Six days after this November’s presidential election, the annual United Nations climate change talks will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan. Unlike the election, no one is holding their breath. Baku will be the twenty-ninth in the series. Climate change regularly draws gatherings of world leaders like no other. When the U.S. president shows up, everyone who is anyone turns up, too. These events often represent milestones in the upward ascent of global climate action. In the beginning, there was the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, attended by President George H. W. Bush. Then came the Kyoto Protocol, with President Bill Clinton shrewdly sending Vice President Al Gore to Japan. The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit (attended by President Barack Obama) is memory-holed; that’s when China, along with India, Brazil, and South Africa, vetoed a binding climate treaty, redeemed by the 2015 Paris climate agreement (President Obama again).