Did the United States skip the COP29 UN Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024? No, that's not true: President Joe Biden did not attend, but a U.S. delegation was present, led by Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy John Podesta. The other members of the delegation included Thomas Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, and Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on November 13, 2024. The video had a text overlay in Czech, translated by Lead Stories staff as: "Petr Fiala at the climate feast." The person speaking in the video comments on Czech Prime Minister Fiala's participation at the Baku UN climate conference, diminishing the event's importance. He also says in Czech, translated by Lead Stories staff:
How useless this conference really is is shown by the fact that the world's two biggest polluters, the United States and China, are not attending the conference at all.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Nov 25 09:23:02 2024 UTC)
The claim that the United States and China would not be attending the event is not true. The person in the video is using a social media video post from CT24 (archived here), the Czech state broadcaster, as the source of the information. The CT24 report from November 11, 2024, the first day of the conference, says, though, that the "leaders" of the two countries would not be present, not that representatives from the two superpowers -- the world's biggest greenhouse gases emitters (archived here) -- would not be attending.
The COP29 conference (archived here) took place in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22, 2024. On the U.S. Department of State's website, a page is dedicated to the U.S. presence at the COP29 (archived here), and an official list of the delegation -- which included senior members of the U.S. administration, led by Podesta -- can be found here (archived here). The U.S. Center at Cop29 X account (archived here) reposted the speech given by Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state (archived here) and quotes from Granholm, the Secretary of Energy. (archived here).
The event's official website also shows a press conference (archived here) with members of the U.S. House of Representative delegation, including August Pfluger of Texas (archived here) and Morgan Griffith of Virginia (archived here), held in Baku on November 16, 2024. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a U.S.-based non-profit organization, also compiled a list (archived here) of U.S. representatives who attended the event. The list includes two U.S. senators, Edward Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse, as well as seven members of the House of Representatives.
On November 23, 2024, the UN announced that the Baku summit had adopted a global financial target of $300 billion a year to help poorer countries cope with the effects of climate change (archived here), an amount that many consider insufficient to finance and mitigate the challenges facing developing countries in the face of global warming.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who did not attend the event (archived here), issued a statement (archived here), following the conclusion of COP29, on November 23, 2024, praising the outcome of the conference. U.S. contributions to international public climate finance for developing countries can be seen here (archived here). During the Biden Administration, it scaled up from $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2023, according to a Department of State update released on November 18, 2024.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala announced (archived here) that he was leaving for Baku in a social media post on November 11, 2024. The post is also mentioned in the TikTok video above.
The TikTok video also falsely claimed China not attend the event. China did send a delegation to the event, led by President Xi Jinping's special representative, Vice Premier of the State Council Ding Xuexiang, according to the transcript of a press conference by the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry held on November 25, 2024 (archived here).
