A new COP climate deadlock looms

 https://socialismtoday.org/a-new-cop-climate-deadlock-looms

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A woman walks past a sign of the COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference on Oct. 31, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (REUTERS/Aziz Karimov/File Photo)

The annual UN Climate summit, COP29, will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan at the end of November. Like the previous summit in Dubai, the president of COP 29 will be from a petrostate. The COP28 president was quoted as saying there was “no science behind demands for phasing out fossil fuels and this would take the world back into the caves”. Presiding over COP29 will be Muktar Babaev who spent 26 years working for the state oil company in Azerbaijan.

The president of Azerbaijan has said that the country’s fossil fuel reserves are a “gift from the Gods”. Climate Action Tracker (CAT) in September said, “Azerbaijan is among a tiny group of countries that has weakened its climate target [and] the country is doubling down on fossil fuel extraction”. Having Babaev chairing COP29’s plenary sessions does not automatically mean he will try to undermine the meeting’s aims, but the signs are clearly not good.

Despite the phasing out of fossil fuels being agreed in Dubai, this ‘historic’ step forward will be challenged in Baku by the petrostates. Other contentious issues on the agenda will be the provision of finance for ‘developing’ poor countries to mitigate and adapt to global warming and the role of livestock emissions driving global warming.

The background to the summit is the growing tendency of capitalist governments to water down and retreat from previous positions on tackling climate change. When Boris Johnson became British prime minister in 2019, he promoted, along with Zak Goldsmith, a ‘green’ programme. This was not just populist, opportunist, greenwash and bluster; they thought they could create a profitable niche for British capitalism in the green economy. However, they soon found out that that horse had long since bolted, the low-wage high-tech Chinese juggernaut had already cornered the world market. Even before he was elected, Keir Starmer recognised this and abandoned his much vaunted ‘green new deal’ that was to be worth £28bn a year. Whether the current vicious trade war on China by the USA and EU over the ‘dumping’ of Chinese green technology changes the calculations of the Western capitalists remains to be seen.

The ‘green retreat’ by the Western governments was prompted by the growing complaints of their capitalists, who they represent, that their profits were being threatened. This does not mean the serious representatives of capitalism underestimate the huge threat global warming represents, but they will always prioritise the demands of their real masters, the big corporations.

BP was in the vanguard of the corporate retreat on global warming. After posing as a green champion, overnight the firm shamelessly abandoned its environmental targets in favour of oil and gas exploration in the Gulf and in Mexico. Not only oil companies are backtracking, but former green advocate Unilever has also rowed back on a whole series of measures to reduce emissions. At the AGMs of the companies it invests in, speculator investment firm BlackRock – with $11.5trn in assets, four times the size of the UK economy – voted to support only 20 out of 493 pro-environment resolutions in 2023/24. In 2022/23 it had supported nearly 50% of similar resolutions.

This was the background to the meeting in Bonn in June called to set the agenda and produce draft position papers for COP29. One aim of the Bonn meeting was to agree a new target to fund the cost to ‘developing’ nations of mitigation and adaptation to warming. At the 2009 Copenhagen COP, it was agreed to set a target of $100bn a year for this purpose. Although the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported the $100bn target was met in 2022, this was fiercely contested by the ‘Global South’ countries in Bonn. They pointed out the $100bn included double counting, re-labelling development aid as climate finance, and government loans rather than grants and private sector money, all against the intention of the 2009 initiative.

In determining a new target, there was deadlock on nearly every aspect of climate finance: the amount of money, who should provide and receive it, and what kind of funds should be included. The main disagreement was on the amount of money. Independent assessments estimated trillions of dollars a year will be needed. India, China and others came up with a figure of $1.1trn to $1.3trn a year – a large sum, but only a tenth of the assets controlled by BlackRock. The US, EU and other industrialised capitalist countries refused to come up with a specific figure. The US proposed the target should be “from a floor of $100bn a year”, ie not necessarily more than the 2009 figure.

What should constitute climate finance was also hotly contested. The Western powers wanted loans from private firms and banks and even the domestic spending of the ‘developing’ countries themselves to be included. There was no agreement on who should contribute to the fund, the West wanted China and the Gulf States to step up, something they flatly rejected, pointing out the industrialised West’s historical responsibility for global warming.

Another bone of contention related to the ‘Global Stock Take’ (GST) agreed at COP28, that included the ‘historic’ commitment to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. China, India and others, plus the Arab Group, opposed the GST being reflected in the decision text of the Bonn meeting, ie trying to backtrack on the ‘historic’ COP28. At the end of the Bonn meeting, the co-chairs produced a Draft Conclusions Text and an Informal Note. These were rejected by the developing countries’ group, who said the authors had no mandate. The two documents were finally agreed but included procedural issues only, and this only after further heated wrangling. The procedural issues where there was no agreement were shown in square brackets in the documents. No substantive questions were addressed.

‘Ratcheting up’ the national pledges made to cut emissions (nationally determined contributions – NDCs), part of the 2015 Paris agreement, are not on the agenda for COP29, the deadline for this being 2025. However, the omens are not good. Many of the participants from developing countries in Bonn said that it will be impossible for them to increase their NDCs without agreement on climate finance.

Another highly controversial issue that could feature at COP29 concerns livestock emissions that contribute to global warming. Methane emissions from cattle are major drivers of global warming, since methane is up to a hundred times more damaging than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. At COP28 a UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) document with an “updated comprehensive overview” of livestock emissions was launched. Twenty leading scientific experts, however, subsequently wrote to the FAO complaining it contained “multiple errors” and underestimated emissions savings from reducing livestock emissions by up to 40 times.

Agricultural emissions, mainly from livestock, make up about a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions, and ending livestock rearing would make a major contribution to tackling climate change. However, billions of people, particularly the poorest, currently rely on meat and dairy for nourishment and as their main if not only source of high-grade protein. Switching this number of people from meat and dairy will be an enormous task that can only be done voluntarily and is inconceivable under capitalism. Even with the advantages of democratic socialist planning it will take many decades. In the meantime, decisive action must be taken now on global warming.

The fundamental disagreement on nearly every issue at the Bonn meeting means the prospects for any real progress at COP29 are bleak. The deadlock in global climate negotiations reflects deepening antagonisms among the big powers. Disagreement over tackling climate change has now become an even more central factor in world relations. The battle for economic supremacy between China, the USA, and the EU, is currently sharply reflected in the trade war over Chinese exports of green technology such as electric vehicles and electrolysers for making pure hydrogen. This emphasises that the climate crisis cannot be separated from the wider struggle against imperialism and for a socialist alternative.