The new international climate conference, COP29, began yesterday without too much fanfare and with many important desertions. This time too, as in the last edition, it is held in an oil-producing country, Azerbaijan, in the capital Baku (last year, Cop28 was in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates).
The setting in which this conference also takes place it’s still the Paris Agreement. The 2015 agreement, strongly supported by the then US president Barack Obama, aims to contain global warming to within 2 degrees centigrade and to continue efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees compared to pre-existing levels. -industrial. The strategy followed to achieve this objective is a new form of indirect industrial planning, in which the State, in each nation, must impose limits on the emission of greenhouse gases and find strategies for absorbing the greenhouse gases emitted.
The focus of this conference in Baku is on “climate finance”: we will try to establish the “New climate financial objective” (NCGQ). In a nutshell: how much to give to developing countries, which cannot afford a green transition to the European one. In 2009, at COP15 in Copenhagen, the EU countries, the USA and other industrialized democratic countries (Australia, Canada, Japan, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and Switzerland) made a commitment to finance developing countries with 100 billion per year, until 2020, to carry out mitigation projects (reduction of global warming) and adaptation to climate change. In 2015, with the Paris Agreements, the commitment was renewed for another 5 years. Now we are approaching the deadline and an agreement is being sought to renew it again.
Developing countries, however, would also like to be compensated for what their governments calculate as “climate change damage”. Donor countries are not against it, but prefer to establish a separate fund, with separate management, a fund that was also the subject of debate in the last Cop, in Dubai, in 2023. Furthermore, developing countries ask, only for mitigation and adaptation costs, much higher funding. The estimate of 100 billion per year, calculated in 2009, is now insufficient. The Permanent Commission on Finance of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), after having collected the estimates developed by the governments of developing countries, calculates that at least 5 thousand to 9 thousand billion dollars are needed in the next five years. It goes without saying that the calculation is developed by governments who have every interest in receiving as much money as possible from the richest countries, this time not for the battle for development, but for the battle, considered more urgent and universal, of the climate.
The Azerbaijani president of COP29, Mukhtar Babayevfor this reason he speaks of the “moment of truth” on the Paris Agreement. Not to miss his catastrophism either, he states that “We are on the road to ruin.” But his country is the first to set a terrible example. Azerbaijan’s economy is driven by the hydrocarbon sector which represents approximately 90% of the country’s exports and 30% to 50% of its GDP, depending on the trend in oil and gas prices. A beautiful contradiction, considering that one of the strategic objectives of decarbonization is precisely the elimination of fossil fuels.
The European Union has always been the most zealous in the policy of reducing emissions. But leaders in its major member nations have shown that other issues are more important. In fact, both Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz are absent. The USA was there, represented by envoy John Podesta, the last member of the now outgoing Biden administration. The new president, Donald Trump, has promised to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. Podesta tries to reassure his colleagues in Baku, stating that «While the US federal government under Donald Trump may put action on climate change on the back burner, the work to contain climate change will continue in the United States with commitment, passion and conviction”, on the part of private individuals and local authorities.
But the underlying philosophy will completely change: no one will stop the entrepreneur, the mayor or the governor from being consistently environmentalist. What Trump wants to avoid is industrial planning at a national level, rigid quotas on emissions at a national level, restrictions on the development of technologies that are deemed too poorly compliant with the plan established by Paris. All policies that risk causing the US to lose the competition with China. The Asian giant, which formally joins Paris, has in fact doubled its coal plants in the last two years. It does not intend to give up its impetuous industrial development to reduce emissions.
If the US also withdraws, the EU will be left holding the bag: with a program of substantial de-industrialisation which is already causing upheavals in sectors such as the automotive sector, with serious consequences for employment. “Decarbonised” Europe alone will not make a difference in the global fight against climate change. Instead, it will make a difference for Europeans: making them poorer.
