A pall of anticipated disappointment hangs over the COP29 UN climate summit that kicks off in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on November 11.

World leaders are making their way to the meeting as the Climate Crisis accelerates faster than scientists predicted and in particular following the deadly flash flooding that recently hit Valencia in Spain, killing over 200 people earlier this month, and the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in the US.

Urgent action is needed, but it appears very unlikely that the leaders will agree on the concrete measures needed to keep temperature rises to the 1.5C above the pre-industrial base line agreed at the Paris summit in 2015.

The previous COP28 summit in the UAE was a cop-out. While it did produce a historic statement to limit fossil fuel use that was couched in terms of allowing “abatable” emissions – those where the CO₂ can be removed by carbon capture and storage (CCS) techniques. However, this technology does not exist at scale and the agreement gives countries de facto carte blanche to continue burning fossil fuels without restraint.

Emissions are currently at an all-time high and the UN warns that with current policies, the world is on track to see a “catastrophic” 3.1C increase in temperatures by the 2050 deadline, according to United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate models. The tragedy in Valencia and similar events elsewhere is going to become an annual event as a result.

As bne IntelliNews reported, large swaths of the globe are likely to become uninhabitable as a result of global warming. At the same time, temperature rises will heavily impact food production and billions will be exposed to rising food insecurity. Extreme weather events, droughts and deluges and increasingly powerful hurricanes have already become the norm since the start of the annual disaster seasons about two years ago, when the earth recorded a 1.5C increase in temperatures above the long-term average in every month of the year for the first time.

While there has been some progress in the deployment of renewable energy, there has been no progress in the reduction of burning fossil fuels. China is the global green energy champion and is reportedly close to peak emission, as it has rapidly rolled out more solar energy capacity than the rest of the world combined.

While China remains the biggest emissions source on the planet and is still replying on coal-fired power stations to fuel its strong economic growth, its rapid transition to renewable energy is well within its carbon budget – the amount of emissions it is allowed to make under the terms of the Paris agreement – and it is a poster boy for the responsible transition to green energy as agreed in Paris. China’s wind and solar power capacity overtook coal this summer for the first time.

India, another top three polluter, is even further inside its carbon budget and is also rapidly rolling out renewable capacity. Renewable energy has reached a critical mass and is widely being adopted across the whole of the Global South as it now makes economic sense as well as being the right thing to do: surging demand and plummeting costs have made renewable energy the answer to most of the emerging world’s energy needs.

The US is the climate delinquent as it has overspent its carbon budget by a factor of two and continued to roll out more new oil and gas projects under US President Joe Biden. While Biden can boast reductions in emissions and did pass significant legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that saw heavy investment in renewables, these efforts have served to mask the US extraordinary increases in oil and gas. Since the start of the so-called shale revolution in 2016, the US has ramped up oil and gas production and is now producing more oil and gas than any country at any time in history.

Moreover, things are likely to get worse under Trump, who campaigned on the slogan “pump, baby, pump.” Trump is likely to approve ever more extraction licences and is set to lift a ban on new LNG export terminals. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that the world cannot afford any new extraction projects if the world is to remain within the 1.5C temperature increases.

The US has been making too much money from hydrocarbon exports to want to stop. And 2023 saw the increase in LNG exports flat line for the first time since 2016 as production and export capacity maxed out, something that Trump wants to reverse to go back to growth and export even more LNG.

 

Financing the Global South

The prospects for addressing the issue of growing use of fossil fuels is likely to be delicately skirted around. The choice of Azerbaijan as the host of the summit – the birthplace of the global oil business – is a testimony to the flagrant disregard of the scale of the climate emergency.

Moreover, Azerbaijan's poor human rights record is an additional slap in the face, and something that the EU in particular has brushed over thanks to its thirst for more gas. After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Baku to meet with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and signed a contract for the supply of 20bcm of gas, ignoring the country’s poor reputation.

At a time where the world should be reducing its gas use, Azerbaijan is already supplying the EU with 13bcm of gas and hopes to increase that to 20bcm soon. It will use the event to lobby EU countries to build a new pipeline to link Azerbaijan’s giant Shah Deniz gas field directly to the EU to allow for increased deliveries. Human rights groups have called on the world’s leaders to castigate Aliyev on his human rights record while in Baku, something that the local administration has worked hard to quell including a crackdown on opposition activists and the arrest of journalists in the lead up to the event. And that is not to mention the rampant corruption where most of the wealth the hydrocarbon sector produces accruing to the Aliyev family and its associates.

Instead of all these issues, the summit is likely to focus heavily on funding the green transition of the world’s poorer countries. While this is an important issue, as emerging markets cannot afford the fickle renewable energy and still opt for simple and cheap alternatives like coal and gas, it is also a distraction from the main problem.

China, the US, India, Russia and Japan are the five biggest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and between them account for just over half (53%) of all emissions, according to the World Resource Institute. Any meaningful reduction in emissions has to start with these five countries – and China and India are on the track agreed in Paris to making the necessary reductions. Russia and Japan account for 5% and 3% of global emissions respectively. At 11% share of the total, the US is in a position to make the biggest contribution to reducing emissions but has already reneged on its Paris commitments and under Trump is likely to leave the agreement again entirely for a second time, champion fossil fuels, and roll back green subsidies.

The UN experts and climatologists have repeatedly called for urgent action and much more ambitious targets to limit warming to 1.5°C – and are routinely ignored.

Key negotiations in Baku will focus on climate finance, particularly the establishment of new funding commitments for developing countries to green their economies and adapt to the climate impacts they already face. Wealthy nations had previously committed $100bn per year in climate finance under the Paris Agreement, yet climate experts now estimate that at least $1 trillion per year will be required by 2030 to adequately support climate resilience and emissions reductions in just the low-income nations.

The outcomes of COP29 will be critical for setting the pace of global climate action in the years to come, as world leaders attempt to navigate geopolitical tensions, economic constraints, and the ever-growing urgency to address the Climate Crisis and it seems the summit will fail in these goals before it even starts.