As the international community at the global climate conference reckons with Donald Trump’s coming presidency, American Democratic state and local leaders are pitching themselves as the chief negotiators for the United States on climate.
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement during his first term and has pledged to do so again. This time, he should be able to do it much faster. He has promised to immediately gut much of the climate regulations put in place by the Biden administration and further up oil and gas production.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and his climate adviser, Becky Kelley, are in Baku, Azerbaijan, this week for the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference to assure the international stage that progress on climate doesn’t just have to come at the national level.
“I’m sure a lot of people feel like they’ll believe our progress when they see it,” Kelley told NOTUS from Baku. “I think if they look carefully at what we’ve accomplished in the U.S. in recent years and how much of it has been driven by state actions, there’s a really clear pattern that we’re succeeding.”
In Baku on Thursday, Inslee said the same thing. “States can do things that national governments cannot do,” he told attendees on a panel with White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi. “One of the things we’re moving toward in future COPs is to embrace the power of those jurisdictions.”
The annual COP conference has become increasingly mired in controversy, its negotiations declining in importance since 2016, the high-water mark that ended with the global Paris Agreement (a treaty that commits governments to keeping global warming below 2 degrees C).
Since Paris, the COP discussions between governments at the international level have become increasingly fraught. Current emissions goals and pledges will not set the globe anywhere near meeting the goals of Paris. Major world leaders, including President Joe Biden and the leaders of China, India, Indonesia and Germany, will not attend COP this year. Despite significant climate progress from the Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure bills, U.S. oil and gas production levels have hit new records under the Biden administration.
“There isn’t a lot of national leadership on anything: Think about defense, Ukraine, the Gaza war. Climate change can kind of get in line when you think about areas where U.S. and other countries’ leadership is faltering,” said Sheila Olmstead, an energy and environment economist who served on Barack Obama’s council of economic advisers. “If you look at Brazil, at Europe, it’s everywhere, the populism and skepticism about being global partners in everything.”
These national leadership problems have led Olmstead to believe that the important negotiations at COP might be shifting to the subnational level.
And Kelley and Inslee are accompanied by a number of local U.S. leaders making that pitch, ranging from California’s secretary of environmental protection to the mayor of Blytheville, Arkansas.
The team of people at Baku with Inslee and Kelley are members of three organizations that formed to advocate for American climate relationships internationally during the first Trump presidency: the U.S. Climate Alliance (representing the governors of about half of the states), Climate Mayors and America Is All In (a group spearheaded by Michael Bloomberg and representing allied private sector and nonprofit actors).
“These groups were created in response to the first Trump election and to pulling out of Paris and so forth, so there is now a multiyear history of working across the subnational governments at COP,” Kelley said. “We’re better and stronger than we were when we first did this, and we’re ready for this fight. It’s not insignificant, it’s a large chunk of the United States’ economy and population, and that matters.”
States do have significant jurisdictional power over energy and climate policy, ranging from making clean energy commitments, regulating utilities, building infrastructure and legislating to protect the environment, said Jackson Morris, a state policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. While Morris repeatedly cautioned that a Trump administration and federal policy could seriously curtail progress toward reducing emissions, he is also optimistic that “it’s not going to be a complete bloodbath.”
Attention is primarily on California. Gov. Gavin Newsom met with Democrats on Capitol Hill Wednesday and pledged immediate resistance to the Trump administration, urging the Biden administration to approve waivers for the state to push even more ambitious clean air and water regulations than the federal government’s.
Newsom is seeking one such waiver for the proposed Advanced Clean Fleets program, which would ban the sale of trucks that produce carbon emissions starting in 2036. Rules such as that one would have ripple effects throughout the U.S. because California’s economy is so large that most companies would have to change their practices.
It’s not just California. More than 20 states have 100% clean energy or zero-emissions goals. Maryland is one such state, and Paul Pinsky, the director of Maryland’s Energy Administration, told his staff the day after Trump won the election that nothing about that commitment would change.
“We’ve always known that would be a heavy lift. It will be a heavier lift now,” he said. “But we are moving ahead. We have 20-plus programs, and we’re going to continue to fund them. If there’s a takeaway, it’s that we are staying on our mission.”
Illinois’ clean energy jobs bill, the regional greenhouse gas initiative (a cap-and-trade program in the northeastern United States), Washington state’s “cap-and-invest” law, and Texas’ embrace of rapid wind and solar development are all local-level efforts that the incoming Trump administration can’t control, Morris said.
“This is when states tend to shine and really can double down on a lot of the action that they’ve already shown can be done regardless of who is in the White House,” he said.
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.