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The U.N. climate conference is being held in Belém, Brazil.Credit...Fernando Llano/Associated Press
Can the world fight climate change without America?
This week, leaders from around the world are meeting at the edge of the Amazon in Belém, Brazil, for their annual climate talks. The guest list is a little thin.
The leaders of China, Russia and Japan won’t be there. Neither will the leaders of Australia, Indonesia or Turkey. But the most notable absence is that of the United States. For the first time since countries began gathering 30 years ago to take action against global warming, the U.S. is not sending any top officials.
The premise of these gatherings is that climate change knows no borders and can be stoppe…
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The U.N. climate conference is being held in Belém, Brazil.Credit...Fernando Llano/Associated Press
Can the world fight climate change without America?
This week, leaders from around the world are meeting at the edge of the Amazon in Belém, Brazil, for their annual climate talks. The guest list is a little thin.
The leaders of China, Russia and Japan won’t be there. Neither will the leaders of Australia, Indonesia or Turkey. But the most notable absence is that of the United States. For the first time since countries began gathering 30 years ago to take action against global warming, the U.S. is not sending any top officials.
The premise of these gatherings is that climate change knows no borders and can be stopped only if countries come together. Can the world do it without the U.S.?
Good-ish news
Ten years ago in Paris, almost every country in the world agreed to a common goal: to hold the average global temperature rise to “well below” two degrees Celsius, and preferably closer to 1.5 degrees, compared with preindustrial levels.
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Credit...Source: Climate Action Tracker’s most recent projection and its 2015 projection | By The New York Times
The good-ish news: Slower emissions growth means the arc of temperature increase has curved downward over the past 10 years. If countries stick to current policies, the global average temperature is projected to rise by 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by the end of the century — still bad, but a significant improvement from where we were 10 years ago. These charts show 10 big things that have happened on the climate front in the last decade.
The Paris Agreement came into force in November 2016, just days before Donald Trump was elected president for the first time. Trump has called climate change a hoax, and is in the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the agreement for the second time.
In Trump’s second term, the U.S. has abandoned America’s promises to the rest of the world to curb the burning of fossil fuels at home. What’s more, it has taken a battering ram to other countries’ efforts to reduce emissions, killing an international limit on the production of plastics made from petroleum and thwarting the world’s first-ever tax on shipping emissions.
Some officials have suggested that climate action might actually be easier to agree on without the U.S., my colleague Lisa Friedman reports.
But the U.S. is the largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas. It’s also the world’s richest country, which matters: Poor countries, which have contributed very little to climate change, depend on richer nations to help them adapt to a hotter world and transition to cleaner forms of energy.
An emerging climate superpower
The hope now lies with China and emerging economies to pick up the slack, my colleague Somini Sengupta told me.
China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it also leads the world on renewable energy. China installed more wind turbines and solar panels last year than the rest of the world combined. It now dominates clean energy industries, from patented technologies to essential raw materials, and is selling a lot of it to the world. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco and Hungary.
The stat that really struck me is that China is now making more money from exporting green technology than the U.S. makes from exporting fossil fuels, according to a recent analysis by The Economist.
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Credit...Source: IEA STEPS via BNEF and Ember | By The New York Times
Affordable clean technology is key to reducing dependence on fossil fuels and bringing down global emissions. Solar panels now hang from apartment balconies in Germany and cover vast areas of Saudi desert and Tibetan plains.
Cheap Chinese-made solar panels, batteries and E.V.s have made it possible for countries like Brazil, South Africa and India to pivot to cleaner technologies. In India’s electricity sector, for example, more than half of the generation capacity now comes from solar, wind and hydropower.
The hottest years on record
Despite these developments, the temperature is still rising. The last 10 years were the hottest on record, and 2024 was the hottest of all, with extreme heat killing election workers in India and pilgrims on the hajj in Saudi Arabia.
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Source: Copernicus/ECMWF | Global temperatures compared with late-19th-century average | By The New York Times
Many are already having to adapt to conditions on a changed planet. In India, a women’s union has created a tiny insurance plan to help people cope when heat makes it too dangerous to work. In Malawi and Uganda, people are experimenting with growing different crops. But as Somini points out, there’s not enough money to help the most vulnerable — not even close.
And so, in some ways, the question of whether the world can tackle climate change without the U.S. is not quite the right question. America is a big, important country, and how it opts to act will affect everyone’s future. But climate change is happening, and the world will have to adapt. As one climate expert put it, “We have to act with or without the U.S.”
Ask a Correspondent
Do you have questions about climate change and how we cover global warming? Somini Sengupta, our international climate reporter, is here to help.
If you have questions for Somini, you can submit them by filling out this form. We’ll pick a few questions for her to answer in this newsletter.
*Interested in providing feedback on this newsletter? *Take our short survey here.
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