At a climate summit at the United Nations on Wednesday, the vast majority of the world’s nations gathered to make their newest pledges to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.
Geopolitical heavyweights including China, Russia, Japan and Germany were there. Dozens of small island states were there. The world’s poorest countries, including Chad and the Central African Republic, were there. Venezuela, Syria, Iran — there, too.
The United States was not.
There are few issues on which the United States is more diplomatically isolated from the rest of the world than climate change. President Trump’s hostility to renewable energy, which he clearly broadcast in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, is at odds with the rapid construction of wind farms, solar arrays and other renewable energy sources in a range of countries. the construction boom includes even oil-producing giants like Saudi Arabia, which is adding solar capacity at a rapid clip.
“We are the dawn of a new energy era,” said U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres as he opened the summit on Wednesday.
At the heart of the U.S. position is the Trump administration’s fundamental assertion — widely dismissed by economists, researchers and the political leadership of other nations — that the transition to renewable energy is a path to economic ruin.
“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” Mr. Trump told world leaders on Tuesday, adding that countries, especially in Europe and Asia, should buy more of it from the United States. The United States is the world’s biggest producer of both oil and natural gas, and Mr. Trump has made it a priority to increase exports of these fossil fuels.
Under the Paris Agreement, the 2015 pact to limit global warming, nearly all the world’s nations assented to submitting increasingly ambitious plans for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions every five years. The event on Wednesday had the feel of world leaders handing in slightly overdue homework.
The Biden administration submitted an updated pledge shortly before Mr. Trump took office, but one of Mr. Trump’s first moves was to announce the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
At Wednesday’s climate summit, 121 countries were scheduled to deliver a message very different from Mr. Trump’s, pledging to rein in global emissions not only for the sake of trying to slow catastrophic global warming but because renewables are getting cheaper faster than was previously thought. In some cases, renewables now produce electricity more affordably than plants that burn fossil fuels, bolstering the argument made by some countries that solar and wind can help with economic growth while providing energy security by limiting reliance on imports of fuels like coal, oil or gas.
That idea was conveyed by Philip Davis, prime minister of the Bahamas, at an event on Monday. “We need decision makers everywhere to understand that replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy will not come at the expense of prosperity, but is a prerequisite for future prosperity,” he said.
On Tuesday, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called fossil fuels “a losing bet” in his remarks at the General Assembly.
Some of the Trump administration’s first actions were to remove incentives for building solar and wind projects or buying electric cars. The administration has also pushed through expedited permitting for coal mines, natural-gas shipping terminals and other fossil fuel infrastructure.
Faced with that, earlier this year many world leaders had voiced fears that the Trump administration’s fierce opposition to renewables might prompt a global about-face on the energy transition. More recently, however, they have said they would push on, with or without the United States.
The European Union climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, said President Trump’s actions show no signs of affecting other countries’ ambitions, including his own 27-country bloc.
“We’re doing the exact opposite of what the U.S. is doing, which, by the way, I find concerning and problematic,” he said in an interview this week in New York City. “The world’s most phenomenal geopolitical player, its largest economy, its second largest emitter, is basically checking out.”
The most important announcement on Wednesday came from Beijing. China currently produces the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions because it burns more coal than any other in the world. But its globally dominant solar and wind power industries are also the engine of not just its own transition away from fossil fuels, but the world’s, according to numerous studies.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, told world leaders on Wednesday by video link that by 2035 China would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 7 to 10 percent from peak levels, which it appears to be nearing this year. He also said China would increase its share of “non-fossil fuels” to more than 30 percent, and to sextuple its installed wind and solar power by then.
Without naming the United States, Mr. Xi seemed to remark on its absence from the climate summit. “While some country is acting against it,” he said, referencing a transition to low-emissions fuels, “the international community should stay focused on the right direction.”
The European Union went next. While the E.U. hasn’t finalized its emissions-reduction pledge, its lawmakers have tentatively agreed to reduce emissions in the range of 66 percent to 72 percent by 2035, compared with 1990 levels. Mr. Hoekstra said the terms would be finalized by the time the international climate talks known as COP30 begin in Brazil in early November.
Europe’s climate ambitions will be put to the test, however, by its need to satisfy the United States. As part of its trade negotiations with Washington, President Von Der Leyen promised in August to buy $750 billion in American fuels by the end of Mr. Trump’s term in office. Analysts have said that if the E.U. were to do that, which they said was almost physically impossible, it would come at the expense of the continent’s transition toward renewable sources.