This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

The talk, of course, around COP29 is all about Donald Trump. This year’s global climate summit comes in the wake of the election of a president of the United States who has referred to climate change as “a scam” and “a hoax” and looks set to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

This is a president-in-waiting who asked US oil producers to contribute $1bn to his campaign in exchange for repealing climate protection laws.

He might not be in the White House yet, and the US may still have a team of Biden administration negotiators working hard to shore up some legacy, but there’s a sense that whatever the world’s largest economy says or does might well be reversed or modified when the new administration comes in.

What does that mean for COP29 and the global effort to reduce emissions? Does a likely future withdrawal of the United States mean that everyone in Baku should give up and go back home? Will all the efforts made there end upTrumped?

Certainly the arrival of Trump back in power does not augur well for climate. It's not the rocket that was needed behind the global effort. Nor is the speech made by thhe president of Azerbaijan, host of the summit, which hailed oil and gas as "a gift from God".  

A sense of what's at stake is there in a comment by envoy and senior advisor to Joe Biden, John Podesta: “This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner safer planet. Facts are still facts. Science is still science. The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country.”

His words are a reminder that while there are serious reasons for concern, there are also some for hope.

One of these can be found in an Oxford University study, published today, which surveyed how net zero goals are aligning up with implementation in thirty major economies (G20+). It notes: “While the incoming Trump Administration will likely reverse climate rules in the US, the global spread of mandatory rules on net zero – with new rules in 21 jurisdictions ranging from Europe, to China, to South Africa coming into effect from 2023 onwards – means companies face global compliance obligations.”

Or as Professor Thomas Hale of Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, co-lead for the project, put it: “There’s been huge growth in rules around net zero in just the last year, not just in Europe but in jurisdictions like South Africa, Turkey, and California. While the incoming Trump administration may try to roll back federal policies, firms operating around the world will be looking at their growing global regulatory obligations.”

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One source of consolation is the knowledge that even in Trump’s previous term efforts did not come stuttering to a halt. As Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s national climate adviser, has said even with the US out of the Paris Agreement, the global collective effort continued. It also continued in the United States, where wind and solar expanded.

That said, there are undoubtedly reasons to be sceptical about current progress, and despondent about rolling back. The world is already failing to meet its goals.

What does Trump's election mean for climate change? (Image: Derek Macarthur) We’ve seen how even in our own country, Scotland, it’s easy to make targets and then fail to live up to them. The Climate Bill passed last week, with its dropping of the previous 2030 target, is a reminder of our own failures.

Meanwhile, 2024 has been the warmest year in recorded history, one which Antonio Guterres also described as “a masterclass in climate destruction”. And in the midst of it fossil fuel emissions were still rising.

This year’s Global Carbon Budget shows fossil fuel CO2 emissions reached a record high of 41.5 GtCO2 in 2024, up 0.8% from the previous year. Overall emissions are plateauing, and this is often seen as a reason for hope, due to a decline in emissions from land-use change, but when it comes to burning oil and gas the graph continues to climb.

How much fossil fuels we continue to extract and burn counts. It’s in this context that court battles like the one taking place in Edinburgh’s Court of Sessions, in which campaigning groups Greenpeace and Uplift are legally challenging the consent to drill at the UK’s largest untapped oilfield, Rosebank, matter.

What happens, even in the wake of a US election, in Baku matters.

The looming US switch climate policy backlash also casts a shadow over a key goal and debate in this year’s summit, which is all about persuading richer nations, most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, to provide ‘climate finance’ to developing countries.

At the heart of this climate finance is the latest bamboozling COP acronym the NCQG, the New Collective Quantified Goal.

Even under Biden, the United States, like most wealthy countries, has not covered itself in glory on this front. A collective pledge of $100 billion a year by 2020, made in Copenhagen in 2009, was only honoured in 2022 and with about 70 percent of the money as loans, to weigh down already indebted countries.

That delay wasn’t all down to Donald Trump.

It is often said that $1 trillion a year will be needed by low income countries. One report concluded that emerging markets and developing countries other than China will need to spend around $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 (6.5 percent of their GDP) to meet mitigation and adaptation investment needs in line with the Paris Agreement.

Last year, the United States contributed $9.5bn to this global finance.

And what about us? The UK has been a driver of climate finance for the developing world. The original $100 billion per annum climate finance pledge was first mooted in 2009 by then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown - and Nicola Sturgeon, at COP26, pushed the idea of of a loss and damage fund.

Keir Starmer has promised to hit Boris Johnson’s target of spending £11.6bn on international climate finance between 2020-21 and 2025-26. He has also signalled climate leadership by announcing the setting of a new NDC (Nationally Determined Contributions) target for 2035 of at least 81% below 1990 emissions, in line with the Climate Change Committee's recommendations.

How big a disaster is Trump for the climate?How big a disaster is Trump for the climate? (Image: Derek Macarthur)

But critics have noted how he has also called on the “private sector to start paying their fair share," triggering concern that wealthier countries may shirk their contributions.

Rosemary Harris, North Sea Senior Campaigner at Oil Change International, said: “One of the key tests for UK climate leadership at this COP is whether it will support the $1 trillion climate finance target that is essential to propel a just transition around the world. Yet Keir Starmer chose to start the day by refusing to do so and instead pointed to the private sector to pick up the tab.”.

Another tension at COP29 revolves around China and its contributions to this finance. The country has been arguing that it should be seen as a developing, not developed, and therefore not have to pay in line with developed countries.

The idea of what is a fair share to contribute is hotly debated, and various calculations exist almost all of which have the United States paying in vastly more than anyone else. A recent model by the Centre for Global Development estimated that around 5-10 percent of global climate finance by 2030 should come from China, compared to at least 40 percent coming from the United States.

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“In face value terms,” the CGD said, “China’s contributions appear to reach closer to its fair share than the US’s.”

These billions, and even trillions may seem like a lot of money, especially when we are barely out of a cost-of-living crisis at home, but they are small compared to the $2.3 quadrillion of damages that it has been estimated could accumulate by the end of the century if climate change is not brought under control

Over the past few days, I’ve noticed how every COP29 press release and statement I have received has mentioned Trump - but the global climate effort is bigger than that. As worrying is whether an anti-Net Zero mood might be bolstered and nurtured by seeing itself further legitimised by power. It’s whether Trump shifts the global mood against net zero, or triggers a surge in the climate fightback.