UN climate summit an expected failure
The main purpose of COP29, the twenty-ninth UN climate summit — this time held in the oil dictatorship of Azerbaijan — is said to have been to devise a plan for how rich countries can support poor countries’ financing of climate adaptation and transition. COP29 was instead a manifestation of the global powers’ indifference to human catastrophes in the wake of the climate crisis, which hits the poor first and hardest, while they focus on using war, a new arms race and geopolitical rivalry to saw off the branches we are all sitting on.
The agreement to channel at least $300 billion a year in aid to poorer countries from 2035 — which they were bullied into accepting — has been called by Oxfam “a soulless triumph for the rich, but a genuine disaster for our planet and communities who are being flooded, starved, and displaced today by climate breakdown.”
While the agreement triples the $100 billion a year pledge made in 2009, which only came close to being delivered in 2022, it is light years away from the $1.3 trillion demanded by poor countries and the $6 trillion a year which experts say would actually be needed to meet Paris Agreement targets.
How much poor countries will see of this $300 billion, which is said to come from “a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources”, is also unclear to say the least. It is, as the Oxfam spokesperson adds, “not even real ‘money’…rather a global Ponzi scheme that the private equity vultures and public relations people will now exploit.”
This is based on a kind of “emissions trading” that was already talked about in the Paris Agreement. With the help of this “carbon market”, oil states, such as the United Arab Emirates and Norway, large emitters like Germany and Japan, Sweden and others — could buy “emission credits” to offset their own continued emissions by financing, for example, renewable energy, rainforest protection or tree planting in poor countries. They can then count the estimated reduction in emissions or increase in removal of CO2 against their own targets.
Concerns about these kinds of market solutions are high and justified, not least among Indigenous peoples. In the run-up to COP28 in Dubai last year, it was revealed that vast tracts of African forest had been sold off in a series of huge carbon offset deals to a company in the United Arab Emirates overseen by a member of the Dubai royal family, raising fears of a neo-colonial chop shop.
A synthesis of studies of thousands of projects funded by carbon credits, published in Nature Communications in the first week of COP29, showed that less than 16 percent of carbon credits represented real emission reductions and that they have otherwise amounted to nothing but hot air.
“We currently see proposals on the table that would credit the natural absorption of carbon dioxide by forests. But these removals occur anyway and not because of any human intervention. If these credits are used by buyers to emit more, this would result in more carbon added up to the atmosphere. And the potential for issuing such credits is very large,”commented one of the co-authors.
Allowing BP and Shell, airlines, oil states and rich countries’ rulers to use emissions trading as camouflage to continue with “business as usual” is nothing but false solutions and empty promises.
Reducing deforestation and restoring forests could indeed be key measures in the fight against climate change, but this is no substitute for directly reducing CO2 emissions.
As Offensiv (paper of Socialistiskt Alternativ, ISA in Sweden) has pointed out, increasing deforestation in recent years, coupled with global warming-induced droughts, forest fires and tree diseases, has also greatly reduced the ability of ecosystems to capture carbon. As a result, it is taking longer and longer for newly planted trees to capture the amount of carbon dioxide promised in emissions trading. We would therefore need to plant and protect huge numbers of trees over several decades to offset even a fraction of global emissions, not to mention the consequences of the massive destruction from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
At a time when the world’s capitalist rulers are focused on cutting off the remaining branches we are sitting on, with all their focus on wars, the arms race and geopolitical superpower rivalry, COP29 became just another glaring example of green-washing on a global scale.
The COP processes are, as Greta Thunberg says, just “part of a larger system built on injustice and designed to sacrifice current and future generations for the opportunity of a few to keep making unimaginable profits and continue to exploit the planet and people.”
The only solution lies in new social tipping points being finally reached, where new mass movements of the world’s youth, workers, the poor and the oppressed understand the necessity of united revolts against both climate destruction and the wars, genocides and rampant injustices that today threaten all life on the planet.
