At 73, Tom Vilsack is having a moment of poltical déjà vu. On Tuesday, November 19, the US Secretary of Agriculture spoke at the United Nations climate change summit, COP29, to defend the environmental record of outgoing president Joe Biden – a final stocktake before once again handing over the reins to Donald Trump's administration. He was in the same post when Trump was first elected in 2016.

With the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), he said, the Biden administration had "delivered the most ambitious climate change clean energy and conservation agenda in US history." As for the continuation of that agenda, he said: "It isn't going to be the administration that continues this, it's going to be the people who have received the benefit... who understand [that] it's in their best interest to preserve it and to continue it. The funding is available, it's already been committed." He listed some of the $369 billion (€348 billion) that the IRA has helped to start pumping into green industry, adding: "There's a ground swell, a momentum that I don't think an incoming administration, regardless of its attitudes about climate, would be in a position to stop."

Words very similar to those of Biden. "Some may seek to deny or delay the clean energy revolution that's underway in America, but nobody – nobody – can reverse it," the outgoing president quipped on Sunday, November 17, during a trip to Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

The incoming president, a climate change skeptic, has monopolized conversations at COP29. When he returns to lead the country that has emitted the most greenhouse gases in history, Trump has promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement – as he did in 2017. But in the negotiating rooms in Baku, it is still the Biden administration that is at the helm. They are behaving "constructively, as if they wanted to make progress on the issues before Trump's arrival and be able to restart in four years' time," said one observer.

Before the G20 and during COP29, which has a focus on finance, the White House sent out a number of signals to ths effect. Biden pledged that the US would now contribute $11 billion to climate finance. And on Monday, November 18, he pledged to contribute $4 billion to a World Bank fund that supports the poorest countries.

Simultaneously, Trump is building his own team by appointing figures from the fossil fuel industry, such as future energy secretary Chris Wright, CEO of the climate change-denying hydraulic fracturing company Liberty Energy.

You have 54.09% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.