BRUSSELS — Donald Trump blew up global efforts to cut emissions from shipping, and now the EU is terrified the U.S. president will do the same to any plans to tax carbon emissions from long-haul flights. The European Commission is studying whether to expand its existing carbon pricing scheme that forces airlines to pay for emissions from short- and medium-haul flights within Europe into a more ambitious effort covering all flights departing the bloc. If that happens, all international airlines flying out of Europe — including U.S. ones — would face higher costs, something that’s likely to stick in the craw of the Trump administration. “God only knows what the Trump administration will do” if Brussels expands its own Emissions Trading System to include transatlantic flights, a senior EU official told POLITICO. A big issue is how to ensure that the new system doesn’t end up charging only European airlines, which often complain about the higher regulatory burden they face compared with their non-EU rivals. The EU official said Commission experts are now “scratching their heads how you can, on the one hand, talk about extending the ETS worldwide … [but] also make sure that you have a bit of a level playing field,” meaning a system that doesn’t only penalize European carriers. Any new costs will hit airlines by 2027, following a Commission assessment that will be completed by July 1. Brussels has reason to be worried.  “Trump has made it very clear that he does not want any policies that harm business … So he does not want any environmental regulation,” said Marina Efthymiou, aviation management professor at Dublin City University. “We do have an administration with a bullying behavior threatening countries and even entities like the European Commission.” The new U.S. National Security Strategy, released last week, closely hews to Trump’s thinking and is scathing on climate efforts. “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries,” it says. In October, the U.S. led efforts to prevent the International Maritime Organization from setting up a global tax to encourage commercial fleets to go green. The no-holds-barred push was personally led by Trump and even threatened negotiators with personal consequences if they went along with the measure. In October, the U.S. led efforts to prevent the International Maritime Organization from setting up a global tax aimed at encouraging commercial fleets to go green. | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images This “will be a parameter to consider seriously from the European Commission” when it thinks about aviation, Efthymiou said. The airline industry hopes the prospect of a furious Trump will scare off the Commission. “The EU is not going to extend ETS to transatlantic flights because that will lead to a war,” said Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association, the global airline lobby, at a November conference in Brussels. “And that is not a war that the EU will win.” EUROPEAN ETS VS. GLOBAL CORSIA In 2012, the EU began taxing aviation emissions through its cap-and-trade ETS, which covers all outgoing flights from the European Economic Area — meaning EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Switzerland and the U.K. later introduced similar schemes. In parallel, the U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization was working on its own carbon reduction plan, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. Given that fact, Brussels delayed imposing the ETS on flights to non-European destinations. The EU will now be examining the ICAO’s CORSIA to see if it meets the mark. “CORSIA lets airlines pay pennies for pollution — about €2.50 per passenger on a Paris-New York flight,” said Marte van der Graaf, aviation policy officer at green NGO Transport & Environment. Applying the ETS on the same route would cost “€92.40 per passenger based on 2024 traffic.” There are two reasons for such a big difference: the fourfold higher price for ETS credits compared with CORSIA credits, and the fact that “under CORSIA, airlines don’t pay for total emissions, but only for the increase above a fixed 2019 baseline,” Van der Graaf explained. “Thus, for a Paris-New York flight that emits an average of 131 tons of CO2, only 14 percent of emissions are offset under CORSIA. This means that, instead of covering the full 131 tons, the airline only has to purchase credits for approximately 18 tons.” Efthymiou, the professor, warned the price difference is projected to increase due to the progressive withdrawal of free ETS allowances granted to aviation. The U.N. scheme will become mandatory for all U.N. member countries in 2027 but will not cover domestic flights, including those in large countries such as the U.S., Russia and China. KEY DECISIONS By July 1, the Commission must release a report assessing the geographical coverage and environmental integrity of CORSIA. Based on this evaluation, the EU executive will propose either extending the ETS to all departing flights from the EU starting in 2027 or maintaining it for intra-EU flights only. Opposition to the ETS in the U.S. dates back to the Barack Obama administration. | Pete Souza/White House via Getty Images According to T&E, CORSIA doesn’t meet the EU’s climate goals. “Extending the scope of the EU ETS to all departing flights from 2027 could raise an extra €147 billion by 2040,” said Van der Graaf, noting that this money could support the production of greener aviation fuels to replace fossil kerosene. But according to Efthymiou, the Commission might decide to continue the current exemption “considering the very fragile political environment we currently have with a lunatic being in power,” she said, referring to Trump. “CORSIA has received a lot of criticism for sure … but the importance of CORSIA is that for the first time ever we have an agreement,” she added. “Even though that agreement might not be very ambitious, ICAO is the only entity with power to put an international regulation [into effect].” Regardless of what is decided in Brussels, Washington is prepared to fight. Opposition to the ETS in the U.S. dates back to the Barack Obama administration, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a letter to the Commission opposing its application to American airlines. During the same term, the U.S. passed the EU ETS Prohibition Act, which gives Washington the power to prohibit American carriers from paying for European carbon pricing. John Thune, the Republican politician who proposed the bill, is now the majority leader of the U.S. Senate.

President Donald Trump is withdrawing the United States from the world’s overarching treaty on climate change in a move that escalates his attempts to reverse years of global negotiations toward addressing rising temperatures. The announcement to sever ties with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change came as Trump quit dozens of international organizations that the White House says no longer serve U.S. interests by promoting radical climate policies and other issues. It was outlined in a memo by the White House. Trump has called on other countries to abandon their carbon-cutting measures, and the move appears to be his latest attempt to destabilize global climate cooperation. The 1992 UNFCCC serves as the international structure for efforts by 198 countries to slow the rate of rising climate pollution. It has universal participation. The U.S. was the first industrialized nation to join the treaty following its ratification under former President George H.W. Bush — and it will be the only nation ever to leave it. The move also marks Trump’s intensifying efforts to topple climate efforts compared to his first term, when he decided against quitting the treaty. “Many of these bodies promote radical climate policies, global governance, and ideological programs that conflict with U.S. sovereignty and economic strength,” stated a White House fact sheet. The move comes as Trump tears down U.S. climate policies amid the hottest decade ever recorded and threatens other nations for pursuing measures to address global warming, which Trump has called a hoax and a “con job.” The U.S. did not send a delegation to Brazil for the climate talks, known as COP30, late last year. Instead, Trump officials have been working to strike fossil fuels deals with other nations. Trump captured Venezuela’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, in an assault using U.S. commandos on Saturday and said he would control the country’s vast oil resources. The plan to leave the UNFCCC stems from Trump’s order last February requiring Secretary of State Marco Rubio to identify treaties and international organizations that “are contrary to the interests of the United States” and recommend withdrawing from them. Trump has also pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the landmark 2015 pact that’s underpinned by the UNFCCC. “This is a shortsighted, embarrassing, and foolish decision,” Gina McCarthy, a former EPA administrator under former President Barack Obama, said in a statement. “As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of U.S. climate change leadership and global collaboration.”

BRUSSELS — The European Commission has unveiled a new plan to end the dominance of planet-heating fossil fuels in Europe’s economy — and replace them with trees. The so-called Bioeconomy Strategy, released Thursday, aims to replace fossil fuels in products like plastics, building materials, chemicals and fibers with organic materials that regrow, such as trees and crops. “The bioeconomy holds enormous opportunities for our society, economy and industry, for our farmers and foresters and small businesses and for our ecosystem,” EU environment chief Jessika Roswall said on Thursday, in front of a staged backdrop of bio-based products, including a bathtub made of wood composite and clothing from the H&M “Conscious” range. At the center of the strategy is carbon, the fundamental building block of a wide range of manufactured products, not just energy. Almost all plastic, for example, is made from carbon, and currently most of that carbon comes from oil and natural gas. But fossil fuels have two major drawbacks: they pollute the atmosphere with planet-warming CO2, and they are mostly imported from outside the EU, compromising the bloc’s strategic autonomy. The bioeconomy strategy aims to address both drawbacks by using locally produced or recycled carbon-rich biomass rather than imported fossil fuels. It proposes doing this by setting targets in relevant legislation, such as the EU’s packaging waste laws, helping bioeconomy startups access finance, harmonizing the regulatory regime and encouraging new biomass supply. The 23-page strategy is light on legislative or funding promises, mostly piggybacking on existing laws and funds. Still, it was hailed by industries that stand to gain from a bigger market for biological materials. “The forest industry welcomes the Commission’s growth-oriented approach for bioeconomy,” said Viveka Beckeman, director general of the Swedish Forest Industries Federation, stressing the need to “boost the use of biomass as a strategic resource that benefits not only green transition and our joint climate goals but the overall economic security.” HOW RENEWABLE IS IT? But environmentalists worry Brussels may be getting too chainsaw-happy. Trees don’t grow back at the drop of a hat and pressure on natural ecosystems is already unsustainably high. Scientific reports show that the amount of carbon stored in the EU’s forests and soils is decreasing, the bloc’s natural habitats are in poor condition and biodiversity is being lost at unprecedented rates. Protecting the bloc’s forests has also fallen out of fashion among EU lawmakers. The EU’s landmark anti-deforestation law is currently facing a second, year-long delay after a vote in the European Parliament this week. In October, the Parliament also voted to scrap a law to monitor the health of Europe’s forests to reduce paperwork. Environmentalists warn the bloc may simply not have enough biomass to meet the increasing demand. “Instead of setting a strategy that confronts Europe’s excessive demand for resources, the Commission clings to the illusion that we can simply replace our current consumption with bio-based inputs, overlooking the serious and immediate harm this will inflict on people and nature,” said Eva Bille, the European Environmental Bureau’s (EEB) circular economy head, in a statement. TOO WOOD TO BE TRUE Environmental groups want the Commission to prioritize the use of its biological resources in long-lasting products — like construction — rather than lower-value or short-lived uses, like single-use packaging or fuel. A first leak of the proposal, obtained by POLITICO, gave environmental groups hope. It celebrated new opportunities for sustainable bio-based materials while also warning that the “sources of primary biomass must be sustainable and the pressure on ecosystems must be considerably reduced” — to ensure those opportunities are taken up in the longer term. It also said the Commission would work on “disincentivising inefficient biomass combustion” and substituting it with other types of renewable energy. That rankled industry lobbies. Craig Winneker, communications director of ethanol lobby ePURE, complained that the document’s language “continues an unfortunate tradition in some quarters of the Commission of completely ignoring how sustainable biofuels are produced in Europe,” arguing that the energy is “actually a co-product along with food, feed, and biogenic CO2.” Now, those lines pledging to reduce environmental pressures and to disincentivize inefficient biomass combustion are gone. “Bioenergy continues to play a role in energy security, particularly where it uses residues, does not increase water and air pollution, and complements other renewables,” the final text reads. “This is a crucial omission, given that the EU’s unsustainable production and consumption are already massively overshooting ecological boundaries and putting people, nature and businesses at risk,” said the EEB. Delara Burkhardt, a member of the European Parliament with the center-left Socialists and Democrats, said it was “good that the strategy recognizes the need to source biomass sustainably,” but added the proposal did not address sufficiency. “Simply replacing fossil materials with bio-based ones at today’s levels of consumption risks increasing pressure on ecosystems. That shifts problems rather than solving them. We need to reduce overall resource use, not just switch inputs,” she said. Roswall declined to comment on the previous draft at Thursday’s press conference. “I think that we need to increase the resources that we have, and that is what this strategy is trying to do,” she said.

BRUSSELS — On the same day world leaders arrived at the COP30 summit in Brazil to push for more action on climate change, Greece announced it will start drilling for fossil fuels in the Mediterranean Sea — with U.S. help. Under the deal, America’s biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, will explore for natural gas in waters northwest of the picturesque island of Corfu, alongside Greece’s Energean and HELLENiQ ENERGY. It’s the first time in more than four decades that Greece has opened its waters for gas exploration — and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming it as a victory in its push to derail climate action and boost the global dominance of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. It comes three weeks after the U.S. successfully halted a global deal to put a carbon tax on shipping, with the support of Greece. “There is no energy transition, there is just energy addition,” said U.S. Interior Secretary and energy czar Doug Burgum, who was present at the signing ceremony in Athens on Thursday, alongside U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and the new U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. “Greece is taking its own natural resources, and we are working all together toward energy abundance,” Burgum added, describing Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as a leader who “bucks the trend.” Only a few hours later, U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterrez made an impassioned plea for countries to stop exploring for coal, oil and gas. “I’ve consistently advocated against more coal plants and fossil fuel exploration and expansion,” he said at a COP30 leaders’ summit in Belém, Brazil. Donald Trump was not among the many world leaders present. NOT LISTENING “America is back and drilling in the Ionian Sea,” said Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador, at the Athens ceremony. Drilling for natural gas — a fossil fuel that is a major contributor to global warming — is expected to start late next year, or early 2027. Greece’s Minister of Environment and Energy, Stavros Papastavrou, hailed the agreement as a “historic signing” that ends a 40-year hiatus in exploration. Last month, Greece and Cyprus — both major maritime countries — were the only two EU countries that voted to halt action for a year on a historic effort to tax climate pollution from shipping. Greece claimed its decision had nothing to do with U.S. pressure, which several people familiar with the situation said included threats to negotiators. Thursday’s ceremony took place on the sidelines of the sixth Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC) conference, organized in Athens by the U.S. and Greek governments, along with the Atlantic Council. Greece aims to showcase its importance as an entry point for American liquefied natural gas (LNG), bolstering Europe’s independence from Russian gas. LNG from Greece’s Revithoussa terminal is set to reach Ukraine this winter through the newly activated “Vertical Corridor,” an energy route linking Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova.

President Donald Trump is no longer content to stand aloof from the global alliance trying to combat climate change. His new goal is to demolish it — and replace it with a new coalition reliant on U.S. fossil fuels. Trump’s increasingly assertive energy diplomacy is one of the biggest challenges awaiting the world leaders, diplomats and business luminaries gathering for a United Nations summit in Brazil to try to advance the fight against global warming. The U.S. president will not be there — unlike the leaders of countries including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, who will speak before delegates from nearly 200 nations on Thursday and Friday. But his efforts to undermine the Paris climate agreement already loom over the talks, as does his initial success in drawing support from other countries. “It’s not enough to just withdraw from” the 2015 pact and the broader U.N. climate framework that governs the annual talks, said Richard Goldberg, who worked as a top staffer on Trump’s White House National Energy Dominance Council and is now senior adviser to the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “You have to degrade it. You have to deter it. You have to potentially destroy it.” Trump’s approach includes striking deals demanding that Japan, Europe and other trading partners buy more U.S. natural gas and oil, using diplomatic strong-arming to deter foreign leaders from cutting fossil fuel pollution, and making the United States inhospitable to clean energy investment. Unlike during his first term, when Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement but sent delegates to the annual U.N. climate talks anyway, he now wants to render them ineffective and starved of purpose by drawing as many other countries as possible away from their own clean energy goals, according to Cabinet officials’ public remarks and interviews with 20 administration allies and alumni, foreign diplomats and veterans of the annual climate negotiations. Those efforts are at odds with the goals of the climate summits, which included a Biden administration-backed pledge two years ago for the world to transition away from fossil fuels. Slowing or reversing that shift could send global temperatures soaring above the goals set in Paris a decade ago, threatening a spike in the extreme weather that is already pummeling countries and economies. The White House says Trump’s campaign to unleash American oil, gas and coal is for the United States’ benefit — and the world’s. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda — which is focused on utilizing the liquid gold under our feet to strengthen our grid stability and drive down costs for American families and businesses,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” ‘WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE PARIS AGREEMENT DIE’ The Trump administration is declining to send any high-level representatives to the COP30 climate talks, which will formally begin Monday in Belém, Brazil, according to a White House official who declined to comment on the record about whether any U.S. government officials would participate. Trump’s view that the annual negotiations are antithetical to his energy and economic agenda is also spreading among other Republican officials. Many GOP leaders, including 17 state attorneys general, argued last month that attending the summit would only legitimize the proceedings and its expected calls for ditching fossil fuels more swiftly. Climate diplomats from other countries say they’ve gotten the message about where the U.S. stands now — and are prepared to act without Washington. “We have a large country, a president, and a vice president who would like to see the Paris Agreement die,” Laurence Tubiana, the former French government official credited as a key architect of the 2015 climate pact, said of the United States. “The U.S. will not play a major role” at the summit, said Jochen Flasbarth, undersecretary in the German Ministry of Environmental Affairs. “The world is collectively outraged, and so we will focus — as will everyone else — on engaging in talks with those who are driving the process forward.” Trump and his allies have described the stakes in terms of a zero-sum contest between the United States and its main economic rival, China: Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they say, are a complete win for China, which sells the bulk of the world’s solar, wind, battery and electric vehicle technology. That’s a contrast from the approach of former President Joe Biden, who pushed a massive U.S. investment in green technologies as the only way for America to outcompete China in developing the energy sources of the future. In the Trump worldview, stalling that energy transition benefits the United States, the globe’s top producer of oil and natural gas, along with many of the technologies and services to produce, transport and burn the stuff. “If [other countries] don’t rely on this technology, then that’s less power to China,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who served in the U.S. Transportation Department during Trump’s first term and is now director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. TRUMP FINDS ALLIES THIS TIME Two big developments have shaped the president’s new thinking on how to counteract the international fight against climate change, said George David Banks, who was Trump’s international climate adviser during the first administration. The first was the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed and Biden signed in 2022, which promised hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. clean energy projects. Banks said the legislation, enacted entirely on partisan lines, made renewable energy a political target in the minds of Trump and his fossil-fuel backers. The second is Trump’s aggressive use of U.S. trading power during his second term to wring concessions from foreign governments, Banks said. Trump has required his agencies to identify obstacles for U.S. exports, and the United Nations’ climate apparatus may be deemed a barrier for sales of oil, gas and coal. Trump’s strategy is resonating with some fossil fuel-supporting nations, potentially testing the climate change comity at COP30. Those include emerging economies in Africa and Latin America, petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, and European nations feeling a cost-of-living strain that is feeding a resurgent right wing. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright drew applause in March at a Washington gathering called the Powering Africa Summit, where he called it “nonsense” for financiers and Western nations to vilify coal-fired power. He also asserted that U.S. natural gas exports could supply African and Asian nations with more of their electricity. Wright cast the goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas pollution by 2050 — the target dozens of nations have embraced — as “sinister,” contending it consigns developing nations to poverty and lower living standards. The U.S. about-face was welcome, Sierra Leone mining and minerals minister Julius Daniel Mattai said during the conference. Western nations had kneecapped financing for offshore oil investments and worked to undercut public backing for fossil fuel projects, Mattai said, criticizing Biden’s administration for only being interested in renewable energy. But now Trump has created room for nations to use their own resources, Mattai said. “With the new administration having such a massive appetite for all sorts of energy mixes, including oil and gas, we do believe there’s an opportunity to explore our offshore oil investments,” he said in an interview. TURNING UP THE HEAT ON TRADING PARTNERS Still, Banks acknowledged that Trump probably can’t halt the spread of clean energy. Fossil fuels may continue to supply energy in emerging economies for some time, he said, but the private sector remains committed to clean energy to meet the U.N.’s goals of curbing climate change. That doesn’t mean Trump won’t try. The administration’s intent to pressure foreign leaders into a more fossil-fuel-friendly stance was on full display last month at a London meeting of the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization where U.S. Cabinet secretaries and diplomats succeeded in thwarting a proposed carbon emissions tax on global shipping. That coup followed a similar push against Beijing a month earlier, when Mexico — the world’s biggest buyer of Chinese cars — slapped a 50 percent tariff on automotive imports from China after pressure from the Trump administration. China accused the U.S. of “coercion.” Trump’s attempt to flood global markets with ever growing amounts of U.S. fossil fuels is even more ambitious, though so far incomplete. The EU and Japan — under threat of tariffs — have promised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on U.S. energy products. But so far, new and binding contracts have not appeared. Trump has also tried to push China, Japan and South Korea to invest in a $44 billion liquefied natural gas project in Alaska, so far to no avail. In the face of potential tariffs and other U.S. pressure, European ministers and diplomats are selling the message that victory at COP30 might simply come in the form of presenting a united front in favor of climate action. That could mean joining with other major economies such as China and India, and forming common cause with smaller, more vulnerable countries, to show that Trump is isolated. “I’m sure the EU and China will find themselves on opposite sides of many debates,” said the EU’s lead climate negotiator, Jacob Werksman. “But we have ways of working with them. … We are both betting heavily on the green transition.” Avoiding a faceplant may actually be easier if the Trump administration does decide to turn up in Brazil, said Li Shuo, the director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington. “If the U.S. is there and active, I’d expect the rest of the world, including the EU and China, to rest aside their rhetorical games in front of a larger challenge,” Li wrote via text. And for countries attending COP, there is still some hope of a long-term win. Solar, wind, geothermal and other clean energy investments are continuing apace, even if Trump and the undercurrents that led to his reelection have hindered them, said Nigel Purvis, CEO of climate consulting firm Climate Advisers and a former State Department climate official. Trump’s attempts to kill the shipping fee, EU methane pollution rules and Europe’s corporate sustainability framework are one thing, Purvis said. But when it comes to avoiding Trump’s retribution, there is “safety in numbers” for the rest of the world that remains in the Paris Agreement, he added. And even if the progress is slower than originally hoped, those nations have committed to shifting their energy systems off fossil fuels. “We’re having slower climate action than otherwise would be the case. But we’re really talking about whether Trump is going to be able to blow up the regime,” Purvis said. “And I think the answer is ‘No.’” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zia Weise in Brussels and Josh Groeneveld in Berlin contributed to this report.

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.

BRUSSELS — For six years, the European Union’s efforts to fight climate change have been on an upward swing. That came to an end on Wednesday morning in messy, exhausted scenes.  After a marathon meeting that ran through Tuesday night and eventually ended a little after 9 a.m. the next morning, a majority of the bloc’s 27 governments agreed on new targets to cut pollution — but only by weakening existing laws and slowing domestic efforts designed to cut down on that very same pollution.  The compromise was met with relief by many countries and European Commission officials, who had feared an embarrassing collapse that would have hamstrung the EU on the eve of the COP30 U.N. climate talks in Brazil starting Thursday. But it also underscored a swing in political momentum. After half a decade of green victories on climate policy, a much more skeptical group of countries and parties now has the upper hand. In an interview just after the talks ended, the Commission’s climate chief Wopke Hoekstra hailed the EU’s continuing “leadership role” on climate issues. But the commissioner was candid about the political and economic realities — high energy costs, the rise of right-wing populists and declining industrial confidence — that had strengthened critics of the green agenda. The EU was “staying the course” on fighting climate change, he told POLITICO, but added “it would be foolish to use the recipe of the past. We’re facing massive change, so we need to adapt to that change.” Ministers also agreed on a target for 2035 — a requirement under the terms of the 2015 Paris Agreement that was due to be delivered earlier this year in advance of the COP30 talks. The ministers were unable to agree to a single number, instead promising a nonbinding cut between 66.25 and 72.5 percent. The final deal on the binding 2040 goal came up short of the 90 percent cut in domestic pollution below 1990 levels, which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had made the key green pledge in her reelection campaign.  Instead, ministers on Wednesday agreed an 85 percent cut in domestic emissions by 2040. Governments intend to achieve the remaining 5 percentage points by paying other countries to reduce pollution on the bloc’s behalf, a system of purchases known as carbon credits.  The deal also opened the door to outsourcing additional efforts as part of a wide-ranging revision clause that will see the Commission tasked with considering amending the target every five years depending on factors such as energy prices or economic troubles. “Embarrassing and short sighted,” was the assessment of Diederik Samsom, the former top-ranking Commission official who was a primary architect of the European Green Deal policy package during von der Leyen’s first mandate — though he said it was unlikely the carbon credits would be used as they would cost just as much as cutting emissions at home, but without the added benefits of investment and innovation. “The Green Deal still holds, since its rationale is largely economic … but the lack of political courage amongst European ministers is worrying,” said Samsom, who also served as Hoekstra’s chief of staff for a few months. These major gifts to countries like France, which had pushed for the credit system, were still not enough to strike a deal on Wednesday. Italy, supported by Poland and Romania, led a blocking minority that refused to budge until they were granted key concessions on existing climate laws.  To win them over, ministers also agreed to delay by one year the rollout of the EU’s carbon pricing system for heating and fuel emissions, known as ETS2. And they asked to extend the use of biofuels and other low-carbon fuels in transport in the future, which could weaken the agreed 2035 ban on new combustion-engine cars.  Watering down existing tools for cutting emissions in order to land a deal on a future target created a challenge all of its own, said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank. “The target is very ambitious, and we need all tools to deliver on it. Dilemma is how to get there.” Those tweaks came on top of concessions already granted in technical talks over the past few weeks, which include permitting heavy industry to pollute more and revising the target downward if the EU’s forests absorb less carbon dioxide than expected.  “Instead of climate protection, the ministers end up with political self-deception,” said Michael Bloss, a Greens MEP from Germany. Poland was one of the key holdouts and ultimately refused to vote in favor of the target even though it was granted a delay in the ETS2, which Secretary of State for Climate Krzysztof Bolesta said “was one of our main demands.” Poland was accused of holding hostage the 2035 climate target, which needed unanimous support, over the delay on ETS2, said three diplomats involved in the negotiations. A Polish official said any discussions on the 2035 goal and the postponement of the ETS2 were part of a “package deal” sought by several countries. These officials were granted anonymity to disclose the details of the talks. But even with that concession, the target was still the lowest level of ambition. “We were forced to accept the lower end of the range to prevent certain countries from blocking this agreement,” said Monique Barbut, the French environment minister.  But that shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign the EU is no longer a global climate leader, according to Barbut. “We have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. Hoekstra framed the deal as a new phase of pragmatic climate policymaking that incorporated the views of traditionally resistant countries, rather than sidelining them. He argued the past approach had failed to protect the bloc from industrial decline and dependence on countries such as China.  “In the past, we have been gambling with our independence and our competitiveness in a way that, frankly speaking, we should not have,” Hoekstra said.

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 goal 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.

BRUSSELS — The United States has hit out at an upcoming EU space law that it says would place “unacceptable regulatory burdens” on American space companies. In a response to a consultation published Tuesday, the U.S. State Department said it has “deep concern” about the EU’s proposed Space Act. It accuses the EU of going after successful U.S. space companies via the legislation, saying its rules “appear targeted specifically against U.S. companies due solely to their size, prominence, and successful track record of innovation …. such unfair and unwarranted regulations are unacceptable to the United States and must be removed.” The EU proposed the law in June in an attempt to dial up regulatory oversight of satellite operators — including requiring them to tackle their impact on space debris and pollution, or face significant fines. There are more than 10,000 satellites now in orbit as companies such as Elon Musk’s Starlink have increasingly ventured into low-Earth orbit, from where stronger telecommunication connections can be established but which requires more satellites to ensure full coverage. The legislation does “not take into account that space operations are still relatively new and novel, and as such, are not yet ripe for strict regulation,” the U.S. said, even arguing that goes against the spirit of the trade agreement between the EU and U.S. agreed in August.  Cybersecurity provisions in the proposal are also under attack. The legislation proposes an “unbalanced approach,” the U.S. argued, saying a shortsighted approach could threaten technological advancement in space. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said in a statement that the law creates “a real single market for space” and cuts red tape. The law would reduce administrative burden by coordinating requirements across the bloc and would also make space companies more reliable, Regnier said.

New national plans designed to more aggressively combat climate change would hardly dent already dangerously high global temperature projections, according to a United Nations report published Tuesday. The findings underscore the task at hand for nations as they prepare for COP30 climate negotiations that begin Nov. 10 in Brazil. The U.N. report showed nations are on a path that would bake in long-term changes to the planet such as more deadly heatwaves, runaway sea level rise and likelier extreme events like wildfires and droughts. Temperatures would rise between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels by 2100 through policies governments included in their formal climate strategies last week, the annual U.N. emissions gap analysis found. That trajectory would far exceed the 2015 Paris climate agreement goals of keeping increases “well below” 2 C and the more ambitious 1.5 C mark. “The bottom line is that nations have had three attempts to hit the mark with their Paris Agreement pledges, and each time they have landed off target,” the report said. “We still need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, in an ever-compressing timeframe, amid a challenging geopolitical context.” While the pathway amounts to progress since the Paris climate agreement, when temperatures were headed for 4 C of warming, it still is far from enough, the report said. The U.N. reached the grim conclusion that multi-decadal temperature increase will surpass 1.5 C for the first time within the next decade. Doing so would cross a critical political threshold. Nations have largely centered their strategies on avoiding that mark, citing dire predictions from a 2018 U.N. special report on climate science that warned of the enhanced likelihood of provoking irreversible climate “tipping points.” “The Paris Agreement does not set a target date or expiration for its temperature goal. It is widely understood as a legal, moral and political obligation,” the report said, noting that, “[e]very fraction of a degree of global warming matters.” Countries are actually falling further behind their original pledges: Nearly all the improvements — accounting for 0.1 C of warming — from the national plans submitted in 2020, when nations were on path for 2.6 to 2.8 C, are due to methodological changes. The United States’ second withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement under President Donald Trump would erase another 0.1 C of progress, the U.N. said. Trump will exacerbate the issue as he sidelines the world’s largest economy and second-highest emitter. The U.N. found recent policy reversals would raise U.S. emissions by 1 gigaton through 2030, a significant increase compared to former President Joe Biden’s goal to cut U.S. emissions to roughly 3 gigatons that year. Pollution trends are going in the wrong direction globally, the report states. Global greenhouse gases rose 2.3 percent from 2023 levels, far exceeding the 1.6 percent increase between 2022 and 2023 and four times faster than the average annual growth rate in the 2010s. Land-use change and deforestation drove emissions higher in 2024, combined with high fossil fuel consumption. The U.N. said the goal is now to limit “overshoot” of 1.5 C — which acknowledges the reality that nations are heading north of the goal — and eventually reducing global temperatures. The report assessed a scenario with 66 percent likelihood of keeping that overshoot within 0.3 C and bringing temperatures back under 1.5 C by 2100. But most nations are not even close to implementing all the policies for achieving their 2030 goals, with the world currently on pace for 2.8 C of warming. And just 60 parties to the Paris Agreement — not even one-third of the total — filed their nationally determined contributions, the national plans due every five years, by the Sept. 30 deadline. That already was months after the original February deadline. G20 nations, which outside of African Union nations account for 77 percent of global greenhouse gases, must lead the way, the U.N. said. So far, just seven G20 members have finalized their latest NDCs while another three have announced informal targets. The G20 proposals are also lacking overall, as none strengthened their 2030 targets, the U.N. said. “Accelerated mitigation action provides benefits and opportunities,” the report said, adding, “The new NDCs and current geopolitical situation do not provide promising signs that this will happen, but that is what countries and the multilateral processes must resolve to affirm collective commitment and confidence in achieving the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.”