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 to again pull the United States out of global climate treaties and efforts, sent concern through the almost 200 countries gathering in Azerbaijan for the climate summit.
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 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.
The UK’s new climate envoy Rachel Kyte said earlier during a panel event that although some recent events had made you “pause”, given the “mixed signals” they send, countries had to keep working together.
The process can be “three steps forward, two steps back. Sometimes it’s a leap, sometimes it’s stagnation. But you can never give up on it.”
Other countries have also been keen to stress that the show must go on, that COP29 is continuing with business as usual.
Host nation Azerbaijan yesterday told Sky News the US team had remained “constructive” in the climate talks even after the election.
Germany’s representative Jennifer Morgan said many things being negotiated in Baku are “are long-term decisions” – alluding to the fact deals on potentially a ten-year finance goal or a shift away from fossil fuels may outlast a four-year term of a US president.
“Obviously, every country makes a difference,” she told Sky News today. But she spoke of “how much commitment” there is from other countries to carry on with climate action anyway.
“It’s the cornerstone of European economic policy.”
And she said the EU’s aims to be a climate leader were “[not] wavering”, despite domestic issues keeping the German chancellor and Dutch prime minister at home, and a shift towards the right and climate scepticism.
