Petrostates preparing for this year’s United Nations climate summit, COP29, are pushing to roll back the signature commitment to phase out fossil fuels that countries adopted at the end of last year’s COP negotiations.
With this year’s talks set to convene in just 54 days in Azerbaijan, the third major oil and gas-producing country in a row to host the annual negotiations, “oil-rich nations are making a concerted effort to slow progress” on the “landmark UN climate agreement,” the Financial Times reports, citing western nations taking part in the talks.
“Negotiators from five western countries told the Financial Times that they were applying pressure to Azerbaijan… to prioritize fossil fuel phaseout discussions, in an attempt to counter a ‘pushback’ from the petrostates and their allies,” the Times writes. “But the negotiators said that a group of countries including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Bolivia—which have historically proved a block to any global agreement to phase out the use of fossil fuels—were yet again frustrating progress.”
Host country Azerbaijan, “which is heavily reliant on oil and gas exports economically, is seen as reluctant to champion a further shift away from oil and gas,” the news story adds.
COP28: Flawed But Transformative
Last year’s COP28 conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates produced what was seen as a flawed but still transformative declaration signalled a transition out of fossil fuels and the dawn of renewable energy. The historic decision text, arrived at after round-the-clock negotiations by climate ministers and other senior officials, included language about “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems” and “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, or before, or around 2050 in keeping with the science.”
Initial analysis at the time indicated the surrounding language was about as weak as it could be in the constellation of United Nations legal jargon, with phrasing that merely “calls on” countries to take action rather than pushing for it in stronger terms. But it was still a major advance over an earlier draft, published two days earlier by the COP28 Presidency, that was dismissed as “unacceptable”, “incoherent”, “grossly insufficient”, and a “slap in the face” by angry, frustrated, and increasingly sleep-deprived delegates.
“We didn’t turn the page on the fossil fuel era, but this outcome is the beginning of the end,” UN climate secretary Simon Stiell said at the end of the conference.
Now, even that nuanced win, weak and mild against the backdrop of a cascading global climate emergency, is under concerted attack.
“There’s clearly pushback by some countries,” one western negotiator told the Times. “We’re having to be very clear with Azerbaijan that this COP won’t be a success if we don’t also talk about the process of implementing mitigation, including the COP28 decision.”
But “at this stage, it looks extremely bleak,” another negotiator said, citing the “real risk” that big emitters of climate pollution within a 77-member bloc of developing countries “will use the difficult finance negotiations to block any meaningful progress on mitigation.”
The Bucks Stop Here
Arriving at a new global goal for climate finance is a primary goal for COP29, and battle lines among rich and developing countries are already being drawn (or just renewed from the last round of talks). African countries are calling for US$1.3 trillion per year in financial transfers to developing countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, beginning in 2025. Last week, the UN Standing Committee on Finance said the world’s 98 developing countries will need up to $6.9 trillion in total by 2030.
Negotiations are beginning from as position of skepticism and mistrust after rich countries missed their self-declared deadline, first adopted at the 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen, to transfer $100 billion per year by 2020.
After pre-COP discussions in Baku last week, negotiators reported little progress in arriving at a new global finance goal, Climate Home News writes. “Countries have yet to define critical aspects of the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) for climate finance, including who should pay—the so-called ‘contributor base’— and how much money they will mobilize—known as the ‘quantum’,” Climate Home says.
“Determination and leadership is needed from all parties to bridge the gaps that still divide us in this critical final phase,” said COP29 President-Designate Mukhtar Babayev. “Sticking to set positions and failing to move towards each other will leave too much ground to be covered at COP29.”
A joint statement from members of Climate Action Network-International said rich country delegations had shown up ill prepared for the negotiations.
“The failure to achieve any clear outcome also means developing countries face uncertainty as they draw up their national climate plans, known as NDCs, because their ambition [to reduce emissions] is necessarily dependent upon the availability of climate finance,” the groups said.
Climate Home has details on different countries’ negotiating positions during last week’s talks.
In an opinion piece last week for The Nation, African Group Chair Ali Mohamed warned the climate crisis “is ringing alarm bells” on the continent. Countries are already spending up to 15% of their GDP to respond to climate impacts, including 9% to deal with extreme weather, while “debt distress” forces “difficult trade-offs between climate action and meeting critical development needs.”
Africa “continues to be disproportionately affected by climate impacts despite its insignificant greenhouse gas emissions,” Mohamed wrote. “And to make matters worse, those same, long-suffering people are disadvantaged in accessing and attracting international climate finance and fair global trade.”
Bloomberg opinion editor Mark Gongloff traces the financial crisis confronting the island nation of Grenada after it faced down three “monster storms” in 20 years. The latest, Hurricane Beryl, levelled the island of Carriacou earlier this year, taking out more than 95% of the homes and reducing the entire country’s GDP by about one-third.
Gongloff opens his post with a description of what today’s climate finance arrangements look like from the ground up.
“Imagine you borrow $1 million from me, and then I burn down your house and steal your car so you can’t drive to work anymore. But then I offer you a one-year moratorium on debt payments to try to get your life back together while insisting the debt still be paid in full, with the deferred interest tacked on to the principal,” he writes.
“On a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being ‘most generous’, you would probably rank this deal as ‘Go directly to jail.’ But it’s not far from the bargain the U.S. and other rich countries are offering to low-income countries on the front lines of climate change.”
