With a few days left in basically any of the 28 previous U.N. climate talks, the eventual agreement that emerged would have been tough to make out. Seasoned delegates to the COPs have long known to either book flexible return flights or simply wait for a Sunday or Monday trip, a few days into “overtime,” officially, as basically every one of these multilateral negotiations has gone longer than planned. But amongst all that struggle, in all cases but one (COP6 in 2000, when negotiators reconvened six months later in Bonn to hammer out an agreement; COP15 in Copenhagen ended with a non-official document from a few major economies), that foggy mid-COP outlook did eventually resolve into a tangible consensus.
That’s the good news as COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan enters its home stretch. The bad news is basically everything else.
“There’s a lot of frustration in the room,” said one NGO observer, according to The Guardian. “There’s a lot of anxiety.”
The COP’s primary goal is to establish a new benchmark for climate finance, the very high number of dollars that rich countries should be sending to the developing world to manage a warming world. The generally agreed upon range from the recipients is north of $1 trillion per year by 2030; the generally agreed upon answer from the donors is “Hm, maybe not.”
The 2009 pledge of $100 billion per year by 2020 was met late, and “met” is heavily reliant on private sector money that carries many more strings and interest rates than actual government-level international aid. The issue here is that no matter how obvious the moral and financial debt may be, rich countries simply prefer to stay rich.
“I’m also concerned that the parties are not moving toward each other quickly enough,” said COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev, according to the New York Times. “It’s time to for them to move faster.” Though new versions can drop at any time, a recent draft text on finance offered several dozen “options” for how to move forward; sticking points don’t just include dollar values, but who is paying. China, the world’s second-largest economy and biggest emitter by far, is still officially categorized as a developing country; where do its trillions in GDP fit in here?
Meanwhile, ominous signs on the overall global progress to actually starting to fix climate change, rather than just pay for it, now abound. A year after all the UNFCCC signatory nations agreed on on a plan to “transition away” from fossil fuels — the easiest call in the world that somehow took 28 years to emerge — some countries are now trying to actually eliminate that language from any new agreement. One country in particular: Saudi Arabia.
“They’re just being a wrecking ball,” one observer said. The authoritarian petrostate, perhaps freed of restraints by U.S. election results, is apparently in an all-out push to literally end the multilateral energy transition. And apparently, some countries lack the stomach to fight back. Even as COP29 is ongoing, the G20 meeting in Brazil yielded a milquetoast statement that appeared to abdicate any agency on the topic.
“We welcome and fully subscribe to the ambitious and balanced outcome” from COP28 in Dubai, the statement reads — but makes no mention of the fossil fuel transition. In fact, its only mention of the word is a continued endorsement of an older pledge to, over the “medium term,” phase out “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”
This is bleak as hell! With a few days still to go, it is of course possible — likely, even — that some text emerges from the negotiations that all 198 countries (minus a couple that have sat this one out or sent their delegates home) can agree on. As is the case with any multilateral process, a successful outcome is one that leaves virtually everyone a little bit unsatisfied; but this is life-and-death shit for millions of people and, eventually, entire countries. The apparent willingness to somehow move backward, even three decades into this process, is just impossibly grim.