Climate change: CoP out?

By Richard North - November 25, 2024

I tried to imagine something I would less like to write about than the just completed CoP summit in Baku, but my faculties failed me. I am sure there are such things but, by any measure, CoP summits are very close to the bottom.

One can, I suppose, take small comfort from the sentiments expressed by some developing countries at the close – something to the effect that the finance deal at the heart of the talks was “a travesty of justice”.

This it seems is because the global climate grifters were after $1.3 trillion from the “rich” countries to help them “decarbonise their economies and cope with the effects of the climate crisis”.

Sadly for these poor deprived people, they were only offered $300 billion annually – sort of. This is not real cash but a bundle of “pledges” comprising loans, grants and private money with that notional headline value.

This, Chandni Raina, a negotiator for India, considers to be “abysmally poor” compared with what was needed – to fund the ongoing coal-fired generation expansion programme.

She said the text did not include adequate protections for other developing nations. “All developing countries need finance” she said, adding that India’s per-capita emissions were far lower than those of developed nations.

As for the $1.3 trillion, the only thing on offer in the “New collective quantified goal on climate finance” was a call on all actors “to work together to enable the scaling up of financing to developing country Parties for climate action from all public and private sources to at least USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035”.

As a bankable commitment, that most definitely falls short of expectations and one can expect a number of advance orders for electric jaguars to be put on hold, while leases for not a few private jets may be under review.

This is more likely the case since the $300 billion a year also seems to have a Scotch Mist element to it. All the parties have been able to manage is a decision to extend the current $100 billion goal, “with the developed Parties in the lead”, to bring it to “at least USD 300 billion per year by 2035 for developing country Parties for climate action”.

Of course, 2035 pushes the programme into never-never land. This is well beyond the electoral cycle of most developed nations and so far into the future that it need not show up in any national budget statements and thus require real funding or financial commitments.

That, of course, doesn’t stop the likes of Ed Miliband bloviating, with his effusions diligently recorded by The Times (and others). The deal – such as it is – is “100 percent in Britain’s national interest”, he says, reflecting a “great British tradition” of helping more vulnerable countries.

Recognising that the delegates from some countries were unhappy, Miliband suggested that this was because climate change impacts had gone from a “theoretical future” to a “present-day reality”, and some nations had a “scale of need” to cope with global warming. Or maybe they just wanted the money.

For once, though, reading the Guardian is almost a pleasure as it retails a litany of pissed-offedness which is way off the Richter scale.

Up high on the list is Catherine Pettengell, an advocate with the NGO Climate Action Network UK. She starts off by saying that the procedural choices “could erode trust in UN climate processes” – assuming there was any trust in the first place.

But, it seems, these “procedural choices” mean that “Developing countries have been forced to accept half-measures, Cop after Cop, but at Cop29 these half-measures push the costs of climate change on to the people least responsible but suffering the worst consequences”.

The NGOs, as always, were fully represented, with Tracy Carty, of Greenpeace International, having a swipe at fossil fuel companies. They have made $1 trillion a year in profit annually for half a century, she stormed. They should have been forced to pay into the finance pool.

That left Nafkote Dabi, the climate policy lead at Oxfam International, to call the agreement a “global Ponzi scheme”. “The destruction of our planet is avoidable, but not with this shabby and dishonourable deal,” she said.

With that, the Guardian was keen to tell us that the financial goal left a bitter taste in other negotiators’ mouths. After the document’s adoption, a delegate from Nigeria refused to accept it. “That the developed countries are saying that they are taking the lead with $300 billion by 2035 is a joke”, she stormed.

In her view, developing countries such as Nigeria, which is a major oil producer – and just happens to be one of the most corrupt nations on the planet – would need far more assistance to cut their emissions. Perhaps she ought to have a word with Olukemi – she’s good on Nigerian issues.

Next up in the Guardian litany was Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change. He also questioned the process of the goal’s adoption, complaining that “The gavel was hit way too fast and our heart goes out to all those nations that feel like they were walked over”.

Hinting at more than a whiff of a stitch-up – even despite the earlier walk-out by developing nations – Gómez was distinctly unhappy, saying: “Developed nations always throw text at us at the last minute, shove it down our throat, and then, for the sake of multilateralism, we always have to accept it, otherwise the climate mechanisms will go into a horrible downward spiral, and no one needs that”.

Perhaps there is an object lesson there as to why some countries are developed nations and why others are developing”. One is not allowed to say “retarded”. Apparently, that is a hate crime.

At the bottom of the ranks of the nations that we’re not allowed to call retards, though, there are the least developed countries (LDC). As a negotiating bloc, they represent 45 nations and 1.1 billion people, and they are really, really unhappy. Sunday’s deal had destroyed three years of negotiations on the climate finance goal, the complained. “This has been casually dismissed,” an LDC statement said.

Not pulling any punches, the statement went on to say: “Despite exhaustive efforts to collaborate with key players, our pleas were met with indifference. This outright dismissal erodes the fragile trust that underpins these negotiations and mocks the spirit of global solidarity.”

Needless to say, there were the apologists for the process, who were also lining up to add their ha’porth. One was Avinash Persaud, an expert on climate finance at the Inter-American Development Bank, who has served as an adviser to Barbados prime minister, Mia Mottley.

In his view, the summit had been “hard fought over”. As to the results, “at $300bn per year led by developed to developing countries, we have arrived at the boundary between what is politically achievable today in developed countries and what would make a difference in developing countries”.

Another fellow traveller, Prof Ottmar Edenhofer, a climate economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, was equally sanguine.

The most important part of the Cop29 finance deal was that it existed at all, he said. The multilateral system of international cooperation had not collapsed as had seemed possible at times.

Putting the toil of thousands into perspective, he observed that “The climate summit in Baku was not a success but at best the avoidance of a diplomatic disaster”. Echoing what many are now saying, he concluded: “different ways to tackle the climate crisis were now needed, such as cooperation between smaller groups of nations”.

Oddly enough, I would have thought the BBC would be in mourning, with the summit news spread all over its website, but there is only one item, well down page.

Capturing the essence of the summit, it tells us: “Huge COP29 climate deal too little too late, poorer nations say”, again offering us a litany of dismay with the NGOs to the fore.

Jasper Inventor, head of the COP29 Greenpeace delegation, called the deal “woefully inadequate” and said, “reckless nature destroyers” were being protected by “every government’s low climate ambition”.

WaterAid described the deal as a “death sentence for millions”, while a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said COP29 had “failed”. Friends of Earth head of policy Mike Childs said that in terms of climate leadership, the planet was still “light years away from where we were” at last year’s meeting in Dubai.

Said Childs, “These latest international talks failed to solve the question of climate finance. Instead, they have again kicked the can down the road”.

With that amount of unhappiness spilling out of the summit, one has to say that, despite events elsewhere, things are not so bad. If so many NGOs are complaining, what’s there not to like?