In one of his final acts as president, Joe Biden has sent a large U.S. delegation of over 250 federal officials to Baku, Azerbaijan, this week, for the U.N.’s annual climate conference.
That figure, which comes from a document I obtained, reflects the 194 Biden administration officials who will take part directly in the COP 29 summit, with over 60 others who are traveling this week to support them. The conference began on Monday and will end on November 22
The roughly 250-strong U.S. government delegation includes everyone from cabinet members down to the advance staffers who are laying the groundwork for their participation but who are not officially accredited to take part in the conference themselves. The delegates include White House climate czar John Podesta, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and Export-Import Bank president Reta Jo Lewis. The president, meanwhile, is in Peru for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, on whose sidelines he will hold his final meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
An earlier iteration of the U.N. climate conference — the 2022 COP in Glasgow — was the venue for a shameful moment in American foreign policy. There, then–climate envoy John Kerry infamously responded to a question about Uyghur forced-labor abuses in the Chinese solar-panel supply chain by saying, “That’s not in my lane.”
With Kerry out of the picture, the administration lost a prominent figure willing to go to bat for an accommodationist stance toward the Chinese Communist Party — a stance that he was eager to see reflected in media coverage. In that sense, the subordination of human rights to a policy of blind engagement with Beijing on climate issues has taken place in a less vocal fashion at Baku.
Earlier today, though, a delegation representing the draconian government of Hong Kong — which answers directly to the Chinese Communist Party — took part in an event focused on facilitating more cooperation between subnational entities in the U.S. and China, plus representatives from the U.S. and China.
Deputy special envoy for climate Rick Duke spoke at the event alongside Chinese climate envoy Liu Zhenmin, according to pictures posted online by UC Berkeley’s California-China Climate Institute, which organized the session. Duke’s participation follows another Kerry staffer’s involvement in a similar event at the previous COP, in Dubai, alongside a representative of a CCP group flagged by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for its role in malign-influence operations.
Biden, meanwhile, will reportedly press Xi this Saturday on China’s sophisticated hack of U.S. telecom providers, which targeted the phones of Trump and Vice President–elect J. D. Vance. Duke’s participation in the Baku dialogue suggests that, for all the talk about holding Beijing accountable for its espionage against major political figures, serious consequences are not in the offing.
After all, it’s no secret that the president views robust U.S. action on international climate diplomacy as part of his historical legacy. “Since Day One, President Biden has treated climate change as not only one of the greatest challenges of our time, but also as a once-in-a generation opportunity to unleash a new era of economic growth, good-paying union jobs, historic investment, and energy security,” a White House fact sheet on America’s participation in the Baku conference reads.
The delegation of 250 is not by any means the largest such group that a presidential administration has sent to one of these summits, and it’s small compared with other countries’ delegations. America, according to data crunched by Carbon Brief, a U.K. website focused on climate change, doesn’t even crack the top ten.
Still, this is a massive mobilization of government resources to ends that will very likely be irrelevant in just a few months, when Donald Trump returns to the presidency. But the expenditure of these resources is no matter for the president and his team, who have a legacy to buffer.