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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Coming up on the show today, we'll resume our Call Your Senator series, my questions and yours for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand today and at this moment in history, so much to talk about with her. Obviously, why did she do better in her reelection in New York State than Kamala Harris did in the state?

Also, Gillibrand is on the Armed Services Committee. We'll get her take on defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, who wants to remove women's right to apply to be in combat and wants to end equity and inclusion policies in the military. Also, Trump reaffirming yesterday, did you hear this, that he would use the military in a mass deportation program, using the military within the United States, and whether she thinks her Republican colleagues will give up the right to confirm or reject nominees at all. They're all in the Constitution, that President-elect Trump wants the Senate to forfeit voluntarily. That and more with Senator Gillibrand coming up.

Also, if you yourself have a place to live, you may be surprised by the eye-popping new number from the group Advocates for Children about the number of homeless students, unhoused students in the New York City Public School system. The number they estimate is 146,000 New York City kids. That's one in every eight not having a place to live. We will talk to Christine Quinn, who runs a major shelter program for families in New York City about that.

We'll have a call-in at the end of the show for your stories of maintaining functional relationships across political lines. This will be about your relationships with friends or relatives or neighbors or work colleagues with whom you severely disagree about Donald Trump or other politics. Last week, maybe you were listening, we heard from callers having a hard time maintaining some of those relationships, and we know there are many. Today, your advice for those listeners with your stories of functional relationships across the political divide.

How do you manage them? By agreeing to disagree respectfully? By agreeing to avoid the topic altogether? Do you work on yourself to humanize people you think are that wrong on one side or another? Are there other ways as well? Your functional relationships across the political divide calls coming up near the end of the show.

We begin here. Our Climate Story of the Week takes center stage today. We've been doing the Climate Story of the Week every Tuesday, last year and all this year. Right now is a pivotal and confusing moment for climate policy in the US and the world. 2024, if you haven't heard this yet, is on track to be the warmest year on earth since they started keeping that record, breaking the old record set last year. This year's UN climate summit, known as COP 29, is taking place right now in the nation of Azerbaijan, just after the election of Donald Trump, who said he plans to be a dictator on day one to issue an order to drill, drill, drill. Remember this statement from during the campaign when he was asked if he would be a dictator by Sean Hannity?

Donald Trump: I love this guy. He says, "You're not going to be a dictator, are you?" I said, "No, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator." [applause]

Brian Lehrer: Trump, during the campaign. He also just nominated a fracking executive to be energy secretary. What is the US's role at this conference? By the way, China's emissions are spiking right now, even though they are trying to beat the US at owning the green technology market. We'll talk about how both of those things can be true. Our guest is POLITICO climate reporter, Zack Colman, who joins us from the COP 29 climate conference in Azerbaijan. Zack, thanks for joining us from over there. Welcome to WNYC.

Zack Colman: Thanks. I really am on the floor here, so you might hear a little background chatter. It's kind of hard to get away from everything.

Brian Lehrer: Well, set the scene for us. What time is it over there? What kind of a space are you in? Who's there? Set the scene for our radio listeners.

Zack Colman: It's 7:00 PM over here. Honestly, pretty much every year, these COP conventions are thrown up overnight. We're in the bowels of what is Olympic Stadium in Baku. They've never hosted the Olympics here, but it's a makeshift staging ground, meeting rooms inside on the main pitch here in this stadium. It's bizarre, but we're also a little bit used to these little towns that get put up overnight for these conferences every year.

Brian Lehrer: Is Baku the capital? Remind me. Is it a nice city? Have you gotten around? It's right on the Caspian Sea, isn't it?

Zack Colman: It's right on the Caspian Sea. It's quite glitzy and glammy down in the old city center. They put on a show here for people. They've cleaned up the streets quite a bit. There's actually been some reporting about some of the maybe untoward ways in which they've presented the city for this international crowd. Here at the conference, it's all the same. We're all just navigating these hallways, trying to make sense of what's going on.

Brian Lehrer: How many people attend these COP conferences? COP stands for Conference of the Parties. That's to an older UN climate agreement, not the Paris Treaty from 2015, which I guess Trump is going to take us out of again, but an older one. Conference of the Parties, that's what COP stands for. This is the 29th one of those, COP 29. I've never been to one. I've read that these are massive with, like, thousands of people. Set the people scene for us.

Zack Colman: Yes, there's 50,000 people from in and out.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, my gosh, 50,000?

Zack Colman: 50,000. That's half of what came last year to Dubai. In fact, a lot of businesses and organizations decided to sit this COP out. I think a lot of that was driven by the uncertainty around the US election. Think about this. You would have had to had some plans to come to Baku not knowing exactly who was going to be running the United States.

In fact, a lot of world leaders have skipped as well amid that uncertainty, not only about the US but even within their own countries. A lot of fiscal constraints across Europe as well has caused leaders not to want to make an appearance here, because the big topic up for debate at this COP is about how much money the rich world is going to be giving to the developing world to adjust to the effects of climate change, and also to change their energy systems in a greener fashion.

Brian Lehrer: Who represents the United States in this moment of transition?

Zack Colman: Well, it is the Biden administration, and they have come here pretty much knowing exactly what people think of them right now. This is a lame-duck presidency. There is a widespread understanding that President-elect Trump will take the US out of the Paris Agreement once again when he becomes president. He can do that within a year's time.

When he was president last time, the Paris Agreement hadn't been-- Basically, there was a waiting period in which the US had to wait out, so it just didn't happen. He didn't withdraw the US until the day before the election in 2020, but now he can do it within one year of telling the UN that he wants to pull the US out. The Biden administration is coming here with a weaker hand. They don't have as much leverage. Frankly, there's a lot of countries who want to make a deal with them, but knowing that there's less certainty on the 2025 side of the calendar. They just don't have a ton of leverage anymore.

Brian Lehrer: What deal would what countries be looking to make with the United States?

Zack Colman: The United States really wants to get more countries to start contributing to climate finance that the developing world needs. The United States really wants China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, countries like that that have grown very wealthy since these talks began in the early '90s and don't actually consider themselves developed countries. There's some reasons for this.

China, while it is the world's second-largest economy and its largest emitter, it still does have millions of desperately poor people in the country. That is something that they remark in these negotiations all the time. However, the US says we just cannot exist on the contributions of rich developed countries with such a massive financial need to address climate change. We're talking about needs in the trillions of dollars every year for developing countries to get on side of global climate goals. The US is arguing for more people to contribute to that pot of money.

It's also arguing that less of that money should be from public coffers like bilateral spending than the developing countries want. The US hasn't put out a number, but they say it should be something achievable with an outer layer of a more ambitious target that is not necessarily something that they're committing to but are working towards.

Brian Lehrer: People are starting to call in. We'll go to the phones in a couple of minutes. Listeners who don't already know our phone number, any comments or questions for Zack Colman from POLITICO. He covers climate for POLITICO. At the moment, he's covering the COP 29 UN climate summit in Azerbaijan, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. This can be about anything taking place on the global stage at that conference. This can be about Trump's pick for energy secretary, who we're going to play a couple of clips of in a couple of minutes, or the transition from Biden to Trump in any climate-related respect. Questions or comments, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text.

Let's keep talking about the thing you just brought up because I know it's a big sticking point and a big topic at this conference this year, and it tends to be every year. I think our listeners, a lot of them, don't understand the underlying issue and why this is even a thing. This is figuring out wealthy countries' payments to developing nations to help with their green energy conversion. Remind everyone what's supposed to happen in that realm, and why payments between countries is even a thing.

Zack Colman: This is a long-standing issue at these negotiations. Rich countries developed and got rich based off of fossil fuels. Poorer countries are still on that development pathway. They have argued that they have to get some finance from the rich world if they are going to essentially skip fossil fuels, to not use them because we know that the planet is overheating.

This has long been the issue at these talks, that the developing world is asking for finance from the rich world to make sure that they are growing on a greener path than the rich countries who were doing it without the knowledge that what they were doing was causing climate change, or with less certainty about it.

That's the big sticking point here because the needs have grown as we have left this problem unaddressed. If we continue to leave it unaddressed, it will become more and more expensive to address it. Every year of delay, this problem gets costlier to solve. We come back here every year and this is the same issue.

However, at these talks, the main deliverable is setting a new goal for delivering that finance from the rich world to the developing world. There was a goal set in 2009 that rich countries were going to give $100 billion annually to developing nations to address their climate transitions. However, the rich countries missed that mark by two years. They actually fulfilled it in 2022.

They already had a really difficult time meeting a lower bar that was just picked out of thin air, but now we've got a lot more evidence, research, and science behind what the actual costs and needs are. That figure is going to have to go up. They're going to have to contribute more money towards annual climate finance for the developing world. That's what we're debating here at these talks, what is that number.

Brian Lehrer: What is that number? It's hard because these wealthy countries may be wealthy, but they don't want to give any more than they have to give right out of their tax coffers to the developing nations, especially if the ask is a big number, right?

Zack Colman: Exactly, and especially here when you have the Biden administration who has talked up the $11.4 billion that they've been able to deliver for climate finance, which was a quadrupling of Obama era levels. That said, we aren't going to be doing that with a Republican Congress and President Trump in the White House. They will cut a lot of that spending. A lot of the other countries here are aware of that. Any commitment that the US makes, it's not realistic that they will live up to it in the short term.

Brian Lehrer: China's role in this is so interesting. It does suggest a real tension that everybody is struggling to resolve because China, at the same time, is a developing country itself with a lot of poor people out of the billion-plus people, and yet they are also one of the main polluters, so they go in the category with the wealthy countries in this respect. In fact, there's new reporting on China. I guess this is from multiple sources, but I have a New York Times article from today here and this is really interesting. You tell me if they're talking about it at this climate conference in Azerbaijan.

New York Times headlined, China's Soaring Emissions are Upending Climate Politics. This is about how China has now surpassed Europe as the number two historical emitter of climate pollutants, greenhouse gases. It used to be the United States, number one, Europe combined number two, China was below that. China, even as it's trying to beat the US in green technology and make a lot of money for its companies that are developing green technology products, its own use of fossil fuels, its own emissions are spiking at the same time, and it's asking for money to go away from that. That is quite a mix of factors.

Zack Colman: It is totally a mix. It's interesting because at these talks, China is really being asked to step up. They're being asked to step up because of the obvious retrenchment from the US that is coming in January. Stepping up means are you going to accelerate your own climate transition. Right now, they have a goal for 2060 to be carbon neutral.

If you are also still emitting up until the end of this decade, when you are emitting as much as China is, you are putting the world further behind the eight ball. Leadership would look like actually accelerating the peak of their emissions and to start to decline it. They have not committed to doing that faster yet.

Brian Lehrer: The reason that they're using so much fossil fuels is that they are trying to develop their industrial economy. That's still the quickest route to doing that. Green energy can't keep up?

Zack Colman: There's a lot of complicated domestic politics at play for China as well. A lot of coal provinces have a lot of political clout wrapped up in that industry. I think for China, what it is is they have such an oversupply of green energy technology that they can go dump it in other markets and just completely corner all these sectors that the US and Europe are really trying to make inroads in. For them, it's an outside-inside strategy. They're using dirtier power to make the goods that then go box out the US, the EU, and other competitors from other markets.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Alexia in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Zack Colman from POLITICO covering the UN Climate Conference in Azerbaijan. Hello, Alexia.

Alexia: Hi. First-time, long-time. You touched a little bit on this, but I just wanted to highlight the controversy and hypocrisy of the conference being held in a petrostate. Azerbaijan has been given a platform on the world stage. They have gross human rights violations, starting with their own population. Human Rights Watch and others have highlighted the regime's arbitrary arrests of journalists, people who dissent in the government, torture, forced disappearances.

You started off the segment by talking about who's not there. Greta Thunberg, the climate rights activist, is noticeably missing because of this issue. I think most upsetting what we're not hearing about in the news is the ethnic cleansing that Azerbaijan committed just last September where 120,000 indigenous ethnic Armenians were cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh. They've lived there for thousands of years. They're indigenous to the land.

Azerbaijan is now showcasing its plans for green energy production in these so-called liberated territories, completely ignoring the fact that these areas have been depopulated by their indigenous inhabitants just last year. I think that this narrative is designed to obscure the reality from the international community.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for raising people's awareness about that, Alexia. Zack, are you aware of all that? Why is the conference in Azerbaijan? Does it just rotate around the world, or did they put into the UN for it to whitewash their image in exactly the respects that Alexei is talking about? Why is it in Azerbaijan?

Zack Colman: The human rights abuses have been a topic of conversation here. It's something that all the reporters here are aware about. There's certainly been people who have tried to pursue stories on that while here. Why it's in Azerbaijan is actually an interesting story in and of itself. The COP, every year, does rotate. It rotates between regional blocks, but there was disagreement over the European hosts because the EU and Russia were at loggerheads over the war in Ukraine. Russia blocked every single Ukraine-supportive EU member from hosting the COP.

These decisions have to be made by unanimous consent. Russia blocked every single EU member. That was left up to then Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Belarus wasn't going to get supported by the rest of the EU, viewed as a Russian proxy. That left it up to Armenia and Azerbaijan. There was a chance that it was going to remain in Dubai, which hosted last year, if there could not be an agreement on who would host, but then there was a last-second deal brokered between Armenia and Azerbaijan that allowed Azerbaijan to host.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, last year, we were talking about the fact that the climate conference was held in an oil state in Dubai, and what the head of state of Dubai was saying that seemed to be playing both sides of the issue last year. There are these controversies that go from year to year. Alexia, again, thanks for making more of our listeners aware of the fact that those things are factors in the world and at this conference.

On the comparison between China and the United States in terms of emissions, and Western Europe, listener writes in a text message, "China has four times the US population. Per person, the US Pollutes twice as much." Is that factually true as far as you know?

Zack Colman: Well, it's certainly true that on a per capita basis, the US Pollutes more than China. There's no doubt about that. I think that it's something that the US has been trying to address through its policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, which of course are in some jeopardy given President-elect Trump's vow to unwind a lot of those climate policies.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener asks, with respect to the payments that the wealthy countries make to developing countries to help their green energy conversions or development. Listener asks, "What do the yearly trillions get spent on?" That's a good question. If we're giving a lot of money to developing countries that don't have much of a fossil fuel economy, what do they spend the money on to keep them green?

Zack Colman: Well, let's be real here. We're not at trillions of payments to other countries yet. That's what we're discussing here. I don't think there's really a belief that we're going to get to a public dollar commitment of a trillion dollars going from government to government.

Brian Lehrer: The listener put it that way, trillions. Let's say billions.

Zack Colman: The billions would end up going towards green energy projects. That could be bringing in the private sector. We could be talking about governments de-risking investments, basically taking the first loss in a loan that goes bad to try to bring in the private sector into areas that usually have some political risk or some foreign currency risk that make their projects less likely to pan out. That could be reforming the grid. That could be paying for large infrastructure projects.

Also, it can be for climate adaptation, things that help countries adapt to the effects of climate change, things like investing in wetlands, in sustainable agriculture. These are things that will be necessary as the climate heats up and we just have to live with it.

Brian Lehrer: It's our Climate Story of the Week today with Zack Colman, who covers climate for POLITICO, from the so-called COP 29 UN Climate Conference in Azerbaijan with thousands of people in just about every country on earth attending. We'll continue. We'll talk about Trump's nominee for energy secretary, Chris Wright, and how that might affect US climate policy. We'll take more of your phone calls, and we'll continue to figure out what might come out of this conference. Will it be anything concrete? Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our Climate Story of the Week with Zack Colman who covers climate for POLITICO, joining us live in a remarkably good phone line from Baku, Azerbaijan, where this year's COP conference is taking place, Conference of the Parties, to a UN climate agreement, COP 29, as they call it. Again, I'll remind people that one of your recent articles is called Trump's Power Plays Overshadow Global Climate Summit.

Donald Trump isn't at COP 29, but his rapid-fire personnel moves to dismantle Joe Biden's climate legacy are being felt there. Certainly, one of those climate moves is the nomination the other day of Chris Wright, who runs one of the biggest fracking companies in the United States, to be energy secretary. Chris Wright has said this.

Chris Wright: There is no climate crisis, and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take up both parts of that. "There is no climate crisis." Raise your eyebrows, listeners, I know for a lot of you, but also, "we are not in the midst of an energy transition." Do you know what he meant by that? I see you have a Chris Wright article. What does that mean?

Zack Colman: It means that we have growing energy demand in this country, not only in the US, but in the world. There is still some use for fossil fuels in the immediate term. That is what he is saying in this statement. We do have a [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Well, Biden says that. Everybody says that, there is some use for fossil fuels in the immediate term or the intermediate term. That doesn't mean there isn't a transition taking place, but he said there isn't.

Zack Colman: That is where I honestly am unsure of what he means, unless you connect the two, which is if you don't actually think climate change is a problem, then you don't have a need for a transition. I think that's where the parties, they are getting to a point where I think they do agree that climate change is something that needs to be addressed, but the Trump administration is a different brand.

It'll be interesting to see how the administration and Republicans in Congress message on this issue, because Republicans in Congress, a lot of them, they represent swing districts and they know that they have to talk about this in a different way. A lot of them have also committed to upholding parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. It will be interesting to see the clash between the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress in the next couple of years.

Brian Lehrer: He claims there's no climate crisis. He even went this far in a recent statement.

Chris Wright: We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, or floods, despite endless fear-mongering of the media, politicians, and activists.

Brian Lehrer: I will say when they played that clip on NPR the other day, they did immediately fact-check it and said, yes, scientists have a consensus that there is a climate crisis and there has been an intensity, an increase in the intense and extreme weather events. Are those clips circulating at the COP 29 conference, and are people reacting?

Zack Colman: I wouldn't say that people are reacting to Chris Wright at the climate conference, but those clips certainly were circulating in DC before he was nominated and we were getting rumors that he was going to be nominated. It's interesting that in that clip he mentions activists and the media, but he doesn't say scientists. Scientists are very clear on what this is. We take our cues from the scientists who study this and have been very unequivocal in saying what's happening. Everything that Chris Wright said in that statement is incorrect.

Brian Lehrer: We've talked to scientists on this show, just to give an example, after some of the intense hurricanes just this year, explaining that the ocean is getting warmer year by year, warmer and warmer because of the gradually increasing temperature of the Earth and the seas. The warmer waters create, because of a scientific process we had them explain, stronger hurricanes. That's why you can get a hurricane that goes all the way inland to the western edge of North Carolina, not just the coast. Scientists are making this very clear, and yet there's Chris Wright who's going to be our Energy Secretary. What do you think the implications are for policy?

Zack Colman: Well, the good thing is the Energy Department is mostly a research organization. To the extent that they want to end up funding more research into whatever technologies that he thinks is necessary to power the country and power the world, have at it, but he's not in charge of climate science. That would be several other departments. I think what's interesting is--

Brian Lehrer: One of the things in Project 2025 is to scale down the amount of climate research that even gets done. This is part of Trump's plan to thin out the so-called deep state, fire a lot of professionals who are nonpartisan professionals in various agencies. I think this includes climate research per se.

Zack Colman: Yes. Again, Project 2025, the Trump campaign, has long said does not represent their views. In fact, it seems like the America First Policy Institute is more influential with this incoming administration. That said, I think that we can absolutely believe that climate science and climate research are going to take a hit. It did it the first time. The Trump administration zeroed out NASA Earth Observation research spending. and it published the National Climate Assessment, which is a sweeping federal review of climate science published every five years. They published it on Black Friday in 2018. They tried to bury it.

This is not an administration that will be friendly to climate research. However, the Energy Department, to the extent that it plays a role here, it will be stewarding the Inflation Reduction Act credits, it will be steering research budgets towards certain energy technology. Chris Wright at least seems to respect energy and be of that world. He doesn't seem as if he would necessarily dismantle the entire purpose of the Energy Department, where you do have some picks in other cabinet spots that seem uniquely unqualified for the positions they've been nominated for.

Brian Lehrer: One more call before you got to go. Mook in State College, Pennsylvania. You're on WNYC. Hi, Mook.

Mook: Hi, Brian. Hi, Zack. I just wanted to go back to the climate finance discussion and ask whether there's any notion of self-interest in this. For example, I'm just trying to tie this to the immigration crisis that we're experiencing in this country. A lot of the reasons why people leave Central America and other places is because of the climate crisis and because of environmental disasters.

If we're able to transfer money to those countries to help them adapt to the climate crisis, that may lead to fewer immigration flows. I was wondering whether or not that notion is maybe more politically feasible in the new administration, or how that is playing out in this current agenda. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Interesting question, Zack.

Zack Colman: Yes, it's fascinating. It's actually something that we did cover. My colleagues here did that, did a story on how the far right in Europe is doing climate politics MAGA-style. Italy has actually contributed a lot of climate finance to other nations because of a eco-fascism where they want to stop the flow of migrants into Italy, so they are giving it to other places. In fact, I talked to Sierra Leone's environmental minister today who said if Europe thinks they have a problem now with migration, wait until you see more climate migration. He said you can't erect walls fast enough if we don't solve this issue.

I don't see that playing with Donald Trump. There is a real antipathy towards climate science and spending in general. There's a huge fiscal issue here with the Republican Party and they don't want to spend money on things that they don't care about or like. Climate science and helping other countries adapt to climate change is not one of those things.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, just build the wall and let everybody take care of their other problems. All right, we leave it there with Jack Coleman who covers climate for POLITICO. He's at the COP 29 UN Climate Summit in Azerbaijan. His recent articles include Trump's Power Plays Overshadow Global Climate Summit, Trump Taps Oil Executive Chris Wright as Energy Secretary, and Soaring Temperatures to Set New Global Heat Record Surpassing Last Year's Mark.

That's our Climate Story of the Week. Zack, thank you for taking time from your work over there. I'm sure you're slammed covering in Azerbaijan, and maybe even jet-lagged. Thanks for giving us this time today.

Zack Colman: All the above, and thanks.

 

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