Democrats Land at Climate Talks With a Message: Don’t Panic

The Australians were giving away fresh brewed coffee on Saturday afternoon. The Singaporean pavilion had free beer. The American delegation was mostly offering assurances that all hope was not lost.

The election of Donald J. Trump has cast a pall over the U.N. climate negotiations in Azerbaijan, putting U.S. representatives, most of them Democrats, in an especially awkward position.

With less than 70 days until Mr. Trump is inaugurated for a second time, a collection of Democratic officials was pledging that the United States would continue working to limit global warming, even as the country’s next president threatened to do precisely the opposite.

“Effective in January, the United States government will be defecting from any position of responsibility,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on Saturday at the talks in Baku, Azerbaijan. “But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be considerable activity coming out of the United States.”

President-elect Trump may have other plans. During his campaign, he threatened to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, roll back environmental regulations and expand the production of oil and gas, the main drivers of global warming.