The Trump administration may have pulled out of the Paris climate accord, but the White House isn’t abandoning the field on global climate policy. U.S. officials made their presence known in force at this week’s United Nations climate conference in Poland.
This particular meeting, COP24, could be a deciding factor on the future direction of the 2015 Paris climate accord, making it more strict than originally envisioned, and speeding the transition away from fossil fuels at a faster clip than Trump may want.
In response, Energy Secretary Rick Perry tasked a group of senior office heads to push for technologies that the administration wants to export overseas, including cleaner fossil-energy technologies, liquefied natural gas, and advanced nuclear energy technologies.
“Under Secretary Perry’s leadership, the Department of Energy remains focused on our efforts to positively impact the environment by exporting more American LNG, advocating for zero emission civil nuclear energy, and developing innovative technologies to modernize the production of all forms of energy,” said Energy Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes.
The White House wants to use the conference to tout American energy innovation, especially when it comes to the continued use of cheap fossil fuels like coal. Perry has been pitching U.S. clean coal technologies that can capture carbon dioxide emissions from the smokestack and recycle them to reduce coal plants’ impact on warming.
Sources close to the White House say the administration wants the U.N. to recognize that coal and other fossil fuels will remain in high demand across much of the developing world, and even in some developed countries throughout the next century, and that a rapid transition to 100 percent renewables isn’t yet feasible.
“It is really the White House with DOE support” that is leading the charge here, said George David Banks, former adviser to President Trump on international energy and environment policy.
“Given the amount of coal generation that we expect to see come on the grid … in Southeast Asia, Africa, the developing world, it’s in everyone’s interest from an energy security/climate mitigation perspective that we try to make sure that those technologies are as clean and as efficient as possible,” he said.
Currently, he said, China is by far the greatest financier of new coal plants in the developing world. But that’s something the president wants to change.
China finances more than the U.S., European Union, and South Korea combined, Banks explained. “That’s a big, big number,” he said, but the financing is going into less-efficient coal plants.
“It’s a really important point that not a lot of the climate folks actually track,” he continued. “There is a perception out there that these developing economies can just leapfrog a fossil buildout in favor of renewables, and that’s just not possible. At least, not right now.”
The way Trump sees it, “climate policy is trade policy,” said Banks, explaining why the administration wants to remain at the table on the climate talks.
Banks explained that the White House is using the negotiations not just to advance its energy dominance agenda, but to hold other countries like China to the same emissions accountability, transparency, and verification standards that the U.S. and other developed nations are currently following under the U.N. climate framework put in place decades before the Paris deal.
“From a U.S. perspective, it really doesn’t matter where the president ultimately lands on the Paris agreement, because right now we’re in the framework convention … that requires certain reporting standards from developed economies that are more stringent than what China faces,” Banks explained.
A big chunk of the COP24 discussions will have to do with finalizing the Paris “rule book,” which seeks to hold all countries to a standard of reporting emissions reductions. This is key to demonstrating if a country is actually doing what it said it would do under the Paris deal.
The administration sees getting these rules right as critical to keeping a level playing field when it comes to the economic considerations surrounding climate change, according to Banks. The U.S. already faces those requirements under the U.N. climate framework convention, but China and other countries still face less stringent requirements, he said.
That’s why a lot of the discussion on Paris will be on “making sure whatever pledge a country puts forward is measurable, reportable, and verifiable,” Banks added.
It’s not just the Trump administration that wants to see this. Environmentalists and conservation groups will also be pushing for the implementation of the Paris rule book.
“The main thing that we hope comes out of this is, obviously, we need to finish the Paris rule book,” said John Verdieck, former State Department foreign policy officer who worked on the Paris deal, who is now director of international climate policy at The Nature Conservancy.
He said improving transparency standards has been a priority across the two previous administrations and is a major part of achieving the goals of the Paris accord.
Verdieck agrees with Banks that all countries need to show what they are doing to meet their emissions reduction targets.
“If the atmosphere is seeing x-number of tons of carbon dioxide going into it, we need to know where it’s coming from and who’s doing it, so that we can have a plan for figuring out how to solve it,” he said.
Verdieck is also open to climate solutions, potentially including those being pushed by the Trump administration, if they merit support under the climate accord.
“For us, one of the main things we hope to see come out of this is that all solutions that are there are something that can be included, if it is something that has environmental integrity that there is flexibility for countries to reduce their emissions that way,” he said.
