US envoy promises climate fight will continue under Trump

The US will continue to fight climate change and reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases despite the election of Donald Trump, the US special envoy said on the opening day of the COP29 conference.

John Podesta, a Biden administration nominee, called the new president a climate denier and said he would roll back environmental protections.

But in a sign of initial progress, country representatives reached an agreement on a long-standing point of contention in international climate negotiations.

The move could allow richer countries to offset some of their pollution caused by warming atmospheres by investing in clean energy projects or forests in developing countries.

Trump's election last week was a worrying development for action on climate change, at least in the short term, experts have said.

“He has vowed to repeal our environmental protections and withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement again,” Podesta said.

“That’s what he said, and we should believe him.”

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries agreed to limit global temperature rise to below 1.5°C.

Leaders from nearly 100 countries will speak at the meeting in the coming days.

COP29 was touted as an opportunity to solve the crucial problem: providing money to poorer countries to help them cope with and prepare for the effects of climate change.

But expectations of what the summit can achieve have been dampened by a Trump victory that turns Biden administration negotiators from one of the world's largest carbon emitters to a lame duck in the process, unable to really promises a lot.

However, the election is not the end of the fight, Mr Podesta told reporters.

He believed that because of policies put in place by President Biden and with support from states and cities, U.S. emissions would continue their downward trend, albeit more slowly.

“The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle and one country. This struggle is even greater because we are living through a year marked by the climate crisis in every country in the world.”

Proving that countries will continue to make progress on this issue in the absence of U.S. leadership, delegates signed the final and most contentious part of the Paris climate agreement late on the first night of COP29.

This means a global “carbon market” can now be established, allowing richer nations to pay for projects in developing countries that reduce emissions and use them to meet their climate commitments. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas released by human activities.

This proposal is very attractive for richer countries in Europe, as it is far cheaper to pay for a wind farm somewhere in Africa, for example, than to subsidize heat pumps in your own country.

Agreeing on this had proven very difficult. There have been concerns about fraud and whether carbon removal is real and permanent.

And despite passage, some of those concerns remain, but advocates say it could unleash a flurry of market activity that could see up to $250 billion a year flow from the rich to the poor.

To remind negotiators of the urgency of the situation, new scientific darkness reigned. The United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a report released to coincide with the start of the conference that 2024 was on track to be the world's warmest year on record.

The latest State of the Climate report also finds that our oceans are warming rapidly and glacier melt is accelerating.

“We are on the road to ruin,” COP29 President Mukhtar Babyaev said in his opening speech.

He went on to list examples of current climate impacts around the world, saying “these are not future problems” as rising temperatures are currently causing major damage around the world.

The delegates' mood was not helped by the scale of the main task facing the negotiators here.

Amid energy and economic crises, developed countries are expected to raise billions of dollars in additional climate finance for developing countries.

Richer countries are willing to increase their contributions provided that large emerging economies such as China and the Gulf states also contribute.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said two-thirds of the world's population cannot afford to cut emissions quickly enough to maintain the 1.5C temperature limit.

If they don't get the money to reduce their carbon emissions, everyone suffers, he said.

“Let’s abandon the idea that climate finance is charity. “An ambitious new climate finance target is entirely in the self-interest of every nation, including the largest and richest,” he told delegates.

One topic that concerns the participants of this meeting is the prices of food and drinks in the conference center

Our colleague Aygul Mehman, a journalist with the BBC's Azerbaijan service, was charged 41 AZN (the Azerbaijani currency) for her modest lunch of soup, bean salad and a dry roll. That's about £18 ($24).

“It's like they're taking money out of our pockets,” one delegate told BBC climate editor Justin Rowlatt as he queued for the meal.

This is a serious problem. Delegates from poorer countries often complain about how much these large conferences cost them when flights and hotels are taken into account, and that the total can run into many thousands of pounds.