For decades, making progress on global climate action has felt like trying to tunnel through a mountain with only a spoon and some elbow grease. When people suggest alternative tools that are perhaps better equipped for tunnel-digging, or maybe even float the idea of climbing over the mountain, they’re dismissed and demeaned as too idealistic. Other people will stare straight at the mountain and declare that it doesn’t exist. And some other people think that instead of creating the tunnel, we should just strip the mountain, sell the tinder and build a casino on top.

Meanwhile, the mountain is growing. And the spoon is broken.

It is against this backdrop that roughly 100 world leaders are convening in Baku, Azerbaijan, this week for the 29th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29. Attendees are primarily focused this year on determining how much money to raise and invest toward helping poorer countries adapt to the climate crisis and curb greenhouse gas emissions. This round of climate financing is meant to address the fact that the world’s wealthiest nations bear disproportionate responsibility for the climate crisis, yet poorer countries often face its most devastating impacts. The U.S. has emitted a greater share of climate-warming greenhouse gasses than any other country since 1850 — but notably, the leaders of the world’s top polluting countries, including the U.S. and China, aren’t in attendance this year.

What’s more, as negotiators meet to hash out a deal, they do so with the knowledge that any work they do could be quickly undone: President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House means that the U.S. will likely pull out of any pact in just a few short months.

Trump has already pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement — for the second time. Since the international treaty was enacted at COP21, it has set guiding principles for global climate action — namely, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing climate financing to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

After Trump formally announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the agreement in 2017, Joe Biden made rejoining the Paris accords a key part of his administration’s climate agenda. But historical memory is all too short — and it is bitterly ironic to note that the agreement was itself decried as ineffective by climate activists when it was passed.

“The Paris Agreement is a death sentence for many people,” Pablo Solón, a former chief climate negotiator for Bolivia, told Democracy Now! in 2015, arguing that the emissions cuts outlined in the pact wouldn’t limit warming to less than 3 degrees. “A world with temperature........

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