Key events
What if the US pulls out of the Paris agreement?
This is the question that everyone is asking. But, as my colleague Fiona Harvey points out, “we’ve been here before”.
Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement seven years ago, when he was president last time around, after all. The impact, she says, will be managed, and twin negotiating tracks will be set up to keep the US at least part of the process.
Yesterday our colleague Oliver Milman reported on the damage Trump could do to his own country if he tries to repeal major climate policies.
Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80bn of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50bn in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.
“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.
“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.
There is more discussion at Cop today, according to my colleague Dharna Noor, about the worrying reports that Argentina’s leader Javier Millei is mulling over pulling out of the Paris agreement.
“We’re reevaluating our strategy on all matters related to climate change,” the country’s foreign minister, Gerardo Werthein, told The New York Times, adding that the country had fundamental doubts about what is driving climate change. The Washington Post also reported the news, citing an unnamed government official.The Argentinian embassy in Baku did not respond to a request for comment.
In the past Argentinian President Javier Milei has described climate change and the international effort to contain it as a “socialist lie.”
On Thursday, he met with Trump at the incoming president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Milei was the first head of state Trump received in person since winning the Nov. 5 election.
During his campaign, Trump said he would withdraw the United States from the Paris deal. The U.S. left briefly during Trump’s first term. But no other countries followed.
For those interested in the finer nuance of China’s positions (ie all of us) Carbon Brief’s China briefing pulls together their statements at Cop and over the last few months in a way which is extremely useful.
China is clearly willing to push itself forward a bit more:
Wen Hua, deputy director-general of the Department of Resources Conservation and Environmental Protection of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top planner, told the methane event that “China is willing to take a more active role in global climate governance”.
But the divisions mentioned in the previous post, over whether China should still be making contributions as a developing country rather than a developed one (which would involve much heavier financial expectations) continue. Carbon Brief notes:
China entered the “finance COP” under pressure to play an upgraded role in climate finance, as “huge divisions” emerged over how much money should be paid into the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) and by whom, the Financial Times reported. Beijing has “firmly rejected” these calls, according to Agence France-Presse, which quoted a Chinese official “warning on Sunday during a closed-door session that the talks should not aim to ‘renegotiate’ existing agreements”. The state-run broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN) quoted envoy Liu calling on “developed countries to take the lead in providing financial assistance to developing nations”.
But they do note that: “Speaking to Carbon Brief in May, Li Shuo, director at ASPI’s China climate hub, said that one possible solution, in his view, was to leverage China’s position as “the biggest solution provider” for low-carbon technologies to encourage it to “provide finance or facilitate investment” in developing countries’ energy transitions, allowing China to find a palatable role for itself in an outer layer of a potential “onion” structure for the NCQG.”
According to an interesting piece in the Africa Report, African countries at Cop are wary of alienating China.
But this year, the main issue at stake in the negotiations is the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG). In the jargon of climate finance, this is the amount that developed countries will have to provide to vulnerable countries to help them adapt to climate change.
When they signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, the developed countries undertook to allocate $100bn a year from 2020 onwards – via loans and grants – to finance projects that enable developing countries to adapt to climate change (rising sea levels, drought, etc.) or help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This amount was not reached until 2022, but is due to be renegotiated upwards this year.
The story reports that:
The developed countries are also lobbying to broaden the base of contributing countries to include the “new polluters”: China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, among others. “The African Group will not be supporting this proposal, as it is too sensitive and we don’t want to alienate China,” says an African negotiator.
The African countries are also members of the G77, the group of developing countries to which China belongs.
“It’s a powerful group, so we can’t go off on our own, not to mention that it’s in the interests of individual African countries not to antagonise such a major trading partner and investor,” the negotiator adds.
Food prices at the conference spark frustration
Damian Carrington
There is always anger and outrage at injustice at climate Cops, but one target of this might surprise you – the outrageous price of the catering inside the closed conference.
Delegates needing perking up after a late night of negotiating have to shell out $10 for an Americano with soy milk. Think a single espresso might do the trick – $3.50 appears to be the cheapest coffee on offer. How about vitamin C boost? A small grapefruit juice is $11.
Those feeling peckish after hours trailing around the vast venue need to dig deep. At the budget end, a “chicken toast” sandwich is still $9.50, a beef bagel – with “canned beef” is $11 and a salmon buddha bowl is $16.50. A sweet treat to lift the mood? A small chocolate bar sets you back $5.50.
If it’s an actual meal that’s required, a frankly horrible “groot” vegan burger, fries and coke will dent your budget by $23. For comparison, you can get a whole pizza, soup, salad and soft drink for less than $10 in Baku city.
It is the most expensive catering the Guardian can remember at a Cop and can only be described as price-gouging exploitation of delegates trapped in the giant conference site all day. Returning to the city for a cheaper bite would involve at least 90 minutes of travel.
The issue is actually a serious one. Climate Cops are where every country in the world comes to make its case and many of those most affected by the climate crisis are poor. High costs mean they can bring few delegates, making their voices less heard, and that is unjust.
“It’s crazy – for one stupid sandwich, you pay the same as what we paid for the whole week [outside the conference],” says Sandra Guzman, from Mexico. “Outside the conference, everything is so cheap, and then you come here.”
“It’s not fair at all – not at all,” she said. “And this is precisely why delegations from smaller countries have only one or two people – they cannot afford it.” Rich country delegates run to hundreds and even thousands of delegates.
Some delegates have been forced to improvise. One South Pacific delegate has a half-eaten Pot Noodle on her desk, having been stung for $33 the previous day. She took warm water from a water fountain to make it. Even those from rich nations are unhappy. “It’s super super expensive,” said a US delegate. “That sandwich was $15 – I mean really!
Azerbaijani journalist, Oruj Alasgarov, has also been investigating the prices: “A lot of people are very angry.” The lack of the usual long queues at Coop for food and drink suggests many people are balking at the prices.
For any delegate feeling extremely flush there is a bar. Among the offerings there are a bottle of red wine – Solaia 2016 – for $1940. It appears to be available online for about $500. The cheapest red wine – Meyseri Mekhmeri – is a comparative snip at $74. There’s also Dom Perignom Brut champagne at $880 and the cheapest sparkling wine – Astoria brut – is $69.
If spirits are your thing, there’s Don Julio 1942 tequila at $80 a shot. How many of these extortionate drinks are being bought is unclear. Some bottles of champagne have shifted, the Guardian was told, but delegates have resisted the cognac on offer so far, priced at $35 -$80 a go.
Rapacious catering costs have been an issue at some previous summits. At Cop27 in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, protests at ludicrous prices led the organisers to halve the cost of the drinks and provide lower cost food options. The UN and Cop29 have been contacted for comment. They have already had to “highlight” the vegan and vegetarian food options available, after “queries”.
China has powered up the world’s largest open-sea offshore solar farm, according to Electrek. Power company CHN Energy has connected the first solar units from a one gigawatt (GW) offshore solar farm – the world’s first and largest of its kind – to the grid.
The massive project is located off the coast of Dongying City in Shandong Province, eastern China.
The project sits 8 km (5 miles) off the coast and spans an impressive 1,223 hectares (3,023 acres). It uses 2,934 solar platforms that rest on large-scale offshore steel truss foundations, each platform measuring 60m (197 feet) by 35m (115 feet).
It’s the first time in China that a 66-kilovolt offshore cable paired with an onshore cable has been used for high-capacity, long-distance electricity transmission in the solar sector.
Once completed, this offshore solar farm is expected to generate 1.78 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually – enough to power around 2.67 million urban homes. It could also help save about 503,800 tons of standard coal and cut down carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 1.34 million tons annually.
The project also includes fish farming, making better use of the marine space by integrating renewable energy with aquaculture.
‘Fossil fuel industry has seized control of COP,’ says Al Gore
More concern about whether Cop29 is really functioning properly. The wires are reporting that former US vice president Al Gore said yesterday: “It’s unfortunate that the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree.
While the Dubai summit produced a global agreement on “transitioning away” from fossil fuels, the follow-up commitment “has been very weak” and the issue “is hardly even mentioned” at COP29, he said.
“I have to think that one of the reasons for that is that the petrostates have too much control over the process.”
Other critics have used even stronger language. Graham Gordon, Christian Aid’s Head of Global Advocacy, said that “having fossil fuel lobbyists at a climate summit is like inviting a drug dealer to a rehab centre.”
And David Tong from campaign group Oil Change International told AFP that “It’s like tobacco lobbyists at a conference on lung cancer.”
The frustration is palpable.
My colleague George Monbiot has written about climate change, and about whether the Cop process is any use at all in dealing with this issue. He concludes … not.
Imagine, as many people do, an all-seeing eye in the sky, looking down on planet Earth. Imagine seeing what it sees. It watches, over the course of decades, ice caps shrinking, rainforests retreating, deserts expanding, ocean circulation slowing, freshwater dwindling and sea levels rising, and it thinks – for it has been there since the beginning – “this is familiar”. All the signs are there, of an Earth system sliding towards collapse, as it has done five times since animals with hard body parts first evolved…
The eye roams across the planet, seeking, in vain, actions commensurate with the scale of the hazard. It alights upon a capital of one of the industries driving this disaster, Baku in Azerbaijan. It finds, to its great surprise, that representatives of almost every government on Earth are gathering here – of all places – to discuss the great predicament. At last! But again, as it looks more closely, it notices weirdly conflicting signals. It sees a process that could scarcely be better designed to fail, and no serious attempt to reform it. It discovers that the event is chaired by a former executive of the oil industry. Well, at least this could be seen as an improvement on last year’s meeting, chaired by a serving executive of the oil industry. It finds that, yet again, this meeting looks more like a trade fair dominated by the interests it is supposed to curtail than a serious attempt to address the species’ greatest threat. Indeed, the Azerbaijani government has used the event to try to arrange new fossil fuel deals. It notices that some of the governments gathering in Baku are using the unravelling in the US as a licence to downgrade or abandon their own feeble efforts.
It discovers that the governments meeting there are prepared to consider any policy except those that might actually succeed: leaving fossil fuels in the ground and ending most livestock farming. Now they are betting on carbon markets: a futile, impossible attempt to offset with contemporary withdrawals from the atmosphere the hundreds of millions of years’ worth of carbon being brought to the surface.
Ajit Niranjan
Europe is planning a sizeable expansion of its fossil gas capacities, a report has found, even as its politicians brandish their climate credentials at Cop29.
Europe is planning and building 80 gigawatts of fossil gas-fired power capacity, according to research from Beyond Fossil Fuels and Greenpeace. Half of the planned increase will come from just three countries, two of which – Italy and Germany – have promised to largely decarbonise their electricity grids by 2035. The third, the UK, is shooting for an even earlier date of 2030.
Alexandru Mustață, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, said the plans were “dangerously out of step” with the countries’ climate targets.
“We didn’t enter the digital age by bulk-buying typewriters, and we won’t build a clean power system by constructing so many new gas plants,” he said.
Used sparingly, gas-fired power plants can be a helpful addition to an otherwise clean energy grid for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. But energy experts have warned against investing heavily in gas infrastructure that will sit unused if the continent meets its climate goals – or that will continue to burn fossils in large quantities if it does not.
Once new power plants are built, campaigners fear, there will be less incentive to build carbon-free sources of electricity at the rapid pace needed to keep the planet from heating 1.5C (2.7F).
The report comes in the same week that the European Commission announced a partnership with the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) at Cop29 to speed the shift towards fossil fuels. The EU is not part of the small group, though a handful of member states – Denmark, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden – have signed up.
The group’s declaration warns that continued investment in oil and gas encourages “locking-in” high carbon pathways, “contributing to dangerous climate change, while at the same time increasing the risk of stranded assets.”
At least 1,773 lobbyists have been given access to Cop29
My colleague Dharna Noor has covered a new report which find that at least 1,773 coal, oil, and gas lobbyists have been granted access to the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan. The report raises serious concerns about the planet-heating industry’s influence on the negotiations.
Those lobbyists outnumber the delegations of almost every country at the conference, the analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition shows, with the only exceptions being this year’s host country, Azerbaijan, next year’s host Brazil, and Turkey.
Sarah McArthur, an activist with the environmental group UK Youth Climate Coalition, which is a member of the KBPO coalition, said: “Cop29 kicked off with the revelation that fossil fuel deals were on the agenda, laying bare the ways that industry’s constant presence has delayed and weakened progress for years. The fossil fuel industry is driven by their financial bottom line, which is fundamentally opposed to what is needed to stop the climate crisis, namely, the urgent and just phaseout of fossil fuels.”
The 10 most climate-vulnerable nations have only a combined 1,033 delegates at the negotiations. “Industry presence is dwarfing that of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” the analysis says.
Meanwhile extreme weather events continue to batter different regions of the world. Carmela Fonbuena has written for the Guardian about the repeated typhoons which have been hitting the Philippines, one after another.
Usagi is the fifth major storm to hit the Philippines in just three weeks, with a sixth forecast for this weekend. At least 160 people have been killed and nine million displaced, while the unusual frequency has left people already struggling with the aftermath of previous heavy rains and flooding little time to prepare for the next strike.
Fonbuena spoke to residents whose homes had been partially or completely destroyed.
Typhoon Yinxing tore off a quarter of Diana Moraleda’s tiled roof in Tuguegaro City in northern Philippines last week. The gaping hole was still there when Typhoon Toraji brought rains over the weekend and when Typhoon Usagi made landfall late on Thursday.
“It’s difficult because many houses were devastated by [Yinxing]. The carpenters themselves are still fixing their own homes. It’s hard to find workers,” Moraleda said.
She spoke to other residents too.
Raffy Magno and his family lost nearly everything they owned when flood waters reached the second storey of their home in Bicol’s Naga City. Miraculously, their refrigerator sprang back to life once dried, but everything else, including appliances, furniture, clothing, and important documents, was destroyed.
“It was the shock of our lives. While we are so used to typhoons, even to floods, we never really expected the extent of the damage,” Magno said.
Even the Philippines’ president, Ferdinand Marcos, has admitted feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of extreme weather. A clip has gone viral of the president saying “I’m feeling a little helpless here” after finding out that government relief could not cross flooded highways.
Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a Filipino climate justice activist, says climate change is undeniable.
“If you still do not think that climate change exists, look to your neighbours; look to your countries. It’s happening across the world,” she said.
Friday at Cop29
Ajit Niranjan
Today is “peace, relief and recovery” day at Cop29 in Baku, a fitting theme for a year in which horrific violence has hit millions in countries such as Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and the DRC.
Researchers suggest that climate change has fuelled some major conflicts in recent history, though they are quick to stress it is just one factor among many. Increasingly scarce water supplies are among the risks for future wars – a finding that may be of particular concern to host country Azerbaijan, which depends on upstream sources outside of its borders for most of its water. (For a small note of hope: as economies switch from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy, conflicts over energy resources may well decline.)
Many world leaders took note of the aggression rocking the world in their speeches on Tuesday and Wednesday. Leaders from across the geopolitical divide, such as Belarus and the EU, spoke about violent imperialism and the need for peace. Several leaders criticised Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the muted international response.
“How can we work together for our shared future when some are deemed unworthy of life?” asked the crown prince of Jordan, Al Hussein bin Abdullah II. He was one of the few to draw an explicit link between war and climate, explaining how conflict compounds the environmental threats that people face. It’s a problem felt particularly acutely in Jordan, where refugees make up an estimated one-third of the population.
Azerbaijan has framed the whole summit as a “peace” Cop, eager to paint the country in a positive light after the blood shed in Nagorno-Karabakh last year. Whether the spin will encourage great cooperation in Baku on climate is yet to be seen.
Negotiations are otherwise inching forward, and a flurry of reports came out yesterday that may shape the deals done behind closed doors. It kicked off with the powerful finding that poor countries need $1 trillion a year in climate finance by 2030 – five years earlier than rich countries are likely to agree to, as my colleague Fiona Harveyexplained. Taxing crypto and petroleum-based plastics could be one of many creative sources of finance with serious backers, another report noted.
Yalchin Rafiyev, Cop29’s lead negotiator, described the text on the pivotal climate finance goal as “a workable basis for discussion for the first time in the three years of the technical process.” Others seem more sceptical.
Is the Cop system no longer ‘fit for purpose’?
Good morning! This is Bibi van der Zee, and we’ll be live blogging the events of the day at Cop29.
It’s day five, and things are beginning to get a little testy, after some extremely highly esteemed Cop watchers declared that the current system is no longer ‘fit for purpose’.
My colleague Fiona Harvey has written about their criticisms:
Future UN climate summits should be held only in countries that can show clear support for climate action and have stricter rules on fossil fuel lobbying, according to a group of influential climate policy experts.
The group includes former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, the former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, the former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and the prominent climate scientist Johan Rockström.
They have written to the UN demanding the current complex process of annual “conferences of the parties” under the UN framework convention on climate change – the Paris agreement’s parent treaty – be streamlined, and meetings held more frequently, with more of a voice given to developing countries.
“It is now clear that the Cop is no longer fit for purpose. We need a shift from negotiation to implementation,” they wrote.