Azerbaijan Proves COP Is Not Fit For Purpose
When, a few days into the most recent UN Climate Change Conference (COP), respected figures in the field of climate policy published an open letter denouncing the annual summit as “no longer fit for purpose”, they made front pages around the world. Yet their declaration was an understatement; COP has always been fundamentally incapable of mitigating or permitting adaptation to climate breakdown. The myopia, corruption and plain inadequacy which characterised this year’s conference are no more than the surface-level manifestations of a deeper, structural problem: that no solution to the ongoing destruction of the planet is compatible with the requirements of our current socio-economic system.
COP29 was held 11-22 November 2023 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Bringing together around 33,000 delegates from the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) member states, alongside around 27,000 observers, activists, and media representatives, it was ostensibly intended to facilitate international cooperation on climate policy.
It fell short of the mark. The measure heralded by many as the crowning achievement of the talks - the operationalisation of carbon markets as foreseen in the Paris Agreement - was itself primarily an exercise in procrastination. This system intends to encourage investment in carbon reduction programs - and yet it cannot have gone unnoticed that the majority of such programs have been ineffective. Furthermore, in the absence of any penalties for breaking the regulations governing this scheme - the UN lacking the authority to enforce the commitments made at COP conferences - this is unlikely to change. Not that it would make much of a difference if it did; even when effective, carbon offsetting remains desperately insufficient and unscalable. Rather than constituting a part of the rapid and radical action we require, carbon markets thus constitute a distraction from the more urgent and fundamental need to rapidly downscale carbon dioxide emissions.
An issue which caught greater public attention was the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), which dictates how much funding rich countries which are historically responsible for the climate breakdown (that is, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and many European countries) are to provide to the rest of the world by 2035, to support emissions reduction and climate adaptation measures.
Whilst many hoped to secure around $500 billion a year - with UN researchers themselves stating that annual figures would have to reach the trillions for countries in the Global South to be able to effectuate their climate plans - the aforementioned states only agreed to an annual $300 billion. This sum is to primarily take the form not of much-needed grants, but of loans. To add insult to injury, the track record of the Global North when it comes to meeting financial goals is uninspiring, to say the least.
These loans would come in part from Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and the private sector; two institutions which, in their storied avarice, are notorious for not only drowning countries in debt but for funding projects which are environmentally destructive, contribute towards prolonging the use of fossil fuels, and infringing upon human rights. The largest MDB, the World Bank - whose policies, it is important to note, are decided in practice by high-income countries, notably the US - requires states to adopt inappropriate, and generally destructive, free market measures as a condition of receiving a loan (measures which inversely play to the benefit of the Global North). Some measures adopted at COP29 are thus not only insufficient but, in many respects, actively harmful.
There is as much to be gleaned about the nature of the COP from what delegates did not do as from what they did. The call for a ‘green transition’ away from fossil fuels which had been made at COP28 - and which had been criticised at the time for its insufficiency - was not renewed, notably having been opposed by oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia. The failure to meet what is seen as the most basic commitment needed to tackle climate breakdown should have been shocking. However, and rather unsurprisingly, at a conference which opened its doors to over 1700 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, it was not.
Yet, the fact that this so-called green transition, conceived as the core of a strategy for ‘green [economic] growth’, constitutes the most radical strategy present in mainstream climate policy discourse demonstrates a fundamental problem with COP. This is not least because the very concept of energy transition has hereto been a myth; all previous so-called transitions were in fact accumulations, with different sources of energy not replacing each other but rather entering into symbiosis. In the same vein, renewable energy exists largely in symbiosis with fossil fuels; fossil fuels are, inter alia, used to mine and transport key raw materials, as well as to build the machinery to exploit these sources of energy. Moreover, renewable resources produce significantly less energy than fossil fuels, and so one would need to dedicate an inconceivable quantity of land to the express purpose of generating energy in this manner (the equivalent of one Britain to power Britain, or 60 Singapores to power Singapore). The clean energy source which has the most potential - nuclear - takes a long time to build and can only provide electricity - which only covers a fraction of our energy needs. A future in which an ever-growing need for energy is entirely or even primarily met by renewable energy is therefore inconceivable - or, at least, inconceivable within a timeframe which would permit the attainment of carbon neutrality by 2050.
In summary, the COP29 conference was characterised by a lack of constructive cooperation or solidarity, accompanied by an inability (at least on the part of the most influential states) to devise a genuinely constructive response to the problem facing us, a reticence to take even those steps which would make a small difference, and the inability to enforce promises related to those few small steps which are taken. All this would lead one to the conclusion that COP could not possibly bring about the radical change we need, especially as a rapidly growing population induces more and more energy use.
This is by design. One need only examine the data which shows that the wealthiest 1% release as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds for it to become clear that this crisis is not the collective responsibility of humanity as a whole. Rather it is attributable to a socio-economic system in which those who hold a dominant position in society have a material interest in pursuing profit through constant expansion in order to preserve this position and ensure the continuation of the system itself, a pursuit which is necessarily destructive and short-sighted. In other words, capitalism.
It is due to this system that states are incapable of conceiving of any alternative to so-called ‘green growth’, after it has been proven time and time again that fossil fuel use cannot be decoupled from GDP. It is also due to this system that the form this utopian green growth would take - the ‘green transition’- is dependent upon a new wave of extraction on a colossal scale to access the necessary minerals; the core of capitalism is located in the Global North, and its survival is based upon the exploitation of cheap labour and resources in the Global South. Language such as ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, which features in much of the discourse surrounding the conferences, hides the North’s responsibility for the economic stagnation in much of the South, and in doing so allows the former to get away with paltry finance deals in which what they promise to give is a fraction of what they take every year.
Nevertheless, there is hope. Advocates of a ‘degrowth and delinking’ approach argue that a shrinkage of the Global North’s economy - a consumerist economy which produces excesses and which is responsible for 92% of global excess CO2 emissions - is crucial to mitigating, and adapting to, the change in our climate. This does not necessitate a decline in living standards: a restructuring of the economy could reorient production towards the goods and services needed for human wellbeing whilst cutting down high-emission sectors, and consequently, overall emissions. This ‘degrowth’ would be accompanied by an economic ‘delinking’ of the Global South from the Global North - that is to say, a break with the subordination of economies in the former to those in the latter. In this scenario, it would be likely that many countries in the Global South would still require some degree of growth, but this growth would be of a limited and much more sustainable nature, assisted by some reappropriation of funds and resources from the Global North, and not subordinated to the logic of the market economy.
2024 was once again the hottest year on record. Millions have already died from changes in the climate attributable to the capitalist mode of production; millions more will die in the years to come. Radical economic change seems out of reach, but one thing is certain: a crisis cannot be solved by the system that created it. COP is a manifestation of that system and, therefore, is not fit for purpose.
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