Every year since the turn of the millennium, the nations of the world gather to address that most timely of planetary concerns: climate change. Among their ranks, one can reliably expect to hear outsize input from the world’s leading merchants of oil (Abu Dhabi), natural gas (Washington), and coal (Canberra). Redoubling their efforts, a dedicated corps of fossil fuel tycoons reassures its financial backers that whatever risk to its profits may ensue from the latest round of negotiations is all talk: the pipelines will continue to flow, the refineries refine, the tankers haul their loads. Stacked against this hydrocarbon Goliath, meanwhile, is a David of dizzying breadth: diplomats and public servants from poor, climate-vulnerable nations; activists waging combat along the very frontlines of fossil capital; Indigenous peoples whose presence on the land threatens to be discontinued by rising temperatures entirely. Anyone, in other words, who has something to lose (rather than everything to gain) from setting the Earth and the many dominated populations it houses aflame.
Above reads the essential class context for understanding this year’s ritual “Conference of the Parties,” or COP. The 29th of its kind to take place so far, this most recent exercise in global climate governance made headlines for inviting more oil and gas lobbyists to its halls than delegates from all but three participating states. As though to twist the knife even further, negotiators decided to hold this year’s COP in Baku, Azerbaijan: the first city ever built for the sole purpose of facilitating petroleum extraction, and whose spectacular gas wealth was used to fuel the ethnic cleansing of 100,000 Armenians from the contested Artsakh region just over a year ago. Leading by example in more ways than one, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev thus set the tone for the days ahead when he declared with bravado that fossil fuels are “a gift from God.”
To be fair, COP29 did seem to have much else besides going for it. Among other things, negotiators promised to take up such diverse matters as food and water security; reducing (if not eliminating) carbon emissions; education and youth; gender equality; armed conflict; Indigenous stewardship of global biodiversity; urbanization and transport; and climate finance from rich nations to poor nations. It was the last of these which our aforementioned David hoped to secure above all, as inscribed in one obscure yet decisive acronym: NCQG (“New Collective Quantified Goal”). The first letter denoted poor nations’ wish to escalate the previous sum of $100 billion/year which rich nations had promised—and until 2022, mostly failed—to deliver at COP21. And escalate they did. Thus the theoretical upper bound for the NCQG was raised more than tenfold, to $1.3 trillion (for reference, it’s estimated that climate change could cost the global economy anywhere from $19 trillion to $54 trillion per year by 2049).
Yet Goliath is rarely so forgiving. Rather than surrender the capital to partly address a problem they were 90% responsible for creating, rich nations instead opted for the “paltry sum” (to quote one Indian delegate) of $300 billion/year. This amount itself came on the heels of a walkout which several poor nations had staged in response to an earlier offer, $250 billion/year. The sheer disproportion between their toil and the derisory increase they were able to win was perhaps best summarized by one Panamanian delegate as follows: “This is what they [rich nations] always do. They break us at the last minute. You know, they push it and push it and push it until our negotiators leave. Until we’re tired, until we’re delusional from not eating, from not sleeping.”
What accounted for such aggressive miserliness? For one thing, many of the projects which poor nations hoped to finance through the NCQG—flood control, ecosystem restoration, weather stations—were not of the profit-making variety; rather than save revenues, they were meant to save lives. This posed something of a quagmire for rich nations, as the lion’s share of the climate finance they’ve doled out since 2000 has taken the form of loans and bonds rather than no-strings-attached grants. In addition to netting their investors billions of dollars worth of interest, this arrangement has kept the recipients of their beneficence stuck in the doldrums of bilateral debt—such domination, it goes without saying, was never going to be given up without a fight.
A second, related obstacle concerned a vernacular which had been popularized by the previous two COPs: “loss and damage.” In contrast to the nominally short-term aspirations of the NCQG, this category of climate finance takes aim at those ramifications of global warming which have the potential to be felt for generations: damage to infrastructure, lost agricultural productivity, receding coastlines, destruction of cultural heritage. A fund for tackling loss and damage was established at COP28, with the not-so-minor caveat that all contributions toward it were declared to be wholly voluntary. Unsurprisingly, some negotiators thus hoped to hitch loss and damage onto the (at least theoretically) binding NCQG, a venture which likely reinforced the stinginess of certain donor states. One gets a sense for this stinginess in an accounting of the aforementioned COP28 fund: out of $702 million committed so far, for example, the United States has forked over a measly $17.5 million.
To an extent, of course, all of the above considerations are highly speculative. None but a strictly autobiographical account of COP29 could do the event justice seeing as, in the words of Catherine Pettengell, “no meaningful negotiations took place [regarding NCQG]…instead backroom discussions pushed developing countries into a take-it-or-leave-it offer.” Still, to the extent that Goliath’s voice was captured by the press, it could often speak multitudes. In the case of one pivotal dialogue concerning the energy transition, for example, Saudi obstructionism managed to excise all mention of “fossil fuels” (let alone phasing them out) from the accompanying draft text, thus delaying the latter’s completion until COP30 at the earliest. On yet another occasion, Riyadh’s intervention managed to accomplish the same in a similar program established by COP28, in addition to axing previous commitments made to reverse deforestation, eliminate hydrocarbon subsidies, and triple global renewables capacity by 2030.
Assuming (optimistically) that the face value of each COP aligns with its real potential, then, this one leaves few reasons to assume a course correction is waiting in the wings. To the contrary—and as was first revealed, of all places, in Baku itself—the present year is likely to set a new record for global carbon emissions, with human civilization currently pumping the gas into the climate system at a rate of roughly 4 million tons per hour. Positive that their reassurances hold good, meanwhile, fossil capitalists continue to pour Biblical volumes of wealth into yet more oil and gas extraction: $4.3 trillion as of this writing, to be exact. Whether another COP—or 29—will prevent these dollars from wreaking the damage their predecessors have, of course, remains to be seen. But the clock is ticking.
Sources:
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