COP29 And The Farce Of Climate Summits

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.