Baranyai: COP29 summit adds to collective despair

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A lot of people are feeling like they don’t have much fight left in them. There is a perceptible turning inward. People are avoiding the news in record numbers. It’s understandable; reality seems to be unfolding in a fun house mirror. It feels as though someone put the ’60s mantra “turn on, tune in, drop out” in a martini shaker, gave it a good bruising, and poured out the words: Turn off, tune out, and drop back from the ledge!

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Still, for the sake of our future, we desperately need to engage. We’ve been standing so long on the precipice of climate disaster, some of our leaders have forgotten the ledge is made of melting ice.

The COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, got underway with little enthusiasm and much derision. Significant press coverage has focused not on policy objectives, but questions such as how a global climate conference came to be hosted by a repressive petrostate, and whether climate summits are even useful anymore.

There were similar grumbles last year at COP28. The Dubai summit culminated in a declaration calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” The impact of that historic feat was somewhat blunted by the fact it took the conference of the parties 28 years to acknowledge fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change; when they finally did, their declaration was nonbinding.

The UN followed that achievement by hosting its next event in Baku, the literal birthplace of the oil rig, in a deal brokered by Russia. If their actual objective was to lower the bar for future summits, they couldn’t have done much better.

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At this point, there have been more COP summits than Bond movies. Whereas the question of the next 007 still holds our attention, the summit in Azerbaijan has made itself maddeningly irrelevant. The leaders of the top carbon-emitting nations are a no-show.

Azerbaijani leadership is, itself, painfully misaligned with climate objectives. Oil and gas, which president Ilham Aliyev likes to call “a gift from God,” comprise 90 per cent of the host country’s exports. The president opened the world leaders’ summit with a defensive rebuke, saying nations should not be judged for bringing their natural resources to market.

Meanwhile his deputy energy minister, doing double duty as the chief executive of COP29, has been caught on camera apparently using his position to promote “investment opportunities” in the state-run oil and gas company, BBC reports.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has charged the autocratic nation with using its host status to “greenwash their crimes and human rights abuses.” Not so long ago, Thunberg was a featured speaker at COP24. At the age of 15, the young firebrand gave delegates a memorable tongue lashing for promoting “green eternal economic growth” over necessary change.

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“You are not mature enough to tell it like it is,” she scolded. “Even that burden, you leave to us children.” The activist has since given up on climate summits, noting if they actually led to change, “we would have seen results by now.” It is a crippling non-endorsement.

We’re on track to have the hottest year on record in 2024. The previous record for historic high temperatures, smashing all prior records, was set last year.

COP29’s worthy focus is to increase climate finance to developing nations in the global south, where the impacts of climate change are felt most urgently. The poor showing of international leadership, in a host nation with scant credibility, does little to bolster confidence in outcomes that resemble actual progress.

write.robin@baranyai.ca

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