Earth Matters: Climate vulnerable small nations blast COP 29 Global South money deal as 'paltry' and 'an optical illusion'

I’m not going to bore you with all the gory details of the COP29 annual climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, but rather cut right to the chase. Like some previous COP summits, this one depended on last-minute efforts to overcome knotty disputes. These interventions have in the past sparked headlines noting how the summit was rescued from having got nothing accomplished that year. This year’s headline atop Brad Plumer’s New York Times story was a little different: Are All These U.N. Climate Talks Doing Any Good? 

In the view of many observers and participants in Baku, the hypocrisy of the most recent summits makes the answer to Plumer’s question: maybe not. About the best that can be said is that the alternative to these talks—not talking, not negotiating, not at least making the effort at cooperation—could obviously be worse. After all, it’s untrue that nothing got done. And nobody should underestimate how much diplomatic effort it takes to make what progress there is. 

But many critics are righteously angry or sad once again this year, as you can see here After Ending in Overtime, COP29 Called 'Big F U to Climate Justice' and here Baku climate summit: Disillusionment lingers as meeting ends with more promises and here Backroom deals and betrayal: how Cop29’s late $300bn deal left nobody happy.

In Baku and last year in Dubai, the petrostate hosts and the 1,700 registered representatives of fossil fuel companies used the two weeks of the climate summits to make side deals. By numerous accounts, Saudi Arabia, the fattest petrostate of them all, meddled repeatedly to undermine the already weak “transition away” from fossil fuels approach that the countries had adopted after much wrangling and rephrasing at COP28. See How Saudi Arabia Turned Back Climate Progress at COP29. 

The United States has worked belatedly, haphazardly, but somewhat diligently to move climate negotiations in the right direction when Democrats are in the White House. But being the country that now produces more oil and gas than any other country in history does not truly help in negotiating sessions over cutting some other country’s emissions.

Moreover, those Democratic candidates who avoid mentioning climate change while touting this massive, wrongheaded production juggernaut with everything but a USA! USA! cheer are scarcely less embarrassing than having the boss of a state fossil fuel operation preside at COP28. But while Democrats need to clean their own house in this regard, come January a serious tool of the fossil fuel industry will occupy the White House, with all the potential this allows for additional grift.

The other major controversy at COP29 was money. The rich, developed nations have generated 92% of excess greenhouse gases that have been sent into the atmosphere in 175 years of industrialization. The developing nations, nicknamed the Global South, have (with exceptions such as China and India) added very small amounts of these gases. But they face some of the earliest and worst climate impacts. The estimates about how much it’s going to cost to address climate change in the Global South are bound to be fuzzy since many impacts are unpredictable. Economists generally put the needed investment at $1.3 trillion with a “t” each year by 2035.

But in Baku, the rich nations would only agree to pool $300 billion. A fourth what is needed. Some critics have decried this as “paltry,” “a Ponzi scheme,” and “insulting.” Others say it’s a start. 

Zoe Schlanger at The Atlantic elaborates:

Even the climate financing that was agreed to is not just a cash handout. Previous agreements had promised $100 billion annually, a goal that the world claims to have finally managed to hit in 2022. But about 70 percent of that financing came in the form of loans. Much of the money in this agreement will likely be structured as debt too—and will add to a global debt crisis that the International Monetary Fund estimates has 35 countries in dire financial straits this year. Dabi described debt—both a country’s existing national debt and climate finance taking the form of new debt—as the elephant in the room at COP. Even as developing countries worried about their debt burden growing from funds promised at the conference, they worried that discussing debt forgiveness would derail the already fragile negotiations.

But both national debt and new climate debt stand in the way of COP’s stated goals. Towering national debts are stifling countries’ ability to invest in climate resilience: Some 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on servicing the interest payments on their debt than on education or health, let alone climate adaptation. And as climate change fuels hurricanes, droughts, and other disasters, the country must take on more debt to respond. African nations in particular are struggling. Last year, the chief economic adviser for Kenya’s president tweeted, “Salaries or default? Take your pick.” The country’s economy is collapsing under the weight of debt repayments.

In December 2007, I was in Bali for the COP13 climate summit where the delegates complained about the lack of air conditioning on an island of 3 million that at the time generated less electricity than Cheyenne, Wyoming. Both got their juice from burning coal. The key issues at the Bali summit were finding a replacement treaty for the Kyoto Protocol by 2009 and setting a deadline for emissions reductions. The United States, Russia, Australia, and Canada all opposed the EU’s initial proposal to bring about a peak in fossil fuels emissions no later than 2022. There was a familiar refrain after the COP13 summit, which has continued to be raised about COP summits ever since: Was anything actually accomplished?

At the time I wrote some of the backstory. Here’s an excerpt:

[I]n this matter of global warming, nobody can go quickly alone—we are all, rich and poor, developed and developing, riding on what the early environmental movement so rightly labeled, spaceship earth.

It all comes down to what we are willing to do. How much future GDP, how much consumption, how much comfort we’re willing to surrender to deal with what is the greatest human-caused crisis since our ancestors first meandered out of Africa 100 millennia ago.

For those of us living in the developed world sipping cooled or warmed drinks in a heated room, running our computers and firing up the horseless carriage whenever we choose, a big question underlying what is being discussed in Bali is whether we’re willing to give up some portion of our prosperity so that the kids of the maid at the spa in Nusa Dua can have air conditioning and a computer and convenient transportation. For Balinese—and Chadians, Amazonians, and rural Chinese—the question is what portion will they yield of their dreams of being megaconsumers, just like the Americans, Europeans and Japanese they see on their televisions.

Big questions for us 6.5 billion rank-and-file human beings is how much we’re willing to accept that 9 billion of us are soon going to be living on spaceship earth unless attitudes change, and how much are we willing to invest in changing those attitudes? Big questions for the human ruling class is how much it is willing to back off from its millennia-old privileges and move boldly but humbly to do something benefiting everyone.

Seventeen years later, it still all comes down to what we are willing to do collectively. The COP29 meeting in Baku that ended just before dawn Sunday made clear that the answer so far to that implied question is: not enough, not fast enough, and not with enough focus on climate justice. Yes, rich or impoverished, privileged or oppressed, we individuals and nations are all in this together but we’re not in the same boat. Some sail yachts, some run motorboats, some paddle canoes, some tread water, some are drowning. While the climate crisis will affect all nations, only a few have the financial wherewithal—in the private and public sectors—to meet the challenges of the multifaceted impacts.

Getting the rich nations to come up with money to invest in preventive and ameliorative climate and energy projects in the Global South has been like pulling teeth from donkeys. And even with the caveats about the form this money will take, it would be utterly unsurprisingly if nowhere near $300 billion appears. At the climate summits, promises are made. And broken. Worst of all, the promises aren’t nearly enough to begin with.

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

(The following video is one of the very best I’ve seen for providing in plain language and simple graphics a clear understanding of what scientists think is happening under the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica—nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier—and what they still don’t fully understand.)

RESOURCES & ACTION

• How to Navigate the Clean Energy Transition. Some tips for electrifying your home and transportation

GREEN BRIEFS

Highlighting the hypocrisy: fossil fuel export emissions

At the COP28 climate summit last year in the UAE, countries vowed to “transition away” from fossil fuels. The fuzziness of that terminology has seen several of those countries are “inconsistent” with these agreements. As Climate Action Tracker points out, “The fossil fuel production industry—which can generate significant domestic revenue – is not a party to international agreements, and emissions from fossil fuel exports are not covered by the national emissions accounting of the exporting country. This leads to a situation where rather than the well-established ‘polluter pays principle,’ polluters are profiting from pollution.”

According to CAT, the top 10 fossil fuel exporting countries represent around 60% of the total exported (see figure below, data for 2022).

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Climate Change ‘Burnout’ Is Taking Its Toll by Nina Dietz at Inside Climate News.  Heather McTeer Toney is no stranger to being the underdog. Toney was only 27 in 2004 when she was sworn in as the first woman, first African American and youngest ever mayor of Greenville, Mississippi. Even still, the 2024 election has been weighing heavily on her. On the Monday after, as she waited on Zoom for yet another of the countless meetings she attends, as the executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, she took a moment to rearrange her bookshelf. “I needed to make sure it was very clear where I am right now, and that’s always reflected for me in what you see on my bookshelf,” said Toney, as she shuffled her books to place the ones with “serious energy” front and center. Though she knows the fight will go on, for now, Toney is giving herself a moment to catch her breath. “Burnout is so real, and you can’t do this work if you’re dead,” she said. “So you have to share the burden, share the load.” Based on her years of experience, trauma therapist Rebecca Mangasarian knows taking time to rest and regroup is not just good advice, but absolutely necessary. And people working on climate change—activists, policy wonks, first responders, scientists—may be especially prone to burnout, she said, given the all-encompassing nature of the climate crisis.

GOP Takes First Steps To Shut Down Climate Groups by Lois Parshley and Freddy Brewster The Lever. Earlier this month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee laid out a plan to target environmental justice nonprofits and organizations working to transition the economy away from fossil fuels. That report preceded a House vote Thursday in which Republicans and 15 Democrats passed legislation giving the Treasury Department the power to strip nonprofit news organizations, advocacy groups, and universities of their tax-exempt status. The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act was originally proposed last year, ostensibly to prevent U.S. nonprofits from supporting groups like Hamas after widespread protests over Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Nicknamed the “nonprofit killer,” it gives the president unprecedented authority to go after political opponents. Advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union warned of the bill’s potential “to grant the executive branch extraordinary power… based on a unilateral accusation of wrongdoing.” [...] The plan singles out specific groups that the committee says have pushed a “radical rush-to-green agenda,” including Rewiring America, a nonprofit working on electrification, and New York City-based environmental justice group WE ACT. It castigated, for example, a blog post on WE ACT’s website “criticizing ‘Republican gas stove culture wars,’ and House GOP Members’ ‘preformative [sic], out-of-touch agenda.’”

Beautiful Bears Ears is at risk, again by Jonathan Thompson at High Country News. Last week the New York Times reported that Trump will again shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments back to the diminished boundaries he established in 2017. The 1.36-million-acre Bears Ears — which President Joe Biden restored in 2021 — will become a 200,000 acre national monument divided into two discrete units. Left out will be Valley of the Gods, Cedar Mesa, the Goosenecks of the San Juan, the White Canyon and Dark Canyon regions, and portions of Butler and Cottonwood Washes. The act is likely illegal, since the Antiquities Act only gives presidents the power to establish national monuments, not shrink or eliminate them. And it will revive lawsuits still pending since Trump’s previous shrinkage. But while the legal challenges wend their ways through the courts, Trump’s shrinkage will take hold (barring a court injunction). The draft management plan that federal officials and tribal representatives have worked on for years will be rendered obsolete before it’s even approved, and about 1.2 million acres of public land will be re-opened to new mining claims and oil and gas and coal leasing.

Salmon Have Returned Above the Klamath River Dams. Now What? By Juliet Grable at The Revelator. The removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California has been recognized as the largest dam removal in U.S. history. More notably, it’s also the largest salmon-restoration project to date. [...] A crew spotted a pair of salmon spawning in one of the tributaries above Iron Gate, which was the farthest downstream dam, where the fish had not previously been able to reach. On Oct. 16 biologists spied fall Chinook salmon at the mouth of a tributary in Oregon. This spot, 230 miles from the ocean, is above all four of the former dam sites. The speed of the salmon’s return has astonished even the most seasoned biologists. “Even though we’ve been anticipating the moment, it’s not until you see that first Chinook…I don’t know; I’m still in shock,” says Mark Hereford, project leader of the Klamath anadromous restoration program at Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, who found the fish in the Oregon tributary.

The Emissions Data GOP Pols Don’t Want Americans To See. Dozens of red states sued to stop the release of their state transportation emissions data. A new report gives a glimpse into what they were trying to hide, by Kea Wilson at Streetsblog. Fourteen states actually increased their transportation sector emissions between 2005 and 2022 — despite a 30% leap in average vehicle fuel efficiency over that period and a 25% national decline in per-capita emissions overall, a new report finds. According to EPA estimates compiled by Environment America, not only did the transportation emissions rise in the Filthy Fourteen, but emissions were essentially flat in another five states, including Arizona and New Mexico. The list of high-polluting states included Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and a raft of other red states that successfully sued to stop a federal rule that would have required them to simply self-report their transportation emissions levels, even though that rule did not require them to reduce pollution. That move was supported by House Transportation Committee Chair Sam Graves (R–Mo.), who was reportedly on President-elect Trump's short list for Transportation Secretary, and who pledged to overturn the rule had it gone forward.

Oil and Gas Industry’s Mating Call Strikes a Sour Note by Laura Peterson at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The U.S. oil and gas industry has sounded its mating call to the incoming Presidential administration with a policy wish list remarkable for its unabated pursuit of profits and defiance of climate science and economic trends. The American Petroleum Institute released a “policy roadmap” addressed to President-elect Donald Trump on November 12 outlining five “actions” he can take to bolster their agenda. However, the “actions”—given euphemistic titles like “protect consumer choice”—actually aim to roll back science-based environmental protections in order to maximize already massive profits. The policy details within each action roughly correspond with recommendations in Project 2025, the infamous policy agenda penned in part by figures from the first Trump administration and supported by several anti-climate organizations.  Here’s a breakdown of the roadmap’s requests along with an explanation of how they would roll back environmental progress.

RESEARCH & STUDIES

• Cities, Climate & Trump: An Early Research Agenda from Climate Law, a Sabin Center blog
• Unexplained heat-wave 'hotspots' are popping up across the globe from the Columbia Climate School

ECOPINION

How to take climate change out of the culture wars by Kate Yoder at Grist. Many Republican politicians see gas stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, and laundry machines as symbols of the government meddling in people’s lives. Earlier this year, lawmakers in the House passed the “Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act” to make it harder for the Department of Energy to create new energy-saving standards, though it stalled in the Senate. Other appliance-related bills proposed this year included the “Refrigerator Freedom Act” and “Liberty in Laundry Act.” [...] On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump revived longstanding complaints about energy-efficient dishwashers and showerheads and also railed against clean technologies, falsely claiming that wind turbines break down when exposed to saltwater and that hydrogen-powered cars are prone to blowing up like bombs. A growing portion of the public appears to share some of Trump’s reservations. Four years ago, 84% of Republicans supported new solar farms; by this spring, the number had slumped to 64%, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Wind power saw a similar dip in support, and the share of Americans who say they would consider buying an electric vehicle for their next purchase dropped from 38% in 2023 to 29%  this year.

Q&A: Cold War Foes Made Treaties to Limit the Spread of Nukes. Could a Similar Approach Wind Down Fossil Fuels? An interview with Tzeporah Berman conducted by Matthew Green at the Pocket Project in partnership with DeSmog as part of the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024.
 Berman is founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative said a growing wave of support for the proposal — which has been endorsed by more than 3,000 scientists, 121 cities and sub-national governments, and 14 nations — could ultimately make new fossil fuel projects unacceptable, even in the United States, the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. Named last week as one of TIME’s hundred most influential climate leaders in business in 2024, Berman  spoke on a broad range of climate-related issues, including the need to combat the pervasive influence of fossil fuel advertising — which has “stolen our imagination” to envisage a world run on clean energy.

The common ground between labor and climate justice is the key to a livable future. The tale of “jobs versus the environment” does not capture the full story by Pradnya Garud at EHN. Labor unions have been criticized for focusing on jobs without considering environmental consequences, with some unions supporting controversial projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, and others opposing bans on fracking. Meanwhile, environmental groups are accused of being divorced from working-class realities, sometimes neglecting lost employment and wages related to the energy transition. The urgency of cutting emissions and phasing out fossil industries to mitigate climate change has brought the seemingly contentious relationship between labor and environment into sharp focus. “Corporate America has painted everyone into a classic dilemma,” said Anthony Mazzochi in 1977, when he was the legislative director for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. “Now it’s jobs versus the environment. The worker has a choice between his livelihood and dying of cancer.” I’ve seen this apparent contradiction since I was young. Growing up in a working-class area in Mumbai, India, I felt alienated, like many in my community, by mainstream environmental and climate advocacy, despite studying environmental sciences and facing harmful exposure to pollution in my neighborhood. Upper- and middle-class environmental activists’ assertions that we face “existential threats” rang hollow, as their claims often overlooked the day-to-day struggles of working-class people to maintain their existence in a society where we have to earn a living. This experience informed my dissertation research, where I explored the social and economic underpinnings of environmental injustices in India. 

Why the IRA Didn’t Help Democrats by Michael Levien at Jacobin. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 459 leader Aric Baker was angry and conflicted after a hundred workers were laid off at the Homer City Generating Station, Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant in July. He saw that Republicans were anti-union and that Donald Trump’s promise to “dig more coal” had not panned out. He understood that coal was being undermined by natural gas and “wasn’t the fuel of the future.” But he also felt deserted by Democrats, who appeared to have little consideration for the workers who had spent decades working night shifts and weekends to keep the lights on for the rest of America. “Energy workers,” he told me, “are politically homeless.” Trump’s resounding victory this month underscores that many such workers have found a new home. When we spoke again shortly after the election, Baker acknowledged almost his whole membership voted for Trump, along with about 70% of Indiana County. Energy workers are part of the larger migration of blue-collar workers — especially from regions ravaged by deindustrialization — to the Trump camp. The story of Homer City provides some insight into why the IRA, the signature legislative accomplishment of the Biden administration, failed to arrest this slide. It underscores the missed opportunity that was Joe Biden’s first two years in office, and it illuminates what Democrats will have to do better if they hope to ever regain mass working-class support.

RELATED: White House says laws passed under Biden spurred $1 trillion in investments

Can the world agree to a sensible treaty to end plastic pollution? by Douglas Main at The New Lede. The U.S. position in unclear. The Biden Administration made waves this summer in saying they would support efforts to curb production. And last week, the Environmental Protection Agency released a new “National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution,” saying it aligned with the nation’s “commitment to negotiating an ambitious international agreement with the aim of protecting public health and the environment by reducing plastic pollution around the world.” The EPA highlighted the “significant human health concerns” associated with exposures to plastic pollution, including cancers, reproductive health problems, heart attack, stroke and other problems. It noted microplastics have been found in human breast milk and research has found them elsewhere in the body, including in the brain. Still, this month, White House staffers reportedly told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting that they would no longer support mandatory caps on production, and would take a more “flexible” approach to a deal, according to Grist.

FERC’s rubber-stamp approach to LNG is bad news for our economy, consumers and environment by Megan Gibson at Utility Dive. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is entrusted with a critical mandate: to regulate and approve energy infrastructure in a manner that serves the public interest, and protects consumers, our economy and the environment. Yet, recent actions — or inactions — by FERC suggest a dereliction of this duty, particularly in its rubber stamping of dangerous liquefied natural gas export project facilities. This disturbing trend is exemplified by FERC approving Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, LNG export project, a massive gas export project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. FERC’s approval of CP2 is particularly striking, given Venture Global’s ongoing pattern of regulatory violations and disregard for community welfare. FERC now has until Dec. 2 to revise and deny its authorization of this harmful and unneeded project. To prevent further harm, FERC must stop greenlighting unnecessary and harmful LNG projects like CP2 LNG and reassert its obligation to actually serve as a regulator providing a meaningful restraint to unchecked fossil fuel expansion.  

OTHER GREEN STUFF

• Europe’s Cruise Ships Produce Toxic Sulphur Emissions Equivalent to 1 Billion Cars, Study Finds.

• Duke Energy utilities long knew of climate change risks before joining denial campaigns.

• Denmark is returning 15% of its farmland back to nature.

• Taxing Farm Animals’ Farts and Burps? Denmark Gives It a Try.