Dyer: Climate conference engagement unprecedented

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It’s hard to imagine a less plausible venue for the annual UN-sponsored conference on climate than Azerbaijan. Baku, the capital, has a walled medieval centre that’s worth a day or two, but offshore, the shallow Caspian Sea is littered with a century’s worth of old and new oil wells.

Ninety per cent of Azerbaijan’s income comes from oil, so the optics of locating the climate conference there were challenging. However, it had the money to host around 50,000 government officials, think-tank policy wonks, investors and campaigners (plus a few climate scientists) for two weeks, and it needed some green-washing. So, the deal was done.

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The conference opened on Monday, a week after climate-change-denier Donald Trump won the U.S. election. The special attraction this year is that conference of the parties, COP29, will be the climate finance COP, where nearly 200 countries decide on a new climate financing target to replace the $100 billion a year pledge that expires this year.

That pledge was needed because the richer countries that industrialized long ago (and put most of the excess CO2 into the atmosphere in the process) must subsidize the poorer counties that are industrializing now so they put in clean power from the start. If they don’t, the warming goes crazy for everybody.

Back in 2009, they already knew the global south would need a lot of financial help to cover its share of the responsibility for shifting to clean energy, but it was early days and the analysis would take years. So, they settled for a token amount just to nail the principle down. ($100 billion a year is only about one-tenth of one percent of global GDP.)

That deal expires this year, and a much bigger deal has to take its place. The economists came up with a new target of $2.4 trillion a year to cover all the extra costs of ensuring developing countries install clean energy rather than fossil fuels.

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They reckon poorer countries can cover more than half of that themselves out of national budgets, private investments and low-interests loans, but about $1 trillion  a year will have to come as transfers from the rich countries. That’s around one per cent of global GDP, so now we’re talking real money.

It is very unlikely there will be an agreement on how to raise all this money this year in Baku. Even with the best will in the world, deciding on how large the contribution of each developed country should be and how the total sum can be shared fairly will take longer than that.

Moreover, the best will in the world may not be available. U.S. president-elect Donald Trump promises to take the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement again as soon as soon as he takes office, which will increase the financial burden on everybody else and generate considerable resentment.

Nevertheless, Trump is not a show-stopper. The U.S. contribution to the existing $100-billion-a year fund was $9.5 billion, less than one-tenth of the total amount. Current U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are only one-eighth of global emissions and have begun to decline, mainly because solar and wind are now cheaper.

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What is truly remarkable is not how long it took for us to reach this point in dealing with this very complex problem, but the fact that some 200 countries are actively engaged with it. In terms of human behaviour, this is an almost unprecedented level of global cooperation.

One could even believe holding the average global temperature below plus-two Celsius degrees remains possible if everything goes exactly right and all our assumptions about the speed of the warming remain true. Unfortunately, those assumptions are looking a bit doubtful, but that is a topic for another day.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England, and author of a new book about climate change, Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.

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