COP29: A climate breakthrough has rarely looked bleaker

COP29 is happening this year in Baku, Azerbaijan, one of the birthplaces of the modern oil industry and (according to civil liberties group Freedom House) among the most oppressive societies on the planet.

By David Fickling

Has there ever been a grimmer backdrop to the world’s most concerted attempt to avert global warming?

COP29 — the annual conference for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — is happening this year in Baku, Azerbaijan, one of the birthplaces of the modern oil industry and (according to civil liberties group Freedom House) among the most oppressive societies on the planet.

Leaders from China and the US, which account for about 45 per cent of the planet’s carbon footprint, won’t be attending — and President Joe Biden is in any case the lamest of lame ducks after the Republican sweep in last week’s elections. Almost every other major economy in Asia and the Americas will be absent, thanks to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru this week, while the leaders of Germany, France and the European Commission are also staying home.

There have been other tough summits. COP28 in Abu Dhabi foreshadowed this year’s event by resembling a trade fair for the oil industry. Still, it happened in a far more benign political environment, before the anti-climate wave seen in recent European and US elections.

The 2009 event in Copenhagen collapsed in disarray, but 15 years ago the world had more wiggle room to avoid disaster. About a quarter of all emissions since 1850 have happened since Copenhagen. We’ve only got seven years left of polluting at current rates to retain an even chance of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The wavering global commitment is particularly worrying because the coming 12 months will be vital for setting the next decade of climate policies. The latest set of Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs — plans by countries to show how they’ll reduce their emissions up to 2035 — are due to be delivered by the end of February. So far only one nation has submitted its latest blueprint: the United Arab Emirates.

It’s common for both climate denialists and campaigners to present such targets as meaningless verbiage. However, just as elected politicians are surprisingly good at keeping their manifesto promises, governments are pretty serious about achieving their greenhouse goals.

The Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 pact that’s widely seen as a byword for the meaninglessness of such agreements, was actually pretty successful. Signatories cut their emissions by 22 per cent between 1990 and 2012, far better than the 5 per cent they were aiming for. Economic collapse in the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence was a major factor in that outperformance, but Western Europe and Oceania, by and large, hit or exceeded their goals.

The main reason Kyoto failed to rein in global emissions was that it didn’t cover emerging nations, something remedied in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The national plans that form one of the main mechanisms of that deal also have a decent record. In 2017, forecasts indicated that without climate policies global emissions would hit 65 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030. That figure is now expected to be 57 billion metric tons.

This is still far too high to avert catastrophic global warming, but it falls only about 2 billion metric tons short of the main targets governments have set for themselves. The problem is that those objectives result in emissions about 14 billion metric tons higher than we need to keep the world on track for even 2C of warming. Implementation of climate plans isn’t the problem — it’s their insufficiency to address the scale of the crisis we’re facing. It’s politics, not logistics or physics, that’s stopping us from tackling climate change.

That’s what is most worrying about the listlessness and pettiness on display in the world’s response to COP29. Politics has always had a decisive impact on the trajectory of global emissions, and right now we are pointing 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

Need one piece of absurdity? The US has more restrictions on importing Malaysian solar panels made with Chinese materials than it has on importing Indian diesel made from Russian crude oil.

Direct global subsidies for fossil fuel use last year was $620 billion, roughly nine times the $70 billion that was spent encouraging consumers to switch to clean power, according to the International Energy Agency. Even in the European Union, supposedly the paragon of green politics, fossil fuels received more direct support than renewable power in 2022.

Factor in the way that coal, oil and gas don’t have to pay for the damage they do to human health and the climate, and the support they’re getting from governments is 10 times higher.

Clean power has won the technical and financial arguments that made it look a non-starter a couple of decades ago. But the roadblock thrown up by wrongheaded politics is far from being lifted. If you’re hoping that Baku will provide a solution to these problems, you’re looking in the wrong place.