Dispatch from COP29: “What the Global North is offering is not just a joke”

“It symbolizes how unserious they are about the climate crisis”

Editor’s Note: This is our second report from Baku in our ongoing series “Dispatch from COP,” with on-site coverage of the UN’s Conference of Parties, “the supreme decision-making body of” the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) “tasked with supporting the global response to the threat of climate change.” -Barclay Palmer

Week Two, Friday, last day…  Maybe…

Nothing has emerged from the negotiations in Baku but hot air – and hotter tempers. This is the real heart of a COP: aching insanity of 20-hour days of illusion at a time when real-life action is an existential need. But it will not come without courage. The small island states, indeed most of the world, know that long-term survival is on the line. 

For many, though, the prospects for survival already seem an illusion. The warming in the pipelines – both fuel and planetary – means most people will have to move. But to where?

The Institute for Economics and Peace estimated in 2021 that the number of climate refugees by 2050 could be as high as 1.2 billion. That number is certainly an underestimate. Back then, we had only begun to see the violence of extreme weather. In 2022, the estimated actual number of reached 32.6 million people displaced by disasters. 

At a time when immigration backlash has toppled governments in the US and Europe, the willingness of rich countries to take a growing and now obviously endless flood of climate refugees is at a low ebb. 

The UN hastens to remind us that most migrants stay in their own countries, becoming “internally displaced people.” That’s IDP in UN speak. Technically a “refugee” is only a person fleeing conflict of persecution. 

But a new UN report shows that three of every four of the 123 million people now homeless because of conflict live in areas highly vulnerable to climate chaos. That’s no coincidence. 

The dumpster fire that is a Conference Of Parties, COP, might amuse cynics from afar. But up close, it’s heartbreaking. 

Developing countries strive desperately to get some sort of financing deal. Already crushed by debt, proposals to loan them money to adapt to the climate devastation now upon them is all but useless. They want the rich countries that caused the crisis to pay them for it. It’s called carbon debt. 

 

To achieve net zero, in which all countries decarbonize by 2050, $192 trillion would be owed to the poor countries (collectively responsible for something like 4% of global emissions) for the appropriation of their atmospheric fair share of emissions by 2050. This would be an average disbursement to those countries of $940 per capita per year, using carbon prices from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5 °C, and tracking cumulative emissions from 1960 across 168 countries. 

And the chances of the rich countries will agree to this are precisely zero. Not “net zero.”  Zero.

The fight now in the negotiations is whether the rich north will agree to offer any help or compensation at all – other than more loans.

The latest draft “agreement” issued a few hours ago, is $250 billion a year, far short of the $1.3 trillion a year needed to enable poor countries to cope with the devastating real world effects of climate change, which most people in the rich North don’t quite see or believe. That’s not even compensating countries for the losses they have already suffered. And the OPEC countries are resisting any call to reduce emissions.

So frustrating. Had we implemented the Paley Commission’s call for energy efficiency and renewable energy  as a matter of urgent national security – way back in 1952, a literal lifetime ago – we would not now have a climate crisis. We didn’t and we do. Grrrr. 

And it is not that we don’t have the money. We do. The world spends more than $7 trillion every year subsidizing the use of fossil fuels. That’d pay what the developing countries need seven times over. 

But the petro-states are refusing even to talk about leaving intact the Dubai agreement to “phase out fossil energy systems.” That was code for oil use in power plants, which is a tiny use of oil. 

Likely outcome: a new aspirational target, with an agreement to meet again in Belém next November to work out details. Which is to say, “Really, really I promise we’ll help… just not now.” COPs essentially never reach real deals, they just say that they did. Already agreed: there will be no mandate to fund anything. Rich nations will be “invited” to contribute money to help poor nations cope. Or as Bloomberg put it: “A deal here may simply paper over the cracks until Brazil’s COP30 summit in the Amazon next year.”

Equally likely, a complete breakdown. Agreement will only come if those most in need of a real deal fold, abandon their demands for climate justice, in order to get out of town before the COP Presidency quits running the buses that have transported people from their hotels to the COP venue. Which will happen tonight.

Will it go to overtime? That’s always the betting around this time of a COP. My entry into Carbon Brief’s betting pool is it will really end Sunday night at 6 PM. 

Oh wait, the answer just came in: We’re now officially into extra innings.

And whoa, the Global South just walked out of negotiations – for the rest of Friday, that is. They haven’t left COP completely.

Fadhel Kaboub, Senior Advisor at Power Shift Africa, and member of the Independent Expert Group on Just Transition and Development, just wrote:

“The $1.3 trillion per year that the Global South asked for is meant to be a modest and reasonable good faith downpayment towards real climate action by the Global North.

“The fact is that the historic polluters are only offering $250 billion by 2035 in poor quality financing (aka economic entrapment & market-based false solutions). 

“For the Global South, climate finance needs to come in the form of grants (not loans and further economic entrapment), cancellation of all climate-related debts, and transfer and sharing of life-saving technologies to manufacture and deploy renewables, clean cooking, clean transportation, and the climate resilience and adaptation infrastructure that we need.

“What the Global North is offering is not just a joke, it is an insult to all the delegations present at COP29, and symbolizes how unserious they are about the climate crisis. 

“Let’s remember that The United States alone gifted the equivalent of $1.3 trillion in today’s money via the Marshall plan after a very expensive WWII and the Great Depression. The U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world can surely afford more than that to pay for the climate crisis they created. 

“I call on all Global South delegations to stand strong, stand united, be firm, and be ready to walk out if necessary. No Deal is Better than a Bad Deal. We are the global majority. We can leverage the complementarity of our resources and capabilities to impose a new international economic order of justice, peace, and prosperity. 

“If the historic polluters of the global minority do not get serious about its responsibilities, then we may have to start restricting access to our strategic minerals and our markets, and start leveraging our collective economic weight to save the planet for all of humanity.”  

 

Cover photo: By The Climate & Capital Media