U.S. Balancing Act May Be More Difficult at 2018 Climate Talks

The U.S. was largely able to pull off a high-wire act at the Bonn climate talks—touting President Donald Trump’s coal-friendly agenda while working in closed-door talks to draft rules for Paris climate pact—but could be headed into some heavy crosswinds at next year’s summit in Poland.

But the U.S. balancing act will be tougher because the rulebook to implement the Paris accord, which was barely sketched in Bonn, has to be finished in Poland a year from now. In a sense, the U.S.—the only country in the world heading for the exits on the climate pact—would be alone at one end of the table trying to exert pressure on the rest of the world, which actually intends to use those rules in implementing the landmark 2015 deal.

“We are doing OK now, but how is it going to look next year, or the year after that, as we get closer and closer to the actual withdrawal date?” Andrew Light, a former Obama administration climate envoy, told Bloomberg Environment. “Do we actually lose some ability to corral” other nations, “just as things get harder” because so much more is at stake.

In Poland, those countries are likely to be less receptive to arguments from a nation withdrawing from the deal, but also less flexible knowing they are making final decisions to implement a deal covering only them for the next decade and beyond, he said.

Among the policies and procedures the nearly 200 nations must conclude at the 2018 high-level summit in Katowice, Poland: rules to launch international emissions trading; a process for taking stock of nations’ collective actions to address climate change; and final reporting and verification rules.

Deadline Looms

Trump announced in June that he will pull the U.S. out of the deal citing fears it puts the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. But he also has questioned whether climate change is happening, calling it a “hoax” in the 2016 campaign.

But by the time the U.S. delegation arrives in in Katowice for the next United Nations climate summit in December 2018, it also will be much closer to the Nov. 4, 2019, deadline for the U.S. to formally notify other parties it is withdrawing from the accord. The earliest it can technically leave the deal is one day after the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election.

Bonn climate conference was the first such gathering since President Donald Trump announced he would extricate the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Photographer: Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images

Viewed another way: Environmental groups, Fortune 500 companies, and more than 20 states now have two years to mount a campaign and convince Trump to let the U.S. stay.

But next year is likely to be a lot tougher for the U.S. in Poland because the nearly 200 nations that adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015 agreed to make the accord operational at the 2018 summit’s end.

Consequently, there won’t be the wiggle room countries had in Bonn to boot tough issues forward, not only on the Paris rule book but other land mines that could trip up negotiators in Poland. Developing nations are sure to demand more specifics on when the U.S., Japan, European nations, and other richer industrialized nations will go beyond the $100 a billion annually in public and private funding they are to provide developing nations starting in 2020.

Those developed countries agreed in 2015 to consider boosting annual climate aid totals beginning in 2025.

Onus on Backers?

One Trump administration political appointee who was part of the U.S. delegation in Bonn sees it differently. The onus will squarely be on those pushing to get Trump to reverse himself, the appointee told Bloomberg Environment Nov. 20.

No countries have taken up Trump on his offer to stay in the climate deal if it’s renegotiated on better terms for the U.S. Thus, the appointee said, there’s no reason for the president to stay.

The key issue for 2018 is “having strong political leadership with [the] resolve to carry the exit decision through to the end"—and finally withdraw the U.S. from the pact in 2020, the official said.

U.S. Pushing Fossil Fuels Elsewhere

One question for the 2018 summit is whether there will be any fallout from a Trump administration decision to host a Bonn event touting fossil fuels as a climate mitigation approach.

The panel, the brainchild of White House energy adviser George David Banks, was to “reintroduce [a] pragmatic policy discussion on energy and climate,” Banks told Bloomberg Environment just before the summit’s end.

The “technical negotiations"—figuring out how to implement the Paris Agreement—were “separate” and in the hands of State Department career staff, he said. But the U.S. still plans to push fossil fuels in a host of other international talks the U.S. is engaged in, which range from one-on-one bilateral talks to multilateral trade deals, according to Banks, who was named White House special assistant for international energy and environment in February.

Showdown Coming

Harjeet Singh, who tracks the climate talks for the nonprofit ActionAid International, agreed that the administration appeared to avoid injecting that fossil fuel message into the negotiations, where the U.S. didn’t appear to diverge from previous Obama and Bush administration positions that as a whole sought to advance or protect U.S. interests.

“At the technical level, the U.S. has been negotiating as if nothing has changed,” Singh told Bloomberg Environment, “even when they are blocking things like finance” for vulnerable nations—a reluctance to take on climate aid commitments shared by the last two administrations.

But that consistency is not exactly cause for celebration, according to Singh. “It’s good and bad—bad because they are still not letting us make progress on some very important issues,” he said. “But good because we need everybody at the table, and the task is so huge that everybody must contribute.”

One Obama-era State Department official told Bloomberg Environment that the U.S. positions in hindsight were very close to what negotiations for Hillary Clinton might have brought to Bonn had she been inaugurated instead of Trump. One exception might be on climate finance.

Had Clinton won, the U.S “would have been slightly less hostile to some of the long-term finance conversations” held in the negotiating rooms in Bonn, the official said, where many island nations and others already hit by climate impacts pressed richer nations for greater commitment to more funding beginning in 2025.

The Trump administration, by contrast, has sought to zero out most international climate finance, including $2 billion of President Obama’s $3 billion pledge over four years to the fledgling U.N. Green Climate Fund.

“It’s no secret this administration hates the $100 billion goal—it thinks it’s stupid and is wary of any affirmation of it going forward,” the former State Department official said. “And it certainly doesn’t want to participate in the post-2025 conversation of what is the new version of that $100 billion is going to be.”

Raising Eyebrows

Light, now a senior fellow in the World Resources Institute’s global climate program, said having the U.S. remain at the table in the talks while it waits to formally withdraw is still useful

“They could stop sending a delegation. Or, they could start sending a place-holder, a delegation that’s even smaller” than the State Department delegation sent to Bonn, which fluctuated but was roughly a team of about a dozen or so.

Holding the 2018 summit in Katowice has raised some eyebrows for those who remember two controversies that erupted the last time Poland played host to the talks in 2013 in Warsaw.

First, there was the heavy presence of fossil fuel companies at the talks, which prompted a walkout by some environmental groups. This was followed by Poland’s peculiar decision to oust its environment minister and president of the Conference of the Parties just as nations were heading into the the last days of the summit with deals on the table for global forest protection and the still simmering debate over how to address the loss and damage in nations already impacted by climate change.

Avoiding Surprises

It will be crucial for Poland “to avoid surprises like we had” at that summit, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who presided over the 2014 U.N. talks in Peru, told Bloomberg Environment. Negotiators don’t need the distraction of a heavy fossil fuel presence or tenuous leadership with Paris implementation issues front and center in Katowice, said Pulgar-Vidal, who now heads the World Wildlife Fund’s global climate and energy program.

The fact that Poland, a coal-friendly European Union member that’s often tugging against the bloc’s clean energy push, will host again is already making some jittery. Perhaps in response, Poland’s environment minister, Jan Szyszko, has repeatedly touted Katowice, located about 50 miles northwest of Krakow in a southern region of Poland bustling with coal mines, for its own environmental progress.

Katowice “is a good example of a just transition,” from black capital to green capital, “an environmentally responsible city [and] one of the greenest” in Poland, Szyszko told environment ministers in the high-level plenary in the final hours of the Bonn talks.

The environment minister also announced in the final hours of the Bonn talks that Poland has tapped Tomasz Chruszczow, a familiar face to negotiators and others who track the U.N. talks, to a new dual position of special envoy for the incoming Polish presidency overseeing the 2018 summit, as well as a more nebulous post of “climate champion.”

Szyszko is still expected to serve as COP president next year, however. Chruszczow has headed the Polish delegation since 2009 and has some technical expertise as chairman of a U.N. technical wing—the Subsidiary Body on Implementation—that advises the nearly 200 nations.

Next year will mark the fourth time Poland has presided over the summit in the two decades or so that have passed since the parties launched talks under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent treaty to the Paris pact.