From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, November 19.

Right now is a pivotal and confusing moment for climate policy in the U.S. and the world.

2024, if you haven't heard this yet, is on track to be the warmest year on Earth since they

started keeping that record, breaking the old record, set last year.

And this year's UN climate summit, known as COP 29, is taking place right now in the

nation of Azerbaijan, just after the election of

Donald Trump, who said he plans to be a dictator on day one to issue an order to drill, drill,

drill, drill. Remember this statement from during the campaign when he was asked if he would be a

dictator by Sean Hannity? We love this guy. He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator. Trump during the campaign, he also just nominated a fracking executive to be energy secretary. So what is the U.S.'s role at this conference?

And by the way, China's emissions are spiking right now, even though they are trying to beat the

U.S. at owning the green technology market. We'll talk about how both of those things can be true.

Our guest is Politico-Climate Reporter Zach Coleman, who joins us from

the COP29 Climate Conference in Azerbaijan. Zach, thanks for joining us from over there. Welcome to

WNYC. Thanks. I really am on the floor here, so you might hear a little background chatter. It's

kind of hard to get away from everything. Well, set the scene for us.

What time is it over there? What kind of a space are you in? Who's there? Set the scene for a radio listeners. Yeah, it's 7 p.m. over here. And honestly, pretty much every year these cop

dimensions are thrown up overnight. So we're in the bowels of what is Olympic Stadium in Baku. They've never

hosted the Olympics here, but it's kind of a makeshift staging ground and meeting rooms inside,

kind of on the main pitch here in this stadium. So it's kind of bizarre, but we're also a little

bit used to these little towns that get put up overnight for these conferences every year.

Is Baku the capital remind me? And is it a nice city? Have you gotten around? It's right on the Caspian Sea, isn't it?

It's right on the Caspian Sea. And it's quite glitzy and glami down in the old city center and you know it's it's

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