Cop29: US Democrats put on brave face as Republicans fight for cheap energy

Throughout the UN climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijanin recent days, US officials have maintained a studiously sunny disposition, saying that Republican president-elect Donald Trump will not derail climate progress.

US climate envoy John Podesta said the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet will not stop under a re-elected Trump even if some progress is reversed. White House energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said: “The absence of leadership in the White House does not mean that this energy transition is stopped.” And Joe Biden’s climate and energy assistant Jacob Levine told reporters that the president’s climate policies have sparked an unstoppable clean energy “revolution”.

In the absence of federal climate policy, they have argued, states will continue the push to zero out emissions. And the historic climate-related subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, they have said, will continue to spur decarbonization efforts from the private sector. On Monday, US officials reinforced this view with a plan for continued private sector-led emissions reduction in manufacturing.

“Climate change wont be solved by one president, but climate action will not be stopped by one president,” Massachusetts senator Ed Markey told reporters on Saturday.

Decarbonization, Markey said, is even taking place in Republican states, thanks to Biden’s green subsidies. “The green revolution is blue and red,” he said.

But Republicans have come to Cop29 with a different message. In a sometimes surreal Saturday press conference where they cracked jokes about US sports teams before an international audience, four Republican members of Congress aggressively argued for increasing oil and gas production; even coal, they argued, should maintain its place in the energy system.

“With technology, we can solve a lot of these problems without just banning fossil fuels,” said representative Morgan Griffith, who represents a coal country district in Virginia. “An area that has natural resources should not be penalized for not looking at the opportunity to have a cleaner world.”

Representative August Pfluger, whose Texas district covers the oil-rich Permian Basin, said Trump’s re-election indicates an “overwhelming support” for the former president’s call to “restore America’s energy dominance and lead the world in energy expansion”.

And when asked by the Guardian in the halls of Cop29 if he would support Trump’s pledge to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, Pfluger responded by talking about energy: “We definitely want to see affordable, reliable energy provided throughout the world.”

“Inflation has been very difficult on people, and we have to take a realistic look about the types of energy and the innovation for energy freedom throughout the world,” said Pfluger, who is leading the House of Representatives’ delegation to the UN climate summit. “Many countries would say that some of the tenants [in the accord] have actually been a massive competitive disadvantage and have pushed up prices everywhere around the world.”

In the weeks leading up to his second inauguration, Trump appears to have doubled down on his crusade against climate action. This week, he tapped a former fracking executive to head up his energy department, a Republican who arranged an infamous meeting between Trump and oil bosses to lead his interior department, and a former congressman who has a score of just 14% from the League of Conservation Voters to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Still, Democratic officials at Cop29 say that the Inflation Reduction Act’s hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy incentives and tax breaks are durable.

At Saturday’s press conference, Pfluger did indicate that Congress would likely preserve some of its provisions. “If there are pieces of the IRA that help support lowering American energy costs, helping Americans, helping our partners and allies have access to affordable, reliable energy, then I bet that those will stay in place,” Pfluger said.

But the US should include fossil fuels in a “best of the above” energy strategy, said Republican Michigan representative John James at the press conference. And the overall strategy, he said, should be “innovation, not regulation”.

Harjeet Singh, a director at the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, a proposed agreement for a concrete phaseout of coal, oil, and gas, attributed the Republicans’ message to a “toxic alliance between polluting corporations and complicit political leaders.”

A key aim for Cop29 negotiators is to establish a new and expanded global goal for climate finance to help poor countries cope with disasters and draw down their emissions. Over the weekend, the White House announced that the US surpassed its goal of providing $11 billion per year in climate financing.

Trump during his first term proposed eliminating the US’s climate finance commitments, but was shot down by the Senate.

When asked on Saturday if he would support zeroing out US climate aid, Pfluger deflected, but did not rule out the possibility. “What we want to do … is to unleash American energy, to unleash innovation throughout the world that benefits in a connected world from affordable clean reliable energy,” he said.

Climate finance, he said, should only go to projects that focus on slashing energy costs. “If something is not congruent or not in support of lowering energy costs while reducing emissions, you can bet that this Congress is going to look at that,” he said.

International leaders at Cop29 have railed against Trump’s stance against climate action and his pledge to exit the Paris agreement. As the world’s largest economy and top contributor to historic emissions, the US has an “ethical responsibility” to lead the climate fight, said Ambassador Dr Pa’oleilei Luteru, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, an intergovernmental organization of low-lying coastal and small island countries.

“The US doesn’t live on a different planet,” he said.

Related: Countries must set aside differences and agree climate finance deal, says Cop29 negotiator

Sherry Rehman, a member of the Pakistan Senate and former Pakistan climate change minister, said the US pulling out of the Paris accord would be a “blow to the whole shape of the climate negotiations process”.

“The United States casts a huge geopolitical and development and leadership shadow still on the world,” she said. “It has a gravitational pull.”

But Trump cannot singlehandedly derail UN climate negotiations, leaders have said.

“The Paris Agreement is a robust process,” Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, said in a Wednesday press conference.

Jacob Levine, a Biden climate adviser, told reporters this week that Biden has set into motion a “deeply shared and integrated vision” for the clean energy transition that has led countries such as the UK, Canada, and Australia to take “a page out of the US government playbook”.

But Trump’s vision also appears to have spread, with Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, reportedly considering removing his country from the Paris climate accord.

US officials’ relentless optimism at Cop29 has been a source of frustration for some. In an intimate meeting with reporters on Saturday, one journalist asked Democratic Rhode Island senator and climate hawk Sheldon Whitehouse why it is difficult for officials to say that Trump’s presidency is a threat to climate action.

“The US election will have a negative climate impact,” Whitehouse said. “That’s not only easy to say, it’s obvious.”