Credibility of COP29 climate talks in question over host’s oil interests

For the second year in a row, diplomats and heads of state from around the world will meet in an oil-rich country to discuss the future of the climate.
The UN’s annual Conference of Parties will kick off on Nov. 11 in Azerbaijan – a small country between Russia and Iran on the Caspian Sea – focusing on climate finance.
Optimism is in short supply as the world’s largest economies have shown little appetite to increase their financial contributions to support green transitions for developing countries and to mitigate the effects of climate change for those most vulnerable.
In addition, the host country is under fire for human-rights abuses, alleged energy profiteering and a lack of commitment to moving away from fossil fuels.
“It’s going to be quite a difficult COP,” said Richard Kinley, who served as deputy secretary of the body overseeing the conference from 1992 to 2017.
How much does Canada owe in climate aid? A trillion-dollar question headlines COP29
The biggest challenge has come from the United States, where climate-change-denying former president Donald Trump sailed to victory in the election on Tuesday. Mr. Trump said on the campaign trail that he would expand fossil-fuel drilling and again pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which seeks to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. He withdrew the U.S. from the accord during his first term as president.
Both Mr. Trump and outgoing President Joe Biden are sitting out this year’s summit, which is likely to be significantly smaller than the COP28 in Dubai. The leaders of many of the world’s largest economies and biggest polluters will also be absent, including President Xi Jinping of China, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The Canadian delegation, led by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, is going into the COP29 talks with two top objectives. One is to push for a new deal worth hundreds of billions of dollars to support developing countries with climate-change adaptation and mitigation projects. In 2009, rich countries agreed to provide US$100-billion annually in climate finance by 2020, with Canada committing US$5.3-billion. The target was achieved two years late, and now the needs have grown.
At the talks, Canada and allied donors will seek to scale up the contributions and call on other high-emitting
Opinion: Every year at COP, Canada shows progress on cutting methane. What about this year?
countries to join in the climate finance effort, known as the New Collective Quantified Goal, or NCQG. They will also push for more policy tools and private-sector contributions to help increase funds for this effort.
Canada’s second main objective is to press countries to toughen their emissions-reduction targets when new goals are set in 2025, despite doubts about its own ability to do so.
This year is set to be the hottest on record and global natural disasters continue to intensify. With COP approaching the end of its third decade and emissions still rising, many experts are questioning whether the summits are the most effective method for combatting climate change.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting new results,” said Jessica Green, who researches climate governance at the University of Toronto. “We’re not getting new results.”
Host country Azerbaijan, which relies on fossil fuels for more than 90 per cent of its exports, is doing little to inspire confidence in this year’s conference.
Long-serving President Ilham Aliyev, whose father seized control of the small Caucasian country after the fall of the Soviet Union, has drawn international condemnation for banning opposition parties and imprisoning journalists.
Amnesty International published a report last month accusing the country of intensifying its crackdown on civil society ahead of the conference and calling on participating states to respond with diplomatic pressure.
While Azerbaijan has made significant investments in renewable energy, it also shows no signs of weaning itself off of oil and gas, which Mr. Aliyev recently called a “gift from God.”
Instead, the country is using the conference to secure new fossil-fuel investments. The chief executive of COP29, who also serves as Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister, was caught using his position to promote deals with the country’s state-run oil and gas company in an investigation first reported by the BBC.
For some, doubts about COP have reached a breaking point.
Prime Minister James Marape of the Pacific island country of Papua New Guinea announced in August that he would not be participating. His foreign minister later called the event a “total waste of time.”
Yet this crisis of faith may not be fatal to efforts to fight climate change, according to Dr. Green of U of T.
Rather than looking for consensus among heads of state, she believes decarbonization ultimately comes down to figuring out how to “rein in the political power of fossil asset owners and build the political power of green asset owners.”
Dr. Green recommends an emphasis on economic policies to speed up the transition to renewable energy, including implementing global taxes on fossil-fuel companies and overhauling trade agreements to promote green supply chains.
Still, many of the most vulnerable countries see COP as the best forum for raising their concerns.
A long-time negotiator and adviser to small island states told The Globe and the Mail that the countries he represents are seeking to keep negotiations focused on the 1.5-degree cap while securing adaptation financing for countries that face an existential threat from sea-level rise.
Last year’s summit, bolstered by an energetic diplomatic push from the United Arab Emirates, yielded the first-ever global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels and a “loss and damage fund” to compensate developing countries for costs incurred because of climate change.
Given this year’s headwinds, another breakthrough is unlikely, according to David Victor, who researches climate policy at the University of California, San Diego. The key, he said, is to continue building consensus around climate finance while avoiding the worst-case scenario: a failure to reach any agreement at all.
“In good times, those are hard conversations,” Dr. Victor said. “They’re probably not going to get some kind of major agreement, but they will make progress.”
With a report from Jeffrey Jones