. “If governments press the brakes on climate action or seriously start to soft pedal, then it does have a limiting effect.” Brazil, the host of COP30, says it wants to demonstrate that multilateralism still works and is relevant to peoples’ lives and capable of addressing the climate impacts communities around the world are facing. But the goal of this year’s talks might be even more straightforward, said Guilanpour, the former negotiator. “If we come out of COP30 demonstrating that the Paris Agreement is alive and functioning,” he said, “I think in the current context, that is pretty newsworthy of itself.” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zi-Ann Lum in Ottawa, Karl Mathiesen in London and Zia Weise in Brussels contributed to this report.

The world order is fracturing and the European Union must turn to outer space in its search for raw materials. In short, it needs to mine the Moon. So argues the European Commission in a new report on the key threats to Europe’s security and prosperity, published Tuesday. “[T]he global order has been shaken tremendously,” the EU executive’s sixth annual Strategic Foresight Report warned, adding non-EU countries may no longer be relied upon to supply materials vital in low-carbon energy technology. “In response, there may be a growing emphasis on … advanced mining technologies including space mining, starting with the Moon,” the report said. Metals such as lithium, copper, nickel and rare earths are essential for renewable energy and electric vehicles, and very few of them are mined within the EU. The Commission is worried countries with rich reserves of these metals could team up to manipulate supply, the same way the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) manipulates oil supply. This could drive up prices and “restrict access to essential materials, posing a serious challenge to the EU’s strategic autonomy and clean energy transition,” the Commission said. HAS BRUSSELS GONE MAD? Space mining has been promoted by many government agencies, including the U.S. government’s NASA and Japan’s JAXA. In the EU, Luxembourg has positioned itself as Europe’s space mining hub, with hopes of mining the Moon and asteroids using robots. These celestial bodies are often rich in useful metals such as rare earths, aluminum, titanium, and manganese, as well as precious metals like gold and platinum. In June this year, the Commission released its Vision for the Space Economy, in which it estimated so-called space resources could be worth up to €170 billion between 2018 and 2045. Still, industrial-scale space mining remains a distant dream, and practical solutions for mining and transporting mined metals back to Earth are in their infancy. The EU has also fallen behind on establishing critical raw material supply chains and refining capacity. | Christopher Neundrof/EPA WHY IS EUROPE WORRIED? The energy transition is sending demand for critical minerals (literally) skyrocketing. To meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, for example, the world needs to mine as much copper over the next 25 years as has been mined in the whole of human history, according to some estimates. Copper is essential in anything that uses electricity. It’s a similar story for lithium, used in EV batteries. The European Commission expects EU lithium demand for batteries to be 12 times higher in 2030 than in 2020, and 21 times higher in 2050. Currently, the EU does not mine any lithium at all. The EU’s small, densely populated landmass, comparatively strong environmental protections, and active civil society make it a difficult jurisdiction in which to develop mines, even when resources are discovered. People don’t like having mines in their backyard, as mining giant Rio Tinto’s attempt to open a lithium mine in the EU’s neighbor, Serbia, has shown. The EU has also fallen behind on establishing critical raw material supply chains and refining capacity. Meanwhile, forward-thinking China has established a stranglehold on critical raw material supply chains, refining 40 percent of the world’s copper, 60 percent of its lithium, 70 percent of its cobalt, and nearly 100 percent of its graphite, according to a report last year by the Jacques Delors Centre. “The EU … imports close to 100 per cent of its rare earths from China,” the Delors report said. “This exposes it to supply disruptions and price volatility, amplifying vulnerabilities in critical sectors.”

LONDON — The U.K. can find a way to work with Donald Trump’s America on energy security while still retaining close cooperation with China on climate and renewables, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said. Speaking at a London energy summit, Miliband told POLITICO that, despite having a “different perspective” to the Trump administration on the role of fossil fuels in securing energy supply, the U.K. could still collaborate on low-carbon technologies like nuclear and geothermal power. Trump administration official Tommy Joyce used his appearance at the Future of Energy Security summit on Thursday to rail against allies’ net zero goals and to warn of a growing global dependence on China for clean energy technology. But Miliband sought to cool temperatures. “Despite the differences, we can find common ground,” he said. “Issues like nuclear cooperation are issues where we can work together with the U.S. We might be doing it with a different perspective but we can work together.” On China, which has not sent a delegation to the summit, Miliband said that “cooperation” on climate change was a “no brainer” but acknowledged concerns about Beijing’s dominance of global supply chains for clean energy technology like solar, wind and electric cars. “There is too much concentration in the clean energy market and one of the things we need is greater diversity,” Miliband said. The solution, he said, was to promote manufacturing of clean technology at home, pointing to £300 million of newly-announced investment by the Labour government’s embryonic state-run power company, GB Energy. Reducing reliance on China “starts with actually taking seriously a proper industrial policy where you start to build it in Britain,” Miliband said. The U.K., he added, should be emulating China’s economic success in investing in the energy transition. “Clean energy is also an economic opportunity, China recognizes that. Chinese growth was 40 percent higher last year because of their investment in clean energy. Why don’t we have some of that too?”

BAKU, Azerbaijan — The U.S. has played the powerbroker in more than 30 years of global negotiations on fighting climate change — a quest that has swept in an army of diplomats, the world’s biggest companies and every nation on Earth. The first climate summit since Donald Trump’s second White House victory underscored the volatile side of that legacy. In a 14-day conference focused on hundreds of billions of dollars in climate finance, everybody recognized that the incoming U.S. president will refuse to pay any amount the Biden administration agrees to. President Joe Biden’s emissaries helped orchestrate a multinational pledge for “ambitious” carbon-cutting, but they declined to join it. And as the U.S. prepares to recede from global leadership, much of the rest of the world is looking to China to fill the void. Trump’s upcoming presidency is the most important source of the instability on display at the COP29 summit, despite all the Biden administration’s efforts to send signals that America is still on board with the climate cause, said Carlos Fuller, Belize’s permanent representative at the United Nations. “This has become the COP of uncertainty because of that change,” Fuller told POLITICO. “Whatever the U.S. says here — now, it could be with the best intentions — will they follow through? Or will they just say, ‘I can give you everything,’ but then it means nothing?” Trump’s rise and resurgent far-right political movements across Europe were just one of many shadows over the climate talks that ended early Sunday, held in the capital city of oil-rich Azerbaijan. Saudi resistance torpedoed any effort to end the summit with a call to move away from fossil fuels — never mind that a pledge to do just that was the supposedly triumphant achievement of the last climate summit less than a year ago. All the while, scientific evidence mounted that the Earth’s temperatures are rising toward catastrophic levels. “The worst part is the unpredictability,” Brazilian climate chief Ana Toni told POLITICO. “The whole world says that on finance, on policy, we need a roadmap, we need predictability. “And then,” she added, “you have the U.S. going in and out.” Here are key takeaways from this year’s climate talks, and what they bode for what’s next: HOPES FOR MEETING AMBITIOUS TEMPERATURE TARGETS ARE A BUST COP29 began with inauspicious news: The World Meteorological Organization said that this year would eclipse 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming since the pre-industrial age for the first time. The mark, which set a record for the modern era, is in some ways symbolic: Crossing that threshold for one year is less dire than doing so over a 30-year climatological timescale, the point at which catastrophic effects of warming — runaway ice melt, heatwaves and droughts that make parts of the world virtually uninhabitable, and rising seas that swallow low-lying lands and islands — would become irreversible. Still, the milestone showed that the world is most likely heading past 1.5 degrees for the long haul, despite nearly a decade of vows by world leaders to avert it. Even before Trump takes office, the U.S. is already on track to miss Biden’s target of halving its greenhouse gas pollution during this decade, relative to 2005 levels. Trump’s policies, which include vows to leave the 2015 Paris climate agreement, unwind Biden’s climate law, reverse vehicle fuel economy standards and pump more oil and gas, would throttle the pace of emissions reductions and global cooperation. Some nations at COP29 echoed Trump’s approach. Populist Argentine President Javier Milei openly flirted with exiting the Paris pact, while Saudi Arabia blocked attempts to restate last year’s fossil fuel pledge. The U.S., meanwhile, declined to join a coalition including the European Union, Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and Norway that promised during the conference to embrace “ambitious” new climate plans by early next year. U.S. officials did not explain their absence from the effort, even though the Biden administration had helped orchestrate the pledge. Broadly, nations arrived unwilling to move from their “red lines” on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, said South African Environmental Minister Dion George, who co-chaired that negotiating track. He said the U.S. was more “subdued” when “normally they talk a lot.” Taking hardened positions is “not in anybody’s interest, frankly, but I think that’s a reflection of where we are heading in the world,” he told POLITICO. “What’s required in this type of environment where we are seeing very interesting geopolitical shifts: Leadership is required. And bravery. And I’m not seeing much of it.” SHOW ME THE MONEY (ONCE DEMS ARE BACK IN POWER) The summit’s most contentious issue involved how much money wealthy nations would offer poorer countries to help them cope with climate disasters while moving their economies toward clean energy. Factions arrived poles apart — with some rich countries pushing for $200 billion in climate financing each year for the next decade, even though studies indicate the real need is more than $1 trillion a year. An independent analysis by finance experts said developing nations needed $300 billion per year of public, mostly grant-based funding that charges little or no interest, plus a total of $1 trillion annually provided by other sources such as the private sector. Senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the looming four years of Trump 2.0 and at least two years of full Republican control of Congress moderated how much climate finance the United States could expect to deliver. Instead, they sought to craft a deal that a future, climate-friendly administration could meet. The summit ended with a call for at least $300 billion in annual finance, which representatives of developing countries called insufficient to meet their needs. “The U.S. elections and many other geopolitical events have changed what [the rich countries] could have provided,” said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a coalition of island states. Trump and congressional Republicans zeroed out climate finance during the president-elect’s first term. Biden spent four years slowly rebuilding those U.S. efforts, hitting $11.4 billion this year and achieving its goal of quadrupling 2016 levels. But the pendulum will almost certainly swing back. While Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment on the finance talks, the president-elect has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a hoax designed to weaken the United States, and he has put Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of an effort to find trillions of dollars in cuts from government spending. At the same time, the U.S. took part in a contentious meeting among major economic powers early Saturday, after which it joined Australia and European countries in agreeing to set the number at $300 billion a year. One European negotiator criticized the U.S. positioning, saying the Americans “behaved as if they have got more influence than they have when they have only got weeks left in power.” The emergence of Trump in the U.S. and European leaders who complained of fiscal constraints in their capitals led to “a lot of posturing” and blame shifting on finance, said Ruleta Camacho-Thomas, Antigua and Barbuda’s climate ambassador. “There’s a lot of waiting and seeing what the other country will do and what the other group of countries will do: ‘But if these people are not doing this, then I can’t do that,’” she said. “That is global politicking. And this is about survival for us.” As wide as the divide on climate was, Trump’s emergence made it more important to not let COP29 fall to pieces, one European diplomat said. “The developing countries are now saying that it is better to have no agreement than a bad one,” said the diplomat, who was granted anonymity to discuss closed-door talks. “Normally that is true but in this case, with the upcoming presidency in the U.S., it should be crucial for them to have an agreement now.” CHINA IS ASCENDANT The U.S. receding under Trump amid his likely withdrawal from the Paris Agreement make room for China to take over the global climate leadership role. But how China will lead is a major question. Beijing’s massive subsidies for its clean energy technology have reduced costs for developing nations’ green transitions, yet its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure lending program has saddled those countries with onerous debt. While reports show China’s greenhouse gas pollution may have peaked, it is still by far the world’s top driver of climate change. Accelerating China’s carbon-cutting is key for staying below 1.5 degrees, but it’s still building more coal-fired power plants. China also routinely resists pleas for transparency for its pollution-cutting measures. The same is true on climate finance. “China is a bit complex, but at the same time, we do see leadership from China,” said Harjeet Singh, global engagement director with the environmental group Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Trump’s rise will likely give China more of the global market, clean energy analysts have said. Ending Biden’s consumer incentives for buying electric cars, which Republicans have targeted, and subsidies for making batteries, solar panels and wind turbines would curtail burgeoning U.S. efforts to compete in realms that China dominates. China has also led a backlash against efforts by the U.S. and other wealthy nations to impose industrial policies that would blunt China’s stranglehold over key raw materials and technologies for green energy. It has prodded emerging economies to criticize policies such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and and the EU’s carbon border tariff, arguing they make greening their economies more expensive. At COP29, Trump’s impending return to power gave the U.S. less leverage to corral China into making compulsory contributions to the finance goals. China — which has the world’s second-largest economy — hung onto a 1992 U.N. determination that it is poor enough to avoid paying into those efforts, though the final agreement leaves the door open for countries that have since grown wealthier to make commitments if they desire. China, however, sought to disarm criticism when it for the first time offered a figure for the amount of finance it has provided to other nations through its long-touted “South-South Cooperation.” The total is $25 billion since 2016, the Chinese said. Zia Weise contributed to this report.

BAKU, Azerbaijan — China must step up and help lead the fight against climate change, starting with a strong new climate target, the United Nations’ top climate official said Friday. Simon Stiell, executive secretary of U.N. Climate Change, touted China’s investments in clean energy technology as a demonstration of “leading by example.” He then implored the world’s largest emitter to release a strong new plan to cut its planet-warming pollution — known as a nationally determined contribution, or NDC.  “A strong NDC would send an important signal to other countries that stronger targets drive investment, that courageous leadership pays off, that development and sustainability are not at odds — that they are compatible,” said Stiell, speaking on the sidelines of the global climate talks in Baku. His comments, delivered at an event on China’s support for developing nations, come as global climate talks proceed in the shadow of a government transition in the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-biggest emitter.  The U.S. has traditionally taken a key leadership role at these global summits, pushing countries like China to do more to cut their emissions faster.  But President-elect Donald Trump has disputed the science behind global warming and promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the landmark deal that calls on countries to collectively tackle climate change. Trump exited the deal in his first term, but President Joe Biden rejoined in 2021. Stiell noted that this year’s global climate summit and the next, known as COP29 and COP30, will be “critical” for global efforts to limit rising temperatures.  “We will need China’s continued leadership,” Stiell said. Countries at this year’s COP29 summit will need to agree on a new sum for global aid to help developing countries address climate change. Traditional rich country donors, such as the U.S. and European nations, are calling for China and other high-emitting, emerging economies to start chipping in. China has pushed back — arguing that it already contributes significant funding to help developing countries through training, joint research and direct financial support. China has provided nearly $25 billion (177 billion yuan) for climate efforts in the Global South since 2016, according to its officials. Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s climate envoy, on Thursday commended China’s efforts but said: “The question remains as to exactly what money flows are being counted here. The quality of the financing is also still unclear at present … It shows that China has already done a lot and is already doing a lot. But only what is reported transparently will be recognized.” As part of the COP29 negotiations, countries will also be discussing the transparency of their support and the need for it to come in the form of below-market-rate loans or grants rather than high-interest-rate loans. The money is considered necessary to ratchet up the emissions cuts countries are meant to pledge in their next round of climate targets due in February. China is currently pledging to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and zero them out by 2060. U.S. officials, pointing to several analyses, say China needs to commit to slashing at least 30 percent of its emissions by 2035. Zhao Yingmin, head of China’s COP29 delegation and deputy minister at China’s ecology ministry, told POLITICO that “the entire international community should work together to deal with the crisis we are facing.”  Asked if Beijing would deliver a strong NDC and show the leadership Stiell demanded, he said: “China has contributed in addressing climate change. But in the future, China will do our best to contribute more.”  Zhao would not say whether China would consider counting its South-South funding, the money Beijing invests in other developing countries, toward the new goal. The responsibility for the new finance goal “lies with developed countries, not developing countries,” he added. “But developing countries will also help other developing countries according to the South-South cooperation framework.” U.S. diplomats representing the Biden administration in Baku say they’re still pushing to drive climate action forward at the event. Biden is preparing to submit a new NDC to signal what the U.S. could do — even if Trump is unlikely to deliver it. They’ve also called on China — and other countries — to do more. If the U.S. is no longer able to project climate leadership over the next four years, White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said earlier this week, “that will come to the detriment of U.S. businesses and U.S. workers, but also to the global dialogue, and we will be, as a collective, looking for other countries to step up to the plate.”

President Joe Biden launched a large-scale experiment during his first term, aimed at boosting American manufacturing, expanding green energy, and making the economy more resilient in the face of disruptions. His vice president isn’t really running on it. Why? For starters, these are policies that take time, and voters don’t give credit for what hasn’t happened yet. Investment has surged in factory construction, but most of the jobs they could yield don’t exist yet. A Taiwanese manufacturer has started making chips for Apple phones in the U.S., but progress on spurring domestic semiconductor production is still in its early stages. Some clean energy projects have run into headwinds. Indeed, these investments don’t seem to be doing Biden many favors, given his low approval ratings on the economy. So, Kamala Harris has instead made lowering costs a central pillar of her presidential campaign, highlighting policies that sound like they can make a difference quickly: tax breaks for families and startups, down payment assistance, penalties for grocery stores that engage in price gouging. Some semblance of speed is the theme that ties these policies together. When I mentioned this observation to Harris’ advisers, they mostly didn’t dispute the point, saying it makes sense to talk more about policies where people understand how their lives will directly be improved. “If I’m not focused on bringing down your prices, you don’t want to hear step 2 or step 3,” a Harris adviser told me. There is a clear political logic behind this approach, particularly at a time when the unemployment rate is at a low 4.1 percent: people are thinking less about jobs and more about costs. High prices clearly dominate voters’ perception of the economy. And they are looking for quick fixes. But not everything can be fixed quickly – or should be. An economy with a healthy labor market and steady consumer spending is one where building out our capacity to make things and provide services is, in many cases, more useful to lowering costs over the long term than making it easier for people to spend. (More money chasing fewer goods is a recipe for inflation, one reason why her campaign has clarified that her housing plan would be designed so that down payment checks won’t kick in until more homes have been built.) But Biden and Harris have not been effective in selling their administration’s long-term investments — and it’s hard to be impressed by the effort they’ve put into it. Biden himself wasn’t a particularly visible figure during his own now-ended campaign for reelection, and there is no substitute for the megaphone wielded by a presidential candidate. “It’s a live experiment we’re running,” Jennifer Harris, a former aide in the Biden White House, told me. “We need to educate people what they should expect if it goes as we think it will and make the case for both ambition and patience, and tout the early returns where we have them.” It’s not that the vice president is ignoring supply-side policies. Kamala Harris has suggested she would continue Biden’s push to strategically boost certain sectors. Building three million new homes is also a major component of her platform. But long-term structural goals overall aren’t a core part of her pitch. Clearly, she’s working in a compressed time frame; she became the Democratic candidate less than three months ago. But it seems strange to not talk more about an animating feature of the current administration’s economic vision, which would, in all likelihood, persist under her leadership if she wins. She’s working with many of the same people, after all. One of her top economic advisers, Brian Deese (who previously ran Biden’s National Economic Council), recently outlined an ambitious series of ideas about how the U.S. could build out global demand for American-made clean energy technology as a means of speeding the climate transition. Those are the types of ideas that might be on the table under a Harris administration. She’s just not asking the public to give her a mandate for them in the campaign. There’s a principled argument to be made that voters should be in the loop on what they’re voting for. On top of that, though, there’s a political case: a bigger focus on manufacturing could help her standing with working class voters in swing states. Harris advisers point to the speech she gave in Pittsburgh as evidence that she is starting to talk more about industrial policy, telling me my critique is less fair in the wake of those remarks, where she referred to building the “industries of the future” as the third pillar of her Opportunity Economy. But her selling point to working class voters still seems more narrowly focused — and again, more focused on immediacy: with proposals like eliminating degree requirements for federal jobs. For voters, the Biden-Harris administration’s industrial policies offer a notable compare and contrast with former President Donald Trump, who has cast tariffs as a kind of cure-all for American competitiveness. He sells them as both a short-term (reducing imports and forcing countries to come to the negotiating table) and long-term (spurring domestic manufacturing or raising revenue) solution. Some Democrats see an opening to make build, build, build a bigger part of the party’s argument to voters. I recently asked Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz if he thought the fact that Harris was campaigning on the need for more housing reflected a larger shift in the party, which has tended to prioritize government aid as a response to the country’s ills. He was so excited that he started to answer before I’d even finished the question. “Democrats have to be the party of building stuff,” he said. “If we want a clean energy future, and if we want economic prosperity, we’re going to have to embrace building, and we’re going to have to embrace doing things at scale and with speed. And if that’s a departure from normal Democratic Party politics, so be it.” “Part of what I want to convey to voters is, they can have nice things,” he continued. “We should not accept the premise that shortages are a way of life and we fight within a finite pie for the people who are most vulnerable. … We don’t have to operate under the assumption that there’s never going to be enough of what we want.” Of course, there’s no guarantee that the investments that the government has made over the past four years will pay off in quite the way Democrats hope. I asked Kate Judge — a Columbia Law professor who signed a contract to write a book about the fragility of supply chains in January 2020, not knowing the pandemic would soon demonstrate it vividly — how much she thought Biden’s policies would help. She offered both praise and caution. “The investments that have been made under the Biden administration should start to provide meaningful dividends in the coming administration,” she told me. But “we don’t yet know what’s going to be successful and what’s going to be less successful.” Still, she said, these investments are risks worth taking. And if they pay off, the next president will likely get credit.