Donald Trump has described his approach to climate change as "drill baby, drill". Photo: CHIP SOMODEVILLA / Getty Images via AFP
Analysis - United States president-elect Donald Trump's approach to climate change has been described - by him - as "drill baby, drill".
Trump has vowed to once again pull the United States out of the landmark Paris Agreement, effectively gazumping any serious role for the US delegation at the annual United Nations climate summit starting on Monday in Azerbaijan.
There are few signs anyone else will follow the US and pull out of the deal - including New Zealand.
But delicate negotiations on climate finance could be harder now.
Summit hosts Azerbaijan have a major goal for COP29, signing a New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance.
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts will be at the Baku summit representing New Zealand, and described the finance goal as the meeting's major focus.
Currently OECD countries are supposed to pay $100 billion a year in finance to poorer countries to adapt to and prevent the impacts of climate change, but the deal runs out in 2025.
Watts says New Zealand will be among the nations arguing for the liability to be shared more widely than the traditional list of OECD nations, bringing in oil-rich countries and perhaps the likes of China.
But with Trump on his way in again, observers say any future US contribution could be in question, raising concerns about how other nations will react to being asked to chip in without the world's richest country.
Trump Presidency 1.0 withdrew the world's second biggest emitter from the Paris Agreement.
Political analysts in America say this time around there are fewer handbrakes on his agenda.
Carbon Brief estimated the US could emit four billion tonnes more emissions if an incoming Trump scrapped clean energy measures brought in by president Biden.
However Kate Wilson Butler of law firm Chapman Tripp, who was involved in global climate negotiations when she worked for New Zealand's foreign affairs ministry, said COP29 was taking place while President Biden was still in office.
"It's hard to predict the impact of the US election outcome on future COPs," she said.
"On one hand, it's not certain what approach the US will take under the new administration. In 2017, the US announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement...That meant the US was no longer involved in the negotiations directly relevant to the Paris Agreement. But the US remained a signatory to 1992's UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [the treaty underlying the COP meetings] so it retained a presence at the COP its subsidiary bodies, where a lot of the negotiations take place. It's not clear whether that will be the case this time."
Wilson Butler said the world had changed since the first Trump presidency.
"Another key factor is that state of global climate action is in quite a different place now than we were in 2016," she said.
"In particular, private sector activity and investment toward the low carbon transition has accelerated significantly in the intervening period."
"According to the IEA [Internaitonal Energy Agency], for example, the ratio of clean power to fossil fuel power investments was 2:1 in 2015.
"In 2024, it was projected to reach 10:1.
"It's not clear to what extent a change in US position would impact that momentum, much of which is being driven by other (including emerging) economies.
"In terms of New Zealand in the negotiations, we have tended to play a pragmatic and constructive 'honest broker' role, which I would expect to continue to help facilitate progress."
The US pivot was on the minds of businessfolk at the Chapter Zero meeting of the Institute of Directors on Friday.
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton was asked whether it would lead to others exiting Paris, but said he did not think President Trump 2.0 would spark an exodus, any more than it did last time.
Upton said the world was bigger than the US, and New Zealand had other trading partners who took climate change seriously. The interesting thing to watch, he said, would be whether the US ceded any leadership on clean technology to China.
Simon Upton. Photo: Supplied.
Upton urged business leaders to push the New Zealand government harder if they really though emissions were a problem, citing an estimated $2-3 billion in damage to businesses from cyclones Gabrielle and Hale, 100 jobs lost from marine heatwaves hitting salmon farms, and a farming sector highly vulnerable to climate disruption.
Sharing a stage with Upton was Climate Change Commission chair Rod Carr, who said moves by the United States to try to block China's success at manufacturing clean technology would almost certainly backfire on America - though New Zealand might get cheap solar panels out of it.
Carr is in the closing weeks of five years in the job - one he told the assembled business people was harder than being acting head of the Reserve Bank or leading Canterbury University after the Christchurch earthquakes.
Carr had some choice words for local leaders with a "drill baby drill" mantra.
He said anyone hoping to find, exploit and profit from new fossil fuel reserves at this point was "delusional" and the local benefits of decarbonising remained for New Zealand regardless of what Beijing or Washington did.
"We live with the ground level pollution, it is our children who breathe this crap."
The commission released a report this month saying New Zealand could make deep cuts to emissions from 2030-2035, the second commitment period under the Paris Agreement, without needing to plant lots of pine trees or spend a lot of money on carbon credits overseas, but only if it made the necessary moves to start now. The government had asked the commission to report on how much New Zealand could do inside its borders from 2030-2035, in various scenarios.
As the summit begins, the United Nations has calculated the world could be on track for "catastrophic" heating of up to 2.9C under countries' existing carbon-cutting promises. Nations were urged to do more.
Asked at the meeting if companies should be preparing for 3C of heating, Upton said accepting that would be "a complete abdication of responsibility."
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