Every year delegates from nations across the globe gather for the United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties, this year’s meeting was the 29th such meeting or COP29. This year’s conference was held at the city of Baku in Azerbaijan from November the 11th through the 22nd.
Even before it started COP29 was in trouble. For one thing the choice of host nation was problematic because Azerbaijan is an oil rich nation whose economy is heavily dependent on exporting the source of the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming. This fact was made clear when the environmental group Global Witness succeeded in posing as oil company executives and actually filmed the conference’s CEO, Elnur Soltanov, who is also Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister, trying to make a deal to sell his country’s oil. As a part of the conversation Minister Soltanov is heard to give his opinion that fossil fuels may be with us ‘perhaps forever’ along with describing natural gas as a ‘transitional fuel’.
It got worse, again before the conference had even started news stories were published announcing that the host country Azerbaijan had granted access to the conference to over 1,700 lobbyists from coal, oil and gas companies. These lobbyists, whose sole objective was to prevent the conference from actually doing anything to stop climate change, in fact outnumbered the delegates. Exxon-Mobile, Shell, BP, Chevron and all the private energy companies sent their lobbyists, as did the national oil companies like AramCo.
To add to the outrage the Azerbaijan security people began detaining and in some cases arresting members of environmental and human rights groups who are also trying to lobby the delegates to try to save the planet. Of course Azerbaijan has never been an open society where the right to protest is legally guaranteed.
How countries like Azerbaijan, and last year’s host Dubai, are chosen as hosts is mind numbing, and indicates a lack of seriousness on the part of the international community. In fact there has been severe criticism of the whole COP climate change process with CO2 emissions continuing to increase even as the world’s temperature rises above the 1.5ºC increase that nations pledged to prevent just nine years ago.
Another factor that lowered expectations was the fact that very few heads of state even bothered to attend COP29. President Biden, China’s President Xi and India’s PM Modi headed a long list of world leaders whose absence clearly indicated how little they cared about the planet. The new British PM Keir Starmer did attend, highlighting his government’s determination to flight global warming but he had little support among the rest of the developed countries.
And as the icing on the cake just the week before COP 29 began the world’s most vocal climate denier Donald Trump was elected as the next President of the United States. With another Trump administration coming every delegate at the Conference knew that no matter what agreement they succeeded in reaching it would probably be immediately torn up when Trump takes office on January 20th.
Even as the conference was proceeding the growing dangers of climate change was highlighted by a new study from the non-profit research organization Climate Central that analyzed the effect of this year’s highest ever recorded temperatures on the not quite over Atlantic hurricane season. According to the analysis all eleven Atlantic hurricanes saw their maximum wind speeds increased by 14-45 kph due to global warming.
For seven of those hurricanes that increase in wind speed caused them to jump up one category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Since it has been known for many years that a hurricane’s destructive power very nearly doubles for every increase of one on the Saffir-Simpson scale the paper estimates that of the economic damage caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton approximately 45% was due to global warming.
With all of that controversy before the conference began it was hardly surprising that throughout the conference COP29 seemed on the verge of collapse. The nation of India, currently the world’s third largest polluter, in particular made it clear that it had no intention of halting or even slowing its economic growth, which is heavily dependent on increased fossil fuel use. At the same time India continued its criticism of western nations for not providing enough money to help undeveloped countries mitigate the damages caused by climate change.
Things at the conference got so bad that on the meetings last day delegates from many of the countries facing the most severe harm stormed out of the negotiating room in protest. Environmental activists began chanting ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ and journalists reporting on the conference announced that COP29 could end with no deal being reached. Cooler heads did prevail however as the conference was extended by two days in order for a deal to be reached.
It’s not much of a deal however, developed nations have pledged $300 billion a year to enable undeveloped nations to both cope with the damages caused by climate change while at the same time cut their growing CO2 emissions. That amount however is less than a quarter of the minimum estimated $1.3 trillion a year required, and much of that money is in the form of loans that most underdeveloped nations would find hard to repay. More than that, the world’s two biggest polluters, China and India, aren’t required to provide any funds at all, or reduce their own emissions. And remember, the original Paris agreement back in 2015 the developed world promised $100 billion per year to help fight climate but precious little of that money ever actually became available.
With the election of Trump and the almost certain possibility that the US will once again leave the original Paris agreement the whole idea of the world coming together to fight climate change must be considered to be in doubt. Even as the danger of global warming becomes more obvious every year the human race seems to become more determined to do nothing to protect itself.
P.S. More bad news. Even as I was preparing this post for publication a second UN conference on the environment was taking place in the city of Busan in South Korea. The talks, officially known as INC-5 were intended to deal with the ever-growing problem of plastic pollution worldwide.
Every year the human race produces 450 million metric tonnes of plastic, 350 million of which is single use plastic that simply ends up being tossed into the environment causing what has become a planet wide blight. Worse still, while plastic does not decay chemically in the environment it does break down mechanically into smaller and smaller pieces, microplastic and nanoplastic particles that are now literally everywhere, land, sea and air. They’re in our water; our food and now they have been detected in our blood and yes, even in our brains.
So the need for an international agreement to reduce the amount of plastic in the world has become as great as the need for an agreement to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and every bit as hard to reach. Of the more than 170 countries and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) that attended the meeting the vast majority favoured mandatory cutbacks in plastic production.
A small minority made up of plastic producing nations disagreed. In their opinion the solution to the problem is recycling and better waste management. Solutions that have been tried continuously for the last fifty years with little success, less than 10% of plastic is ever recycled.
By the end of the week long conference the two sides were as far apart as ever and the conference closed without any agreement. So in the short space of a month the nations of the world had gathered together in two conferences to try to save our planet, with little or nothing to show for all the effort.