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In what will probably be the warmest year in recorded history, in a month in which all but two U.S. states are in a drought, and on a day when yet another hurricane was forming in the Caribbean, Donald Trump, a climate denier with a thirst for oil drilling, won the American presidency for a second time. And today, delegates from around the world will begin this year’s global UN climate talks, in Baku, Azerbaijan. This UN Conference of Parties (COP) is meant to decide how much money wealthy, high-emitting nations should channel toward the poorer countries that didn’t cause the warming in the first place, but the Americans—representing the country that currently has the second-highest emissions and is by far the highest historical emitter—now can make no promises that anyone should believe they would keep.

“We know perfectly well [Trump] won’t give another penny to climate finance, and that will neutralize whatever is agreed,” Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, told me. Without about a trillion dollars a year in assistance, developing nations’ green transitions will not happen fast enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. But wealthy donor countries are more likely to contribute if others do, and if the U.S. isn’t paying in, other large emitters have cover to weaken their own climate-finance commitments.

In an ironic twist for a president-elect who likes to villainize China, Trump may be handing that nation a golden opportunity. China has, historically, worked to block ambitious climate deals, but whoever manages to sort out the question of global climate finance will be lauded as a hero. With the U.S. stepping out of a climate-leadership role, China has the chance—and a few good reasons—to step in and assume it.

The spotlight in Baku will now be on China as the world’s biggest emitter, whether the country likes it or not, Li Shuo, a director at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in a press call. The Biden administration did manage to nudge China to be more ambitious in some of its climate goals, leading, for example, to a pledge to reduce methane emissions. But the Trump administration will likely shelve ongoing U.S.-China climate conversations and remove, for a second time, the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which requires participants to commit to specific emissions-reduction goals. Last time around, Trump’s withdrawal made China look good by comparison, without the country necessarily needing to change course or account for its obvious problem areas, like its expanding coal industry. The same will likely happen again, Alex Wang, a law professor at UCLA and an expert on U.S.-China relations, told me.

China is, after all, the leading producer and installer of green energy, but green energy alone is not enough to avoid perilous levels of warming. China likes to emphasize that it’s categorized as a developing country at these gatherings, and has fought deals that would require it to limit emissions or fork over cash, and by extension, limit its growth. But with the U.S. poised to do nothing constructive, China’s position on climate looks rosy in comparison.

[Read: A tiny petrostate is running the world’s climate talks]

By cutting off its contributions to international climate finance, the U.S. also will give China more room to expand its influence through “green soft power.” China has spent the past five years or so focused on the construction of green infrastructure in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, Wang said. Tong Zhao, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Reuters that China expects to be able to “expand its influence in emerging power vacuums” under a second Trump term. Under Biden, the U.S. was attempting to compete in the green-soft-power arena by setting up programs to help clean-energy transitions in Indonesia or Vietnam, Wang noted. “But now I suspect that those federal efforts will be eliminated.”

[Read: Why Xi wants Trump to win]

Most experts now view the global turn toward solar and other clean energy as self-propelled and inevitable. When Trump first entered office, solar panels and electric vehicles were not hot topics. “Eight years later, it is absolutely clear that China dominates in those areas,” Wang said. China used the first Trump administration to become the biggest clean-tech supplier in the world, by far. The Biden administration tried to catch up in climate tech, primarily through the Inflation Reduction Act, but even now, Shuo told me, Chinese leaders do not see the U.S. as a clean-tech competitor. “They have not seen the first U.S.-made EV or solar panel installed in Indonesia, right?” he said. “And of course, the U.S. lagging behind might be exacerbated by the Trump administration,” which has promised to repeal the IRA, leaving potentially $80 billion of would-be clean-tech business for other countries—but most prominently China—to scoop up. In all international climate arenas, the U.S. is poised to mostly hurt itself.  

[Read: How Trump's America will lose the climate race]

More practically, Baku could give China a chance to negotiate favorable trade deals with the EU, which has just started to impose new carbon-based border tariffs. But none of this guarantees that China will decide to take a decisive role in negotiating a strong climate-finance deal. Climate finance is what could keep the world from tipping into darker and wholly avoidable climate scenarios. But news of Trump’s election is likely to lend COP the air of a collective hangover. EU countries will surely assume a strong leadership posture in the talks, but they don’t have the fiscal or political might to fill the hole the U.S. will leave behind. Without surprise commitments from China and other historically begrudgingly cooperative countries, COP could simply fail to deliver a finance deal, or, more likely, turn out a miserably weak one.

The global climate community has been here before, though. The U.S. has a pattern of obstructing the climate negotiations. In 1992, the Rio Treaty was made entirely voluntary at the insistence of President George H. W. Bush. In 1997, the Clinton-Gore administration had no strategy to get the Kyoto Protocol ratified in the Senate; the U.S. has still never ratified it.

But although President George W. Bush’s administration declared Kyoto dead, it in fact laid the groundwork for the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement survived the first Trump term and will survive another, Tina Stege, the climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, told me. The last time Trump was elected, the EU, China, and Canada put out a joint negotiating platform to carry on climate discussions without the United States. That largely came to nothing, but the coalition will now have a second chance. And overemphasizing U.S. politics, Stege said, ignores that countries like hers are pressing on with diplomatic agreements that will determine their territories' survival.

Nor is the U.S. defined only by its federal government. Subnationally, a number of organizations cropped up in the U.S. during Trump’s first administration to mobilize governors, mayors, and CEOs to step in on climate diplomacy. These include the U.S. Climate Alliance (a bipartisan coalition of  24 governors) and America Is All In: a coalition of 5,000 mayors, college presidents, health-care executives, and faith leaders, co-chaired by Washington State Governor Jay Inslee and former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, among other climate heavy hitters. This time, they won’t be starting from scratch in convincing the rest of the world that at least parts of the U.S. are still committed to fighting climate change.

Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.

In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.

Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.

One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”

[David A. Graham: What Trump understood, and Harris did not]

While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Another Bidenland critique takes Harris to task for failing to navigate the backlash against identity politics. Not that Harris ran a “woke” campaign. To the contrary, she bathed herself in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement, and a proud gun owner. But she failed to respond to the ubiquitous ads the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-change operations for prisoners. She allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.

Biden, allies say, never would have let such attacks stand. He would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports. Of course, he never staked out that position in his presidency. But it’s true that Harris avoided the issue, rather than rebutting it, despite the millions of dollars poured into those attack ads. And in the end, those ads very likely implanted the notion that Harris wasn’t the cultural centrist she appeared to be.

A sour irony haunts Biden aides. In the coming months, Trump will use executive power and unified control of Washington to wreck many of the administration’s proudest accomplishments. But the ones he doesn’t wreck, he will claim as his own. Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest. Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor.

The rise in prices under the Biden administration proved fatal for Kamala Harris's election hopes.

When delegates of the world gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, next week for the most important yearly meeting on climate change, their meetings will overlook a reeking lake, polluted by the oil fields on the other side. This city’s first oil reservoir was built on the lake’s shores in the 19th century; now nearly half of Azerbaijan’s GDP and more than 90 percent of its export revenue come from oil and gas. It is, in no uncertain terms, a petrostate.

Last year, too, the UN Conference of Parties (COP) meeting was a parade of oil-state wealth and interests. Held in the United Arab Emirates, the conference included thousands of oil and gas lobbyists; its president was an executive of the UAE’s national oil company. Baku’s COP president, Azerbaijan’s ecology and natural-resources minister, is also an ex-executive of its oil company.

Optimistically, handing influence over this conference to the UAE, and now Azerbaijan—states whose interests are, in many ways, opposed to its aim—means that leaders who depend on fossil fuels must face the costs of burning them. As host this year, Azerbaijan’s job will be to broker an agreement that secures billions—possibly trillions—of dollars from wealthy countries to help along the green transition in poorer countries. Developing nations need these funds to set ambitious climate goals, the next round of which are due in February 2025. A failed COP could set off a chain reaction of failure. The world is gambling that a country that’s shown a bare minimum of commitment to this entire process can keep us all on a path to staving off catastrophic warming.

Baku came to host COP by process of elimination. Hosting duties rotate among regions of the world; this year is Eastern Europe’s turn. Russia nixed the possibility of any European Union country, leaving only Armenia and Azerbaijan standing. Armenia retracted its bid after Azerbaijan agreed to release 32 Armenian service members from prison. (Armenia freed two Azerbaijani soldiers in exchange.)

In many ways, Azerbaijan is an extremely unlikely candidate. Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, has followed all 29 years of COP so far, and told me that Azerbaijan has “been pretty much off the radar since the beginning.” The country has hardly ever spoken during previous negotiations, and is not part of any of COP’s major political coalitions, she said. The Paris Agreement requires that, every five years, each country must lay out how it will reduce emissions in a Nationally Determined Contribution plan; Azerbaijan is “one of the very few countries whose second NDC was weaker than the first,” Depledge said. To Steve Pye, an energy-systems professor at University College London, having a petrostate host a climate meeting presents an unambiguous conflict of interest. The country has been clear that it’s looking to ramp up gas exports and has made “no indication” that it wants to move away from fossil-fuel dependency, he told me. That’s an awkward, even bizarre, stance for the entity in charge of facilitating delicate climate diplomacy to hold.

Still, in some ways, Azerbaijan “could be seen as an honest broker” in the finance negotiations, because it is neither a traditional donor country nor a recipient of the funds under negotiation, Depledge said. Azerbaijan, for its part, says it intends to “enable action” to deliver “deep, rapid and sustained emission reductions … while leaving no one behind.”

The whole point of COP is to bring diverse countries together, Depledge said; global climate diplomacy cannot move forward without petrostates on board. Last year’s COP, in Dubai, resulted in the first global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, and was seen as a modest success. To run COP, Azerbaijan will be forced to reckon with global climate change directly; its team will have to listen to everyone, including the countries most ravaged by climate change today. That’s bound to have an impact, Depledge thinks. Ultimately, Azerbaijan will also need to adapt to a post-oil economy: The World Bank estimates that the country’s oil reserves will dwindle by mid-century. And, since being chosen to host, it has joined a major international pledge to limit methane emissions, as well as announced that its third NDC (unlike its previous one) will be aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goals—although it has yet to unveil the actual plan.  

COP also gives Azerbaijan a chance to burnish its image. After Armenia withdrew its hosting bid, Azerbaijan branded this a “peace COP,” proposing a worldwide cease-fire for the days before, during, and after the meeting. An army of bots have been deployed on X to praise Azerbaijan just ahead of the talks, The Washington Post reported. Ronald Grigor Suny, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about Azerbaijan, told me that he views the country’s hosting exercise as an elaborate propaganda campaign to sanitize the image of a fundamentally authoritarian and oil-committed nation—a place that last year conducted what many legal and human-rights scholars considered an ethnic-cleansing campaign in one of its Armenian enclaves. “This is a staging of an event to impress people by the normality, the acceptability, the modernity of this little state,” he said. But hope for any peace-related initiatives, including a peace deal with Armenia, is already dwindling. Climate and geopolitical experts have called the whole thing a cynical PR stunt, and Amnesty International reports that the country, which Azerbaijani human-rights defenders estimate holds hundreds of academics and activists in prison, has jailed more of its critics since the COP presidency was announced.

Azerbaijan will still need to broker a real climate deal by the end of the event for it to be declared a success. Failure would be deeply embarrassing and, more pressingly, dangerous for the planet. The world is on track for up to 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, and total carbon-dioxide emissions in 2030 will be only 2.6 percent lower than in 2019 if countries’ current NDCs are followed, according to new analysis. Keeping to a 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit would require a lowering of 43 percent over the same time period, which many scientists now say is out of reach. Keeping warming below the far more catastrophic 2 degree limit now will take far faster and more decisive action than the slow COP process has historically produced.

Even if this COP ends in success, Pye, who has worked on the UN Environment Program’s Production Gap Report, notes that, without follow-through, what happens at the conference is merely lip service. Once the spotlight of COP was off it, the UAE, for instance, returned more or less to business as usual; this year, the state oil company increased its production capacity. Then again, the UAE is investing heavily in clean energy, too, following a maximalist approach of more of everything—much like the theory that President Joe Biden has followed in the United States, which recently became the world’s biggest oil producer and gas exporter even as Biden’s domestic policies, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act, have pushed the country toward key climate goals.

Perhaps more than Baku’s leadership, the outcomes of the U.S. election will set the tone for the upcoming COP. News of a second Trump presidency would likely neutralize any hope for a strong climate finance agreement in Baku. In 2016, news of Trump’s election arrived while that year’s COP was under way in Marrakech, to withering effect. America’s functional absence from climate negotiations marred proceedings for four years. Wherever COP is held, American willingness to negotiate in good faith has the power to make or break the climate deals. Put another way, it’s still possible to save the world, if we want to.