WASHINGTON — The U.S. will seek to use a United Nations fund designed to aid nations hard hit by climate change to promote the construction of coal-fired power plants around the world.
The U.S. already donated $1 billion to the so-called Green Climate Fund, and it can now use its seat on that board to advance American-energy interests globally, a White House official said.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe climate negotiations at the just-concluded summit of Group of 20 leaders in Germany. A U.S. commitment to “work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently” was highlighted in a statement issued by the group last week.
Trump previously announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord in which nearly 200 nations agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At the same time, Trump insisted he would be open to a new deal that protects American interests. He also is keeping the U.S. in a 15-year-old United Nations convention on climate change that underpins the 2015 Paris pact.
Financial support for the Green Climate Fund was seen as a critical tool to win broad support for the global carbon-cutting pact. Former President Barack Obama pledged $3 billion for the initiative, though he only provided a third of that before leaving the White House.
Trump has made clear the U.S. won’t be sending any more checks to the fund as long as he is president, but the U.S. gets to keep a seat on the managing board for a year or more based on that previous $1 billion contribution. The board, which includes a U.S. official with veto power, has so far approved more than three dozen projects — including dams in Pakistan and barriers around an island in the South Pacific.
Board members previously refused to impose an explicit ban on funding projects that use fossil fuels, which scientists say are responsible for climate change. Coal is the fuel that releases the most carbon dioxide when burned to produce electricity.
The U.S. wants to encourage developing countries to build high-efficiency plants that produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than earlier facilities and construct “clean coal” plants that employ carbon-capture technology to strip out even more, the White House official said.
The U.S. will also use its position as a board member administering the fund to lobby for spending money on natural gas infrastructure abroad, the official said. The fund is supposed to help developing countries and those on the front lines of climate change — those dealing with intense droughts, raging storms and other consequences of the phenomenon.
The advocacy is in line with President Donald Trump’s stated goal of American “energy dominance,” with U.S. coal, oil and gas helping to supply the world’s power needs. “We will export American energy all over the world, all around the globe,” Trump said at an Energy Department speech last month.
Discussions over a bottle of red wine during the Hamburg meeting helped produce consensus language in the summit’s final communique, after France raised objections, the White House official said. French officials wanted to remove the entire fossil fuel sentence. The U.S. in turn argued it couldn’t weaken that sentence unless another was strengthened.
After that meeting, reports cast the communique as evidence of a 19-1 split among world leaders, with the U.S. and Trump isolated on the world stage. But that division was only valid for specific language on the Paris agreement and doesn’t represent consensus on the overall climate language in the document, the White House official said.
The statement shows the sincerity of U.S. engagement and the administration’s intent to work with partners and allies in trying to find a way forward on an approach to climate change, the official said.
Despite Trump’s stated willingness to rewrite the Paris climate deal or another agreement addressing the problem, the U.S. isn’t actively asking other countries to negotiate or offering up alternative language. The administration also needs to figure out potential pathways to make the Paris agreement acceptable, the official said.
Trump already announced his plan to shift U.S. policy to make it easier for the World Bank and other multilateral development banks to finance coal plants in developing nations. Under Obama, restrictions were put in place to block that financing.
