Hadley’s view
Nobody imagined these last two weeks at COP29 would be easy. Getting to a just and equitable energy transition means coughing up an uncomfortable amount of money — at least $1 trillion a year for developing countries, activists and researchers say — at a time when the West is painfully cash-strapped, with anemic growth, wars in Europe and the Middle East, and elections that have made Washington’s future commitment at best uncertain.
“Elections have consequences,” John Kerry, the former US Special Envoy for Climate, told me. Whatever else is decided as the COP29 climate summit closes in Azerbaijan, “none… ultimately will rise to the level of what COP28 was able to accomplish. That was the most powerful thing since the Paris agreement was created, and now those plans have to be more specific, more comprehensive, and bigger.”
But with just hours to put a price tag on climate reparations owed by the world’s industrialized economies to their partners in the Global South, COP29 risks derailing a major accomplishment of its predecessor — namely, getting the right people in the room and keeping them there.
“It is a cycle of timing,” Kerry says, “but the mandate out of COP28 couldn’t be clearer, and that mandate is we must transition away from fossil fuels and do so in an orderly, just, and equitable manner.”
But whereas COP28 — led by Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi’s national oil company and the UAE’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology — was all about a necessary course correction, COP29 seems to have devolved quite quickly into a name-calling, ideological farce, with Azerbaijan’s president dropping truth bombs on day one. Oil and gas are a “gift of God,” he told the august assemblage, and no country should be blamed for using and exporting its natural resources in line with demand.
Not an unfair assessment, on the face of it. But with the climate community still smarting from the previous year — where for the first time fossil fuels were included in the final text in relation to the energy transition — it’s no surprise some participants would not welcome their hosts rubbing “God’s gift” in.
Meanwhile, the only attendee speaking much sense at all these last weeks — or even offering a plan — seems to be one of the former so-called “enemies” of climate change, Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil. Woods’ media blitz has included calling on President-elect Donald Trump to stick to the Paris Agreement, advocating the creation of a global carbon accounting system, and pushing an “all of the above” approach to the transition that includes fossil fuels alongside renewables.
“Dr. Sultan was courageous enough to push back [on the climate community writ large] and insist that oil and gas be invited in,” Woods told me. “The previous approach to date isn’t working, the policies aren’t working, despite effort and investment they aren’t having an impact — oil, gas, and coal are up. It is time to roll up sleeves and move from pledges to plans.”
It’s not the first time that the fossil fuel community has seemed to provide the COP process with the only grown-up in the room. But it’s about time those in the climate club understood that the only thing worth doing for governments and for corporations is something that makes commercial sense.
“It’s undoubtedly true that the COP process hasn’t yielded the necessary reduction in emissions overall,” admits the Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Kruppe. ”They are at their highest level ever in spite of 28 years of the COP process. We need access from everyone, everywhere to tackle this and we cannot rely exclusively on the COP. The evidence is plain.”
COP28 gave the world the roadmap. It’s on COP29 today to get the car on the road.