346: What does Trump’s UNFCCC exit mean for climate diplomacy?
We examine the United States’ decision to withdraw from international bodies including the UNFCCC - could the absence of the US voice, paradoxically, unlock progress elsewhere?
About this episode
What happens when the world’s most powerful country walks away from the system it helped to build?
This week, we examine the United States’ decision to withdraw not only from the Paris Agreement, but from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change itself - alongside dozens of other international bodies. Headlines declared the end of multilateral climate cooperation. But is that really what this moment represents?
Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson unpack what has actually been announced - and what it does (and doesn’t) change in practice.
They are joined by Sue Biniaz, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change and one of the quiet architects of decades of climate diplomacy. Sue brings rare insight into whether a US president can legally withdraw from a Senate-ratified treaty, the surprising pathways by which a future administration could rejoin, and what influence the US may still wield as a non-party.
Could the absence of the US voice, paradoxically, unlock progress elsewhere? And in a fractured world, where does collective climate leadership now come from?
Learn more:
🎥 Watch our hosts’ immediate response to the US UNFCCC withdrawal announcement, recorded the day after news broke
📰 Read the New York Times profile of Sue Biniaz by Lisa Friedman: Meet the Closer Who Finds the Right Words When Climate Talks Hit a Wall
📄 Dive into the Just Security article penned by Sue Biniaz and Jean Galbraith on treaty withdrawal and re-entry
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
Join the conversation:
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Or get in touch with us via this form.
Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Assistant Producer: Caillin McDaid
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
Full Transcript
Transcript generated by AI. While we aim for accuracy, errors may still occur. Please refer to the episode’s audio for the definitive version
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Hello, and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.
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Christiana Figueres: I'm Christiana Figueres.
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Paul Dickinson: And I'm Paul Dickinson.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: This week, we discuss the United States withdrawal from the UNFCCC and many other UN bodies, and we speak to legendary United States Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, Sue Biniaz. Thanks for being here. So last week, we put out a special edition when the United States announces withdrawal from all of these different UN bodies, and we put it out on YouTube. So hopefully, some of you will have seen that, but we're going to cover that off in a bit more detail today. The US last week announced it is withdrawing from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UN Climate Change body, under which the Paris Agreement was negotiated, and of which Christiana used to be the Executive Secretary and many other climate related international bodies. The headlines came out and said this was the end of multilateral climate cooperation. We're going to explore whether that's really true. Let's just kick off with a quick reaction from the two of you. I know we saw it on YouTube and your initial reaction, Christiana, was what the hell? Is that still how you feel? Or a week later, do you feel a bit more reflective about it?
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Christiana Figueres: You know, I just say what the hell because it makes no sense to me. But I also say, what the hell? Let's not drown in a glass of water. This is not the end of multilateralism. This is not the end of action on climate change. So let's just put it back in its box where it belongs and continue to stay focused.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Very good. Paul?
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Paul Dickinson: Yeah. I mean, I'm struck by a comment of John Podesta said, you know, of all the wreckage Donald Trump is leaving in his wake, this one could be amongst the most consequential and damaging, particularly for future generations. You know, it is a huge thing, climate change sort of biggest national and global security issue for the world. And the US is something like this and it's totally bizarre. But I'm fascinated by how major organizations are going to respond to this. You know, you have many hundreds of vast global corporations headquartered in the US. It's the home of most of the biggest companies in the world. How are they going to react to this? You know, they've got this kind of dysfunctional, crazy town government. People trust brands and companies. They expect them to behave in a reasonable way. So I think they're really, really torn. But I mean, I woke up this morning to see the chair of the Fed saying, I'm suffering a political prosecution, gold is rising, the dollar is falling. It's a story of sort of the US economic system kind of unraveling. And this may be a footnote to that, but that's the kind of meta-context. I just think every country in the world must think the US is insane.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So let's get into exactly what happened. The US, as we said, has pulled out of 66 bodies.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, 67, because the next day they added the Green Climate Fund.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Green Climate Fund. You're totally right. The Green Climate Fund, the UN Entity for Gender Equality, UN Population Fund, UN Oceans. The list goes on and on. IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. The withdrawal push is, of course, so much else in the Trump administration, being driven by presidential action. It all happens via presidential memorandum. The direct agencies to take immediate steps to withdraw funds and withdraw participation as soon as possible. There's an interesting question around permanence, and we'll get into some of this when we talk to Sue Biniaz a bit later. The UNFCCC is a Senate ratified treaty, and there was a lot of back and forth in the media about what it would necessarily take. Can the US withdrawal just through presidential memorandum? Could they get back in through presidential memorandum? So there's a lot of questions about that. And it's also worth pointing out that Article 25 of the UNFCCC states that withdrawal takes effect one year after written notification, so there is a notice period. Now, what this doesn't mean is that the Paris Agreement has collapsed. It doesn't mean that other countries' obligations vanish, and it doesn't mean that US states, cities, and corporations will now stop taking action on climate change. All of those things remain true. It is, of course, consequential, and we've seen quite an interesting diplomatic reaction from other countries. Christiana, do you want to take us through what other countries have been saying about this?
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, I mean, there's obviously huge disappointment on the part of everyone who is climate conscious and climate responsible, ranging from the EU, of course, to smaller countries. You know, and from a political point of view, it does make a difference that the United States leadership is now absent. But as we will discuss with Sue Biniaz, the absence of negative influence on negotiations could also be an upside, question mark?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, that's an interesting question and a way to phrase it. I think we should ask that of Sue. So I'm going to now bring in our special guest this week. Sue Biniaz was the Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, certainly at the time of the negotiation of Paris and years afterwards. But giving her her official job title as part of the United States delegation and as part of the State Department is only giving you a small window into the consequential role that this woman has played on the international climate stage for decades. Sue was famously described in the US media as America's closer. She has been there since the Kyoto Protocol. She's been there all the way through. She's been fighting for effective participation from the United States. She's played an incredibly important brokering role right at the heart of the negotiations.
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Paul Dickinson: Overseeing the treaty department?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Exactly. Of course, now has left the administration. But Christiana, you know her well. You negotiated Paris very much opposite her, together with Brian Deese and John Kerry and Todd Stern.
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Christiana Figueres: I wouldn't say opposite her, but with her.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Oh no, of course, you weren't negotiating.
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Christiana Figueres: But she is legendary for her deep knowledge of legal text, legal consequences. She definitely during my entire several decade experience, which goes even before I joined the Secretariat, is that she really held the red ink pen on most texts, and one thing that I would really love to credit her with is her capacity to think creatively about how to change sometimes just a word, sometimes a phrase, sometimes a different punctuation in one sentence in order to make it acceptable to those for whom it was not acceptable before her change. And she just did it always with such professionalism and such grace, but also such firmness. I think that for me brings Sue Biniaz together. It was her grace and her deep knowledge and firm argumentation of why something yes and why something no. Just absolutely brilliant. It was, I would say, the secret weapon of the United States on their delegation for decades.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So let's go to the interview now and we will put in the show notes a remarkable profile that was done of Sue a few years ago by our friend Lisa Friedman in the New York Times. Meet the closer who finds the right words when climate talks hit a wall. It is a remarkable tribute to her decades of experience, but that is a very nice introduction. Christiana, let's hear the conversation.
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Christiana Figueres: Okay, Sue, thank you so much for joining us here on Outrage and Optimism and taking the time to join us. We wanted to have a quick conversation with you about the legalities of what we're seeing coming out of Washington. I am absolutely sure that I'm not qualified to ask you these questions. So please bear with me. They're going to come out of total ignorance. And that's why we have you on. So Sue, let's start with the withdrawal from the UNFCCC among 66 other organizations and then the day after from the Green Climate Fund. But the withdrawal from the convention is arguably, from a legal perspective, somewhat more consequential than the other withdrawals. So a two-part question there. First, can a president of the United States simply on his own withdraw the United States government from a convention that has been ratified by the US Senate? And what happens in a future administration who might want to rejoin? What are the entry points there?
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Sue Biniaz Well, thanks for having me, Christiana. Great to see you. And you asked those questions very well. So on the issue of withdrawal, first, there's a question of international law, and then there's a question of domestic law. You've asked the domestic law question, but let me start with the international law question because it's relevant to the domestic law question, right? So as a matter of international law, you look at the framework convention, you look at the article on withdrawal, which back in the day, I don't think we ever thought we would have to worry about when we were drafting it 30-something years ago.
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Christiana Figueres: 1992.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Yeah, to be precise. So it says that if you've been a party for at least three years, you can withdraw from the convention and then the withdrawal takes effect one year after you submit your kind of notice of withdrawal. So from an international law perspective, it's very clear that the United States or any other party that has been in for three years can withdraw. So, you know, park that fact. I don't think they have submitted the notice yet, as of maybe yesterday, last time I checked. But whenever that happens, you can sort of count forward a year. Okay, then you get to the issue of US law. The short answer is yes, but I'll go into a couple of the details. The mainstream legal view is that the president may, as a matter of constitutional law, withdraw from a treaty, even one that the Senate has given advice and consent to, provided that withdrawal is lawful under international law, which is why I raised the international law point first. Okay, so we have that in this case. And that there's nothing in the resolution of advice and consent, or in any other law that puts some kind of limitations on withdrawal. So, for example, the Senate, when giving advice and consent to joining the convention, you know, theoretically could have put in some kind of limitation, but that does not exist in this case. So, you know, I would say the mainstream legal view is yes, the president can withdraw. And I think it's important to remember that the Senate doesn't ratify. The Senate gives advice and consent. It's the president who ratifies. A Senate could give advice and consent to a treaty, and the president could choose not to join. It is a unilateral decision, in a sense, to join a treaty. And the mirror image of that is that, basically, unilateral decision to kind of unjoin, if you want to think about it that way.
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Christiana Figueres: But sorry, a president just theoretically, a president couldn't ratify without the advice and consent of a Senate.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Exactly. So when I say unilateral, what I really mean is the last step. So it's not the Senate that joins. If the Senate joined international agreements, there'd be a stronger case that, well, a president couldn't just undo that. But having said all of that, that it's the mainstream legal view and that it would apply in this case, the Supreme Court has never actually addressed this question. And that's because in the case that's closest to this kind of case, which involved a treaty involving Taiwan, it was called the Goldwater case, Goldwater v. Carter. The Supreme Court decided not to take up the merits of the case, basically deciding that this was what we call a political question. And the Supreme Court doesn't take up cases where it is of the view that the question is really one between the two other branches of government. So it's really a matter for Congress to battle it out with the executive branch and the judiciary is not going to get involved. I can't say it's legal as a matter of Supreme Court law, right? All I can say is it's basically the mainstream view and it has been the practice since that case. So that's all we can say. I couldn't rule out that someday it would make it to the Supreme Court and they would take a different view on this issue. I think it's pretty unlikely that this Supreme Court, even if someone were to raise this case, would say that the president could not withdraw from the framework convention. So that's kind of where we are in terms of the withdrawal issue. Now, your second question is about, okay, rejoining. So I watched your podcast from a few days ago and I saw one of you saying, well, it's unfortunate because you would need two-thirds of the Senate to rejoin. I don't think that's necessarily true, though.
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Christiana Figueres: Okay. I stand corrected because that was me that said it.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Yeah. No, no, no. And I would say that most people think that. The overwhelming majority of people would just think naturally, well, the Senate gave advice and consent. The first time, of course, you'd have to go through the same procedure. I have been saying there are multiple pathways to rejoining, should a future administration want to rejoin the convention, which of course you would need to do if you wanted to rejoin the Paris Agreement. So I think in some cases people are less concerned and as you made clear, the convention is actually kind of less significant at this point than the Paris Agreement, but I think most people who care about rejoining the convention see it as, you know, it's the condition to rejoin Paris, which is the more important thing. Some of the options are hard to imagine politically, and one of those is getting two-thirds of the Senate to prove the convention again. If you think about where we were in 1992 when we sent up the treaty to the Senate, you know, even though it was called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Senate basically approved it unanimously by voice vote. That's kind of unimaginable these days. So I agree with those who think getting a two-thirds majority again is pretty unlikely. You could also have both houses of Congress authorize the president to rejoin. That would require fewer votes in the Senate. But it would, again, depend on the makeup of the House and Senate whether you could get that done. But the third option is something that I kind of put forward as a possibility at a treaty withdrawal conference in 2017. And someone who's much more scholarly than I am, Jean Galbraith, she developed the idea in a very long law review article. And we just wrote a piece for Just Security, which should come out later this week, you know, about this idea. So here's what we were thinking. And we think that this is a viable option.
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Christiana Figueres: I'm waiting with bated breath, Sue.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): So our view is that the Senate resolution of advice and consent from 1992 is still good, is still valid, that there's nothing that extinguished that authority and that a future president could use it to rejoin. Now is that true of every single resolution of advice and consent for any treaty? Not necessarily, because, you know, if a treaty had changed dramatically or if there were some kind of conditions in the resolution of advice and consent, that might not be the case. But in the case of the Framework Convention, those things are not present. The reason I had this thought, and Jean elaborated this in like 100 pages, mine was like a page, so I give her 99% of the credit for pursuing this idea. The reason I had the thought was I was paying attention several years ago to the fact that the United States had joined, unjoined, and rejoined two international organizations, the International Labor Organization and UNESCO. So I was thinking, hmm, I wonder on what basis the US sort of originally joined, unjoined, and rejoined. The answer was that there was statutes, right? So there were actual kind of laws passed by both houses of Congress authorizing the president to join, and nobody batted an eye when, like, the third president rejoined these organizations. Nobody said, well, wait a minute, how can you rejoin when you've already unjoined? Well, the answer was, because there's a law that continues and continues to authorize. So I thought, I wonder if there's any kind of legal difference between a law and a Senate resolution of advice and consent. Like, why should a Senate resolution be extinguished just because one president used it to join a treaty and another president unjoined the treaty? Why shouldn't it continue to exist just like a law? So I was really more posing a question than giving a definitive constitutional answer. But Jean has developed it, and she and I have both run around talking to other treaty scholars. And I think it's turning into kind of a mainstream view.
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Christiana Figueres: Interesting. Of course, if the Senate should now take a vote and choose to withdraw its approval, then that avenue would be closed. Is that correct?
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Well, I'm not exactly sure what it would take to undo that authorization, and whether that would have to be done by two-thirds because it was the original was done by two-thirds. So I haven't pursued that question, but it's a good question.
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Christiana Figueres: OK. Under the scenario that a future administration may choose to not rejoin or may not be able to rejoin, whichever way, the United States, I take it, could still participate in the Climate Convention, just like it participates as a non-party in the Convention on Biological Diversity. The US is not a party to that. It's not a party, actually, to quite a few international treaties, environmental and human rights treaties. What could the US do in a scenario in the future in which they might want to participate, but they wouldn't be a party to either the Convention or the Paris Agreement? What options do they have?
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Well, you're right. We are a non-party to lots of agreements. I'm painfully aware of that, having worked on many of those agreements and tried to get them over the finish line. Yeah, well, we could be an observer, for sure. We would have a right to be an observer and could participate in that way. I agree with you on something you said the other day. The amount of influence the United States could have in that scenario, I think depends very much on the attitude of the other parties to kind of entertain whatever the United States comes up with. I think it could depend to a certain extent on whether the United States chooses not to rejoin or cannot rejoin. I think if I were another country anyway, but who knows what another country would actually think. But hypothetically, I guess I would have more tolerance for the US participation or strong participation if there were some legal reason or whatever, why they couldn't rejoin as if they just decided, well, we don't feel like rejoining. Because then you might be saying, well, you're getting all the benefits of having influence, but without any of the sort of responsibilities of being a party or having obligations to report or whatever. We know that the climate action world now goes way beyond the COP or CMA process like it has to. The job is just way too big for those agreements to do it alone. So the US could of course also participate in all kinds of other whatever organizations, initiatives, bilaterals, multilaterals, plurilaterals.
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Christiana Figueres: In a future administration, not over the next three years, yeah.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): No, no, I was focusing more on your question about, if a future sort of climate-friendly administration for some reason couldn't rejoin the convention of the Paris Agreement, they could still take the underlying premises of the convention and the Paris Agreement and run with them in a million different ways.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Thank you so much for this. I would love to ask you a simple question, but one that I'm sure our listeners would love to hear you explain. The US has obviously now pulled out not only of the Paris Agreement, but also of the UNFCCC. Given that the agreement is in place, the decarbonization process is happening, does it really matter? And if so, in what ways specifically?
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Well, again, I keep saying that I agree with you guys, so that might get tiresome, but I agree with the point that I think that Christiana made on your last podcast, which was...
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Christiana Figueres: Sue, thank you for giving me some wrong points when I was dead wrong on some things.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): I think pulling out of Paris was way more significant than pulling out of the Convention, because let's face it, most of the action is under the Paris Agreement. The kind of formal withdrawal from the Convention is less significant than the de facto withdrawal from the Convention, which I think you could date to the beginning of this administration. So I think you also made that point the other day. So not that I kind of disagree at all with people who are outraged by the whole thing. Of course, I also think it's completely wrong policy. But I kind of feel like they withdrew from the Convention already, even before, because they didn't attend any of the meetings, even when they had a right to be there as a party. They didn't hand in the report that's actually a legally binding requirement under the Convention and et cetera, et cetera. Once a year goes by and they're not formally a party to the Convention, will you really notice any difference? Probably not. So to me, it's more the sum total of pulling out of Paris, pulling out of the Convention, which is obviously more than happened under the first Trump administration where there was kind of a compromise between those who wanted to stay in the Paris Agreement with a different NDC and those that wanted to pull out of both agreements. The compromise was, well, I understand this was the compromise. I wasn't there anymore. That they would pull out of Paris but not the Convention. Obviously, they decided this time to also pull out of the Convention. So if you take the totality of pulling out of Paris, the symbolism of pulling out of the Convention, and then the de facto actions with respect to fossil fuels and being anti-renewable energy, that just adds up to so much. I mean that in a negative... The way I've been thinking about it is that the first Trump administration on climate was the absence of a positive, that the US wasn't there pushing other countries to do more. But actually, the US team continued to negotiate the rulebook under the Paris Agreement. By all accounts, they were very constructive. They weren't just passive or negative. But there wasn't this positive energy trying to raise ambition or anything like that. Whereas in the second administration, it's more than the absence of a positive, it's the presence of a negative.
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Christiana Figueres: I was just going to ask a very cheeky question. Could there be an advantage to not having the US in the room?
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): You know, I've been thinking about that, and you're not the first person who sort of floated that idea. I'm not sure. Now, some argued that at COP 30, that was an advantage because the US position might have been even to the, let's say, to the right of Saudi Arabia. In other words, the Saudi delegation was okay with the COP 30, Mouchirao decision, which also, you know, basically acknowledges climate change. I mean, they may not have wanted extensive language on an NDC response or endorsing, you know, a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, but they were willing to accept the rest of it. I think the US position now would not have been able to go along even with that. So in that sense, you could say, well, even though that outcome was fairly lean by a CMA standards, you know, it was more forward-leaning than you would have had if the US was there. So maybe, but, you know, other people have sort of said, but do you think process-wise it's an advantage to not have the US there because maybe now finally we could agree on two-thirds majority, that I don't see at all, right? Because so many countries now are against moving away from consensus, that's much more of a widespread issue. So I don't see like major reform in the works just because the US is out for the next couple of years. I don't know what you guys think about that.
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Christiana Figueres: No, I don't think reform, I don't think the possibility of reform has been opened or stretched. I was just thinking politically, is it an advantage not to have the negative voice and the negative influence? Paul, any questions from you?
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Paul Dickinson: Just one question, Sue. Thank you for this fantastic exposition which is brilliant. A very unfair question because it's to no one's particular skill set, but your rich experience makes me want to ask it. A lot of people are looking at the USA with their eyes are squinting and it's like, what is going on? How do you think the world will react? This critical issue of climate change, more and more extreme weather, government's more and more concerned, populace more and more concerned, and then there's this action from the US government to withdraw from the UNFCCC. How do you think the rest of the world will interpret that and respond to it?
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Well, I imagine the reaction will be negative, of course, but maybe not very surprised. This was, I would say, previewed early in the year, in February when the executive order came out that said, to the State Department, do a review of all international organizations and agreements that the United States is a party to figure out which ones are not in the US interest. So it was pretty obvious, I suppose, back then, that the US would be withdrawing from many organizations. And the ones that had climate change in the title were maybe the biggest targets on their backs. So everybody's been expecting this for a really long time, including the countries that I interact with on a regular basis. So I'm not sure anyone is surprised. Probably the fact that happened in the same week as Venezuela maybe compounded people's questions about what is this world coming to. I don't know if that was by design or coincidence. But it is hard to figure out how all of this straightens itself out someday. People are starting to talk here in the US about, what if a climate-friendly administration comes back in 2029? How does it re-engage and all of that? And that has two sides to it. That has, what would a administration be interested in, both with respect to these agreements and more broadly? But it also takes two to tango. So you have to also assess, where's the rest of the world going to be in three years? Will there be new groups, alliances? Will the treaties have become unrecognizable, these climate agreements? Christiana, if that theory is correct, that the absence of the US might allow things to happen, when will those be positive or negative, from a US point of view? It's all very interesting to contemplate, but it's a little bit early to figure out where things will be headed. Three years seems like a really long time at this point.
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Christiana Figueres: I wouldn't want to close without mentioning national sovereignty. Because I think many people incorrectly assume or think that being a party to a convention curtails the sovereignty of a nation. And I think it's really important to remember that all nations are sovereign, even if they are part of a United Nations or any other international treaty. Every nation is sovereign, which is why the work of the United Nations is so difficult, because the United Nations can convene countries, but it definitely cannot obligate or force anyone to do anything that they don't want to do. So I think it is important as we close, just to remind everyone that national sovereignty remains untouched, even when countries are party to any agreement.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Yeah, if I could add, I used to supervise our treaty office for several years. And we used to say that joining a treaty is actually an expression of sovereignty, because the country is deciding, using its sovereignty to take on certain obligations or whatever, and that we should think about it in that way. And just in that regard, I would add that we thought when we were designing Paris, that the whole idea of these nationally determined contributions would be a real winner, because you were not only expressing your sovereignty by joining, but you continued to have the last word, the only word, on what kind of target you were going to take on. And you not only were like picking a target from ABC, but you could design it however you wanted. You could write in footnotes and caveats and parentheticals and all of that. And it's like...
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Christiana Figueres: The ultimate proof of sovereignty.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): The ultimate proof of sovereignty. So to me, it was quite disappointing that we ended up not sticking to that agreement, because to me, it answered every one of the concerns that the US had with the Kyoto Protocol.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah. Oh, well. But we're not in the land of rationality. We're in fantasy land. Thank you for joining us from Travel. Sue, really appreciate it.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So how wonderful to have Sue on this podcast discussing these consequential issues. We'd love to hear how you responded to that conversation. Paul, why don't we start with you?
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Paul Dickinson: I love the clarity of a brilliant scholar, legal scholars' thinking. I recall the head of our Supreme Court in the UK was being interviewed by the Restors Politics, and Alastair Campbell commented on the perfect structure of her sentences, but I got maybe actually the same sense from Sue. And I kind of calm at a time when my own mind is sort of melting a little bit with febrile fear. I was reminded that there are brilliant administrators in the United States who have built this thing. The whole edifice of the USA, such as dominant nation, has been built on this idea of sort of predictability and trust and a small group of people have put that in the blender recently. I was quite struck. I picked up this quote, I don't know if you've heard it. The one from Miller, the deputy chief of staff, and seemed to be the kind of the agent for all the, abducting Maduro and all the rest of it. He was saying, the world is governed by strength, and these are iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. And actually, I believe Sue teaches us that strength comes from the power of global collaboration. It was wonderful to hear her sort of dissect this tremendous act of self-harm. And also, Christiana, I thought you were having a very productive conversation with her about, you know, how we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again afterwards. The USA is a big and important economy that will long exceed the sort of rather dark memory of Donald Trump. And so, yeah, I found it in some ways reassuring to hear the pragmatism of it and the idea that it could even help. What did you think?
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I guess there was, as she pointed out, there are several ways to put Humpty Dumpty together again. I also just want to add, it just strikes me as such an incoherent, but I don't know why I expect coherence from the US administration still. So incoherent that, on the one hand, they do everything that they have done, UNFCC, IPCC, all of the other UN agencies, basically saying, we do not believe in the UN, we do not believe in multilateralism, we want to go at this completely on our own, as though we were an island unto ourselves. And they don't go all the way. The United States is still sitting on the Security Council. The United States still holds a veto on, for example, who is going to be the next Secretary General, a decision that will be taken this year. So it's just interesting that on the one hand, we don't believe in multilateralism, we don't believe in the UN, but we definitely want to have a voice in who leads the UN. Doesn't that strike you as rather odd?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, yes, odd and potentially entirely consistent between wanting to have all of the suites and non-responsibility. So I thought it was, I mean, just take your point, Paul, one of the things I was reflecting on as I was listening to you talk to Sue, is just what has been lost throughout this process in the form of the depth of diplomatic expertise in the US government. And the fact that Sue is brilliant, and there have been many other brilliant diplomats and administrators across the US government who have been forced out. And that's, in terms of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, as you try and run the world's most consequential country in many ways at the moment, that makes a very, very difficult thing to try to put together again. Because I mean, the last thing you would do if you were the president of the United States is fire Sue Biniaz. I mean, she can represent your interests on the international stage, because she knows her way around like nobody else. And yet...
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, would she want to work with this administration is another question.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, there's that, there's that. But you know, but it's a bonkers thing. I thought her point about moving in the last administration from an absence of a positive to the presence of a negative was interesting. And that actually may be, you know, your follow up to that, Christiana, that maybe the US pulling out there is net beneficial. It did lead me to think if you follow that logic through and say, well, if a country is disengaged from the international process and they're not really helping, then is it more helpful if they leave? There are probably other countries that sit in that category. But if you...
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Christiana Figueres: But there's a difference, Tom, sorry. It's not that they're disengaged. It's that they're throwing bombs at it. That's different. One thing is to be disengaged and another thing is to throw bombs.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: But there are lots of others who throw bombs too.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, not that many. A few.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Really? This is quite a lot. But you don't want lots of countries to start pulling out because even if they're chucking bombs, at least it's... The heartbreaking thing to me, I would just come back to, I know I talked about this on YouTube, is this is the great international forum in which we try and deal with the major problem of our time. If we start getting to the point where we don't have everyone engaged, you can squint at it and say, well, maybe it's better for...
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Paul Dickinson: You know, we've only ever had one country pull out the Paris Agreement, the USA, then it went back in again. Now we've got one country pulling out the Paris Agreement. I mean, the sort of kind of, I'm the diva, USA, and I'm in, I'm out, and oh, I've decided this, I've decided that, I'm terribly important. I mean, you call the USA consequential, it's consequential because it's behaving in a completely bonkers way. But here's the thing, nature abhors a vacuum. And as the US exits itself from grownups thinking about how the world should be run, others will fill that gap. I can promise you that.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, hopefully. But I mean, the US has played a pretty important role in international affairs since the Second World War, that it's been pretty hard for anyone else to fill, right? And actually, it's been a unique role. So hopefully that's the case. We'll discuss this more at length, I'm sure.
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Paul Dickinson: Oh, it's not going to be easy, Tom, but it is what it is and we'll do what we do and it'll turn out right, I promise.
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Christiana Figueres: You know what, Tom? I think that is a really interesting discussion challenge for us.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.
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Christiana Figueres: Let us put a marker in this, okay? Let us come back to that question toward the end of the year.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Very good idea.
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Christiana Figueres: Did the rest of the world step in and continue to do what needs to be done? But that's not something that we can predict right now. It is a question, definitely a crystal ball question. So let's put a marker and come back.
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Paul Dickinson: If that does happen, Christiana, and I'm right, then I think we should discuss that towards the end of the year. But if that doesn't happen, and Tom's right, I think it's probably a mistake to discuss it towards the end of the year. That's just my idea.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, until next week, when we will be talking to Arna Tony, the CEO of COP30, about what's been happening at the COP and what their plans are for this year. Thank you all so much for joining us. And final point, we are going to be together in two weeks' time in the UK, recording some episodes, and we want to record an episode of your questions. So please do, we've had many already, but we're really going to take some time to record an episode, or maybe more, answering questions. So please send them in, all the details from the show notes. We're looking forward to it. We'll see you next week. Thanks so much.
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Christiana Figueres: Bye-bye. Bye.
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Sue Biniaz (guest, former US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change): Bye.
