Trump Team Plans ‘Sideshow on Coal’ at UN Climate Talks

Policy

No one really expects the
coal-friendly Trump administration to take significant action on climate change, but this is just trolling.

A new
exclusive from Reuters claims that the president’s team will “set up a side-event promoting fossil fuels” at the global climate summit this December, aka COP 24, in Katowice, Poland.


Citing three sources, the American officials will “highlight the benefits of technologies that more efficiently burn fuels including
coal,” Reuters reported.

This sounds similar to what the U.S. delegation did last year at the COP 23 climate talks in Bonn, Germany. The so-called “clean fossil fuels” event was
widely criticized for promoting “false” global warming solutions such as nuclear power, “clean coal” and carbon capture and storage or CCS. Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, compared it to “promoting tobacco at a cancer summit.”

The Katowice panel, scheduled possibly for Dec. 10., will include proponents of coal, natural gas and likely nuclear power, a source involved with planning the event told Reuters. There are currently no plans to include a representative from the renewable energy industry, the source added.

“Quite frankly, the U.S. is the only party to the convention that appears to be willing to push a rational discussion on the role of cleaner, more efficient fossil (fuels) and the role of civilian nuclear energy,” the source told the news service.

The panel will be led by Wells Griffith, Trump’s international energy and climate adviser, and include a U.S. Energy Department representative, according to Reuters.

The White House and the State Department, which represents the United States at the COP talks, did not respond to Reuters’ request for a comment.

COP 24 will be dedicated to the implementation of the Paris agreement, which has been ratified by a vast majority of the world’s governments.

The all-important Katowice summit will be held just months after a dire climate report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that warned that the world has a very narrow 12-year window to drastically reduce consumption of fossil fuels and ramp up renewable energy sources such as wind and solar to avoid catastrophic global warming.

Trump, however, infamously intends to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord and continues to push polluting, planet-warming fossil fuels. Just last month, the president said the climate will “change back again.”

Under the terms of the Paris agreement, the earliest the U.S. can officially exit the pact is the day after the 2020 election.

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