COP29 smells like oil

What’s happening—and not happening—at the biggest and most influential climate summit in the world.

Activists outside COP29 urge rich countries to pay their climate debts. So far, the world has made no progress in reducing polluting emissions. Source: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The world’s largest climate summit literally smells like oil.

Leaders from nearly 200 countries have come together at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan to strategize how to preserve a livable climate. But this year’s conference has been roiled by drama, as talks grind to a halt amidst the fumes from nearby refineries driving planetary heating. 

For the second year in a row, the chief executive of the climate conference was caught on tape making secret deals for oil and gas. The president of Azerbaijan opened the talks by praising oil and gas as a “gift from God,” then started a verbal feud with France that prompted the French environment minister to boycott the talks. Only days before the conference kicked off, Donald Trump was re-elected, signaling to other nations that the world’s largest economy will once again pull out of the Paris Agreement that the president-elect has called a “rip off.” And more than one week into the talks, delegates are deadlocked as they haggle over exactly how much money they should pay to prevent dangerous levels of planetary heating.

All this drama is playing out against a backdrop of the actual crisis those 198 countries are there to solve. This year is already on track to be the hottest year on record; the world is polluting more than it ever has; and countries are feeling the consequences of deadly hurricanes, raging floods, and famine-inducing droughts.

This year’s conference has been so messy, U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell told countries to stop fighting and get it together. “Let's cut the theatrics and get down to real business,” he told delegates at the end of the first week.

But with only two days left, negotiators still can’t agree on the most important question: how much climate funding wealthy countries are willing to give developing countries to transition away from fossil fuels. The slow progress prompted some former U.N. climate officials to publish a letter calling for significant reform, including barring countries that don’t support the phase-out of fossil fuels from hosting the summit.

Other environmentalists think that COPs should be scrapped altogether, because they focus too much on corporate and national interests, while doing too little to address the existential crisis. “When you sit in your tenth opening statement [at COP], and it’s all the same, it’s frustrating to think that no other world is possible,” Xiye Bastida, the executive director of the nonprofit Re-Earth Initiative, told Grist.

Before flying to Baku, Bastida and 200 others attended an activist and Indigenous-led “anti-COP” in Oaxaca, Mexico that focused on the needs of frontline communities. “For us, it’s not about the parts per million in the atmosphere, it’s about how our societies have transformed,” she said. 

Here’s more of what’s happening (or not happening) at COP29, the biggest and most influential climate summit in the world:

• Who pays for climate change? That’s the biggest question of the conference, and it’s a doozy. This year is called the “Finance COP” because rich countries are getting down to brass tacks about who funds the climate transition in countries that can’t afford it. Without help, poorer countries will be unable to transition away from fossil fuels, driving up emissions for the whole planet.

  
  But which countries should pay, how much, and the means by which those funds are distributed are all up for argument. Developing countries say that the fund should be $1.3 trillion per year, an amount that aligns with U.N.-backed expert recommendations. Rich nations, like the U.S. and European Union, would prefer to keep the amount closer to $100 billion a year, where it’s been for nearly a decade since the Paris Agreement. Developing nations counter that the world has plenty of spare change to spend on fossil fuels. “The reality of the situation is that $1.3 trillion pales in the face of the $7 trillion that is spent annually on fossil fuel subsidies," said Fiji deputy prime minister Biman Prasad at the conference.
  
  The debate has brought negotiations practically to a standstill, but a consensus has to be reached by Friday.
  

• Trump casts a long shadow over climate negotiations. Trump’s re-election only days before the start of the conference left Biden administration officials in the unenviable position of negotiating climate goals they know Trump won’t meet. "In January, we're going to inaugurate a president whose relationship to climate change is captured by the words 'hoax' and 'fossil fuels,’” said U.S. climate envoy John Podesta. The U.S. has previously played a critical role in shaping negotiations, and urging other countries to set more ambitious climate goals. That leaves a vacuum of leadership that another nation will have to step in to fill, most likely the European Union or China.

• But the president can’t reset climate action entirely. At the same time, Democrats tried to reassure world leaders that states, lawmakers, and market forces will pick up the slack. California Governor Gavin Newsom called a special legislative session to protect the state’s progressive climate laws. Democratic attorneys general and New York lawmakers are already preparing legal strategies to protect environmental laws. And unlike Trump’s first term, renewable energy is far more widespread, powering 30 percent of the world’s electricity. Washington Governor Jay Inslee told Time that “Donald Trump is going to be a speed bump on the march to a clean energy economy.”

• More lobbyists than delegates came to the climate talks. A whopping 1,700 coal, oil, and gas lobbyists attended COP29, outnumbering almost every country at the conference, according to an analysis by Kick Big Polluters Out. A further 204 agriculture lobbyists were given access to the conference, even though the sector contributes up to one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to DeSmog and The Guardian. While fewer than last year, many of those lobbyists came as guests of their host countries, which gives them access to the diplomatic negotiations that are usually closed to corporate interests. That includes 20 meat and dairy lobbyists that came with Brazil, which is hosting next year’s climate summit.

• But less world leaders showed up. Argentina pulled its delegation before the second week, after President Javier Milei said he is considering exiting the Paris Agreement. That would make Argentina only the second country ever to do so, after the United States.
  
  Other world leaders who didn’t show at all include: U.S. President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron, and Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof. That lack of attendance is concerning given the fact that every country is supposed to submit goals to cut their polluting emissions before next year’s COP30 in Brazil.
  

• Saudi Arabia is trying to undercut the world’s fossil fuel phaseout. Last year, for the first time ever, countries agreed to ramp down the production of fossil fuels—a move scientists say is necessary to preserve a livable climate. But Saudi Arabia has been working overtime since then to make sure that pledge isn’t repeated in any new agreements, The New York Times reports. So far, the country has attempted to nix any language about phasing out of fossil fuels from at least five U.N. resolutions—and from any agreements reached at COP29. Austria climate minister Leonore Gewessler told Reuters that Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries have been "very vocal in watering down the mitigation part" of the talks. Of course, Saudi Arabia isn’t the only petrostate that believes it should drill baby, drill. 

  
  On the other hand, a group of 25 countries and the EU pledged to stop building new coal plants, unless they have carbon capture technology. The U.S., China, India, and other large coal consumers did not back the pledge.
  

• Instead, alternatives to phasing out fossil fuels became more popular. Nuclear energy was the talk of the conference, with six new countries joining the now 28-country pledge to triple the world's nuclear power by 2050. The U.S. and U.K. also signed a deal for civil nuclear collaboration to speed up billions of dollars of new research. The clean energy source does not emit greenhouse gases, but some environmentalists say its toxic waste is just as dangerous.

  
  The talks also inched closer to agreement on a global carbon market, which has become a dirty word synonymous with greenwashing. But, in theory, a U.N.-backed global carbon market could allow rich countries or companies to offset their emissions by paying poorer countries who emit less. Leaders from developing nations and indigenous communities expressed skepticism that it would be any different from the corrupt voluntary markets currently in place. "It's going to do substantively nothing to actually reduce our emissions,” Eriel Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, told Reuters.
  

• Young people, Indigenous leaders, and small island nations reminded everyone why they’re there. Against a backdrop of politicking and wheeling and dealing, the people most affected by climate change tried to remind everyone that the climate crisis was happening to them—right now. “I think for a lot of young people from extremely climate vulnerable nations, it actually doesn’t feel like much of a choice,” Fathimath Raaia Shareef, a 20-year-old from the Maldives, told the AP about being part of the summit. 

  
  “We do feel abandoned,” Michai Robertson, the lead negotiator on finance for the Alliance of Small Islands States, told reporters. “And you have all the developed countries saying that we cannot include in the scope of this goal the financing to address that loss and damage,” he said. “That's a really tough pill to swallow."

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