16 hours Ago By Nick O'Malley
One of the world’s leading climate diplomats has told a conference in Sydney that Donald Trump’s resistance to climate action would not stop the global transition to a clean economy, rather it would delay the United States’ progress, and potentially cost lives around the world. Former US climate envoy Jonathan Pershing believes the renewable transition will survive the Trump administration. Credit: Louie Douvis Jonathan Pershing, the former US climate envoy and one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, said the world was locked in on the transition, with China, India and Europe signalling their intention to continue deploying green technology and renewables.
In a conversation launching the Climate Action Week Conference in Sydney on Monday, Pershing said it was notable that after Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, not even ideological fellow travellers such as Argentina’s firebrand leader Javier Milei followed suit, despite signalling that he would. This, said Pershing, was due to Milei’s realisation that his nation’s strong economic ties with Europe would suffer if he left the agreement. Pershing said that in his recent conversations with senior government officials around the world he had detected no change in the appetite for investment in green energy and technology despite the Trump administration’s position on climate.
He conceded the Trump administration would slow efforts by the US to reduce its emissions, which make up about 11 per cent of the world’s total. “It will not decline as fast as it should,” said Pershing. “It will decline more slowly as a consequence of the set of actions that Donald Trump is taking.
” The US was no longer the central part of the climate problem, he said, but would not be the central part of the solution, a role it had adopted under the Biden administration. According to Pershing, Australia has a unique position in the world on climate policy, and is unique in the central role climate has played in its own politics. In most countries, he said, climate and energy policy was changed over the years by government, but in Australia the debate over climate and energy had proved so intense that it had in effect changed governments.
As a result, Australia’s contribution the United Nations negotiations over the years had proved to be erratic depending on which government was in power. Speaking with this masthead after his talk, Pershing said he believed this era might be over, noting that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had not suggested he would leave the Paris Agreement. On stage, Pershing said Australia was in a unique global position in dealing with the US on climate because it was a key defence partner of the US and trade partner of China.
In addition, Australia was not only rich in the space for wind and solar development, but had the capacity to produce green iron and steel, as well as the rare earth minerals that the world – and the US – wanted for future industries, he said. “When Australia is in, it brings a rather extraordinary capacity. It has depth in science,” he said.
“It actually has relationships diplomatically that are quite extensive, in particular in the Pacific. It has connections back to players that are often at odds with each other. And I think about the relationship, which is difficult, but put Australia in the middle between the US and China, this is a unique space that Australia plays.
” Asked if he still believed the world might achieve the Paris Agreement goals to keep warming below 2 degrees and as close to possible to 1.5 degrees, Pershing said there were some positive signs, noting it was cheaper to build renewable energy infrastructure today in 80 per cent of the world than it was to build new fossil fuel burning power stations. He said that as the Trump administration flexed its muscle, companies, investors and even countries were weighing up the competing risk of taking bold climate action and failing to do so.
“To me, it’s this timing problem,” said Pershing. “We are going to get to low carbon emissions. We are going to do it.
[The question is] if we don’t do it until 2100, when we are going to bake and have floods and we all die first, or we move it a little forward. “Like I said, [transition by] 2030 might be more expensive in the operational side, but it will save us untold damages and costs on the climate side.”.
