World Leaders Move Forward on Climate Change, Without U.S.
HAMBURG, Germany — World leaders struck a compromise on Saturday to move forward collectively on climate change
without the United States, declaring the Paris accord “irreversible”
while acknowledging President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the
agreement.
In a final communiqué at the conclusion of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany,
the nations took “note” of Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the pact and
“immediately cease” efforts to enact former President Barack Obama’s
pledge of curbing greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005
levels by 2025.
But
the other 19 members of the group broke explicitly with Mr. Trump in
their embrace of the international deal, signing off on a detailed
policy blueprint outlining how their countries could meet their goals in
the pact.
The
statement and the adoption of the G20 Climate and Energy Action Plan
for Growth ended three days of intense negotiations over how to
characterize the world’s response to Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of
the Paris climate agreement, and it came as this year’s meeting of
major world economies here laid bare the stark divide between the United
States and the rest.
“This
is a clear indication that the U.S. has isolated itself on climate
change once again, and is falling back while all other major economies
step up and compete in the clean energy marketplace created by the Paris
Agreement estimated to be worth over 20 trillion dollars,” said Andrew
Light, a senior climate change adviser at the State Department under Mr.
Obama.
Differences
between the United States and other nations on climate, trade and
migration made for a tricky summit meeting, which unfolded amid large
protests that sometimes turned violent, with several injured and
demonstrators setting fire to cars and looting in the streets of the
German city.
“Nothing’s easy,” Mr. Trump said of the gathering on Saturday as he complimented its host, Chancellor Angela Merkel
of Germany, who has toiled to bridge the gap between the United States
and other nations, for handling the challenge “so professionally.”
Hours
later, at the start of a high-stakes meeting with President Xi Jinping
of China, Mr. Trump vowed to confront the threat posed by North Korea
“one way or the other,” and said he appreciated the Chinese leader’s
efforts to respond to Pyongyang’s latest provocations.
“It
may take longer than I’d like, it may take longer that you’d like, but
there will be success in the end, one way or the other,” Mr. Trump said.
“Something has to be done about it.”
The
wording on climate change in the communiqué represented a much-needed
victory for Ms. Merkel, who played a major role in forging compromise
language after France raised objections.
In
most other respects, though, the summit meeting had to be a bitter
disappointment for the chancellor. When the meeting was first planned
for Hamburg, Ms. Merkel’s birthplace, she would have reasonably expected
Hillary Clinton, a likely political partner, to be the American
president, and she had expected the event to be a strong part of her
re-election campaign for a fourth term, with voting in September.
But
Mr. Trump tends to suck all the media air out of a room, even in
Germany, where he is deeply unpopular. This summit meeting was always
going to be primarily about Mr. Trump and his first meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
It
has also been about efforts by most of the rest of the world to cajole
the American president into softening his stances on global trade and
the climate, with Ms. Merkel in a secondary role, trying to come up with
compromises.
Her
standing has also suffered as Germans have been shocked by violent
protests by a small bloc of anarchists who saw the G-20 as a perfect
platform for their rejection of capitalism and order.
The
atmosphere around Hamburg has been that of an armed camp, hardly
welcoming, with 20,000 police officers asking for further reinforcements
to try to protect the various leaders here. So far, 213 police officers
have been injured, and 43 people have been arrested and 96 more
detained.
The
central city has been shut down. There is no taxi or bus service, trams
are often blocked by protesters and the subway is overcrowded. The area
around the conference center is ringed by riot police officers while
helicopters fly overhead and police sirens scream around motorcades.
Some
shops were looted and cars were burned, and the smell of burning tires
wafted over the conference center. Even Melania Trump could not leave
her guesthouse on Friday to join a spousal tour of the harbor.
Ms.
Merkel expressly backed the 100,000 or so peaceful demonstrators who
massed here in recent days and were marching on Saturday. She may have
been hoping to show authoritarian leaders like Mr. Putin and Turkey’s
president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, how to tolerate protests in a
democracy. If so, she and the security forces failed, losing control in
parts of the city, including the area where Ms. Merkel was born in 1954,
weeks before her parents moved east to Communist Germany.
So
this was always going to be risky for Ms. Merkel, and Mr. Trump’s
presence has only intensified what were widely anticipated to be
widespread and sometimes violent demonstrations against globalization,
even though Mr. Trump is a sharp critic of globalization.
Whether
the criticism of holding the summit meeting here will hurt Ms. Merkel
in the September elections is not clear. Her popular conservative
finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, appeared on national television on
Friday night strongly defending the decision. Only large cities like
Hamburg, a picturesque Hanseatic port, have sufficient infrastructure to
host the thousands of leaders, delegates, journalists and lobbyists who
gather at a G-20 meeting, he said.
And
some diplomatic work has been done at the summit meeting, even beyond
Mr. Trump’s meetings and his hyperbolic praise — regardless of his
private views — of every leader he meets, including Ms. Merkel. (“You
have been amazing and you have done a fantastic job.”)
Working
overnight, diplomats first agreed on a common text on trade, with a nod
toward Mr. Trump’s “America First” demands for restrictions on unfair
trade, but they had great difficulty on climate, with the Americans
demanding a reference to the use of fossil fuels.
President
Emmanuel Macron of France said that he would continue to press Mr.
Trump on climate and would convene a follow-up summit meeting in Paris
in December to move the Paris deal forward.
The
trade section in the statement the aides thrashed out read: “We will
keep markets open noting the importance of reciprocal and mutually
advantageous trade and investment frameworks and the principle of
nondiscrimination, and continue to fight protectionism including all unfair trade practices and recognize the role of legitimate trade defense instruments in this regard.”
The
climate section is more of a dodge. It takes note of the American
decision to withdraw from the Paris accord and says the other countries
nonetheless regard the deal as “irreversible.”
It
then nods toward fossil fuels, saying: “The United States of America
states it will endeavor to work closely with other countries to help
them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently.”
Mr.
Trump, who spent so much time with Mr. Putin on Friday that he delayed
meeting the British prime minister, Theresa May, until Saturday, tried
to fortify her delicate political fortunes. He said that they had had
“tremendous talks” on trade and were working on a “very powerful” trade
deal for a post-“Brexit” Britain that could be completed “very, very
quickly.”
It
is not clear what Mr. Trump meant, since the two sides cannot sign such
an agreement until after Britain leaves the European Union, in March
2019 at the soonest.
Mr. Trump also confirmed that he would eventually make a state visit to Britain, but the dates continue to be unclear.
Also
on Saturday, American officials said that Mr. Trump would order the
State Department to redirect $50 million from its foreign-aid budget to a
new international public-private partnership to aid midsize businesses
run by women, a group that his daughter Ivanka Trump helped create.
The
partnership aims to “help women in developing countries gain increased
access to the finance, markets and networks necessary to start and grow a
business,” a spokesman for Ms. Trump said.
The
contribution comes as the Trump administration considers a drastic
scaling-back of foreign aid as part of Mr. Trump’s “America First”
campaign pledge to target federal funding to create jobs at home.
His
budget, released in April but largely ignored on Capitol Hill, would
include deep cuts to the United States Agency for International
Development, a major conduit for foreign assistance.
