BONN, Germany — President Trump remains determined to take the U.S. out of the global Paris climate accord, but that hasn’t stopped the U.S. from being a player as the latest U.N. summit on climate change wound down Thursday.
U.S. government officials said Washington will push for a change to World Bank rules blocking funding for coal-related projects, while seeking to build “a clean-coal alliance” of like-minded nations across six continents.
George David Banks, the chief U.S. representative to the 23rd Conference of Parties of the Paris accord on climate change, popularly known as COP23, said the World Bank ban on underwriting projects using coal was “very, very wrong” and the Trump administration would seek to reverse it.
The ban, adopted in 2012, also has been criticized by nations such as Nigeria, Tanzania, India and Bangladesh, all of which have sought to fund development and infrastructure projects using coal.
Mr. Banks, Mr. Trump’s special assistant for international energy and environment, said it was vital that developing countries be able to generate electricity and that the structures of the Paris deal work against poorer countries trying to meet their emissions targets.
