Even Under Biden, the U.S. Was Still Obstructing Global Climate Goals

Donald Trump’s quest to reverse the modest progress the United States has made fighting climate change will take place on two fronts: domestic and international. At home, the administration will likely loosen fuel efficiency regulations, dismantle corporate disclosure requirements at the Securities and Exchange Commission, roll back various other environmental regulations, and gut federal staff that deal with reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On the international front, Trump will almost certainly pull the country out of the Paris climate agreement again.

This second part has gotten and will continue to get a lot of attention. But the understandable uproar over Trump’s prospective climate diplomacy obscures an uncomfortable but important fact: The United States is not a universally beloved climate diplomat, no matter which party occupies either Congress or the Oval Office.

The U.S. has never, for instance, ratified the global Convention on Biological Diversity, and so has never been an official participant in the U.N. biodiversity talks. When the U.S. does sign on, it often obstructs serious progress. At the most recent U.N. climate talks in Azerbaijan, COP29, participants report that the U.S. played a quiet but heavy-handed role in watering down what was meant to be a landmark deal to deliver much-needed financing to climate-vulnerable countries. Developing nations came into those talks demanding that developed countries raise $1.3 trillion per year for climate finance, with somewhere between $440 and $900 billion of that to be provisioned by public and grant-equivalent funds, as opposed to loans and private-sector investments.

“Developed countries refused to engage with that in any way,” says Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns for the nongovernmental organization ActionAid USA, who attended COP29. “They didn’t put a counteroffer on the table, and on the second-to-last day came out with their number of $250 billion per year. Everything we heard was that the U.S. was absolutely immovable on any number greater than $250 billion and absolutely immovable on having any core of public finance.”

After a series of late-night backroom negotiations, the final language stated that developed countries would be “taking the lead” in furnishing “at least” $300 billion per year worth of climate finance by 2035. Those funds can come from “a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral,” the text specifies. There’s a wider $1.3 trillion goal that “all actors” are called on to “work together” to raise “from public and private sources.” Developing country delegations and civil society groups were outraged. “People of the global south came to these talks needing a lifeboat out of the climate crisis,” Mariana Paoli, global advocacy lead for the Christian Aid charity, told The Guardian. “But all they got was a plank of wood to cling to.”

“At COP, the U.S. really fed into this narrative that U.S. foreign policy is the same imperialist bullshit regardless of whether it’s a Democrat in power, a Republican, or Donald Trump,” Wu told me. “I think it was deeply disillusioning.”

Negotiations over a U.N. plastics treaty ended on an even sourer note earlier this month in South Korea, concluding without any agreed-upon outcomes other than to extend talks beyond their initial deadline: the end of this year. The U.S. made headlines a few weeks before the negotiations for allegedly supporting efforts to reduce plastics production, recognizing the need to regulate plastics across the entire supply chain. But in reality, the U.S. only agreed to support a goal to reduce production—and reportedly lobbied against taking enforceable steps toward that goal.

“At the end of the day, the U.S. won’t agree to anything they can’t do on the national level. The point of a treaty is to negotiate the law of the land, and then you rely on Congress and the Senate to get you there,” says Rachel Radvany, environmental health campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law. “That’s not the way the State Department approaches any kind of negotiation. They negotiate it down to the U.S. level. But most of the time in environmental agreements we don’t sign on anyway.”

That’s not to say the U.S. presence in climate and environmental talks has been exclusively negative. Even rhetorical calls for more ambition can help bring other countries along; Radvany was frustrated with the gap between what the U.S. said and what it did in Busan but credited its endorsement of plastic production reduction as having helped bring more than 100 countries on board in support of draft text that outlined legally binding, global reductions in plastic production and a phaseout of certain harmful chemicals.

This Trump administration is expected to be at least somewhat more competent (and therefore destructive) than it was the first time around. During the last round of Trump-era U.N. climate negotiations known as COPs, the administration hosted what seemed to be deliberately provocative high-profile panels featuring representatives from the coal and gas industry. Yet people in negotiating rooms at the U.N. negotiations—largely career diplomats—tended to keep a relatively low profile.

This time could be different. Trump could withdraw the U.S. not just from Paris but from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, the broader treaty under which the Paris climate agreement and ensuing negotiations are housed. While Biden was able to rejoin the Paris Agreement almost immediately after taking office, the U.S. joined the UNFCCC in 1992 via Senate ratification. That could make it more complicated for Trump to leave, but likely even more difficult for a subsequent Democratic administration to rejoin. Legal experts are split on what either end of that process might entail. But even if Trump opts to stick with the UNFCCC, the U.S. won’t have many outlets for engaging in it once it exits the Paris Agreement.

The other worrying possibility, advocates say, is that the transition team’s quest to rid the federal government of civil servants—including through the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency—might take out the career diplomats who typically staff U.N. negotiations. If the next administration clears house, that could make way for the U.S. to have a much more openly obstructionist presence in climate and environmental talks than it did during Trump’s first term.

U.N. negotiations, though, are just one part of the equation for determining whether the world can reduce greenhouse gas emissions at scale, adapt to the effects of the climate crisis, and recover from the fires, storms, and floods that it’s strengthening. Major questions remain as to how this Trump White House will engage with the International Monetary Fund, for instance, where the U.S. enjoys de facto veto power. Debt-distressed countries burdened with onerous loan-repayment terms from the IMF—and made to pay arguably extortionary surcharges—find it difficult to fund basic infrastructure and public services, let alone transition off fossil fuels and scale up renewable energy. Here too, “there’s huge continuity,” and the U.S. has had a “mostly negative influence,” says economist Jayati Ghosh. “The best thing that could happen to the IMF is for the U.S. to withdraw from it.” Unlike the UNFCCC, though, the IMF still commands considerable power, money, and influence—making a U.S. withdrawal unlikely.

Over the last several years under Biden, the U.S. has also become increasingly willing to weaponize the tools of economic statecraft, expanding its already considerable sanctions and tariff regime. Countries have already been exploring more regionally based economic structures that enable them to engage in different kinds of trade and credit, sidestepping Western banks and payment systems that are susceptible to U.S. geopolitical meddling. The Trump administration could accelerate that process.

The U.S. has long been a fickle, volatile participant in multilateralism. That’s been especially true when it comes to climate and environmental negotiations. But its chaotic presence in spaces like the UNFCCC—and tendency to try to force the rest of the world to bend to its will—is symptomatic of U.S. foreign and economic policy more generally, whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office. As Trump reenters the White House and prepares to take U.S. obstruction to new extremes, the rest of the world might just start losing patience with the country’s consistently difficult way of doing business.