The fight against climate change is “bigger than one election”, US envoy John Podesta has said.
Mr Podesta was speaking at the UN COP29 climate talks after his party lost the White House to Republican and climate sceptic Donald Trump.
The re-election of Mr Trump, who is expected again to pull the United States out of global climate treaties and efforts, had a chilling effect on the two-week summit in Azerbaijan that started today.
But a defiant Mr Podesta said: “This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet.
“Facts are still facts. Science is still science. The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country.”
Mr Trump’s campaign team has indicated the president-elect would withdraw the US – the world’s second biggest polluter – out of the landmark Paris Agreement, which he also did during his last term.
The climate envoy, a senior advisor to President Joe Biden, said: “In January, we’re going to inaugurate a president whose relationship to climate change is captured by the words, ‘hoax’ and ‘fossil fuels’.”
He said he was aware the US had brought “disappointment” by changing its position on climate.
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The UK’s new climate envoy Rachel Kyte earlier said countries had to keep working together even though some recent events had made you “pause”, given the “mixed signals” they send.
The process can be “three steps forward, two steps back” she said during a panel event. “Sometimes it’s a leap, sometimes it’s stagnation. But you can never give up on it.”
Many others from the almost 200 countries gathered in Baku stressed the show must go on, that COP29 will continue with business as usual.
Host nation Azerbaijan yesterday told Sky News the US team had remained “constructive” in the climate talks even after the presidential election.
The annual COP summits, during which countries agree collective next steps on climate action, withstood the last time the US bowed out of it.
But this year they are trying to agree a major new climate fund for developing countries, and cash is not expected to flow under Trump.
“Obviously, every country makes a difference,” Germany’s representative Jennifer Morgan told Sky News.
“We need leadership more than ever. But I can say from Europe, I don’t see that wavering,” she said, despite a shift towards the right and climate scepticism in some parts of Europe.
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Mohamed Adow, who runs thinktank Power Shift Africa, said the US election result “hasn’t changed much” because it had been a “laggard” on paying into past climate funds under both Democrats and Republicans.
Joe Biden’s landmark $370bn Inflation Reduction Act has stimulated green investment and jobs in the US, but the country remains the largest oil and gas producer in the world.