Net Zero

1. Finance talks deadlocked
2. More lights on
3. Trump’s wind headwinds
4. China overtaking Europe
5. SAF’s green premium

How to survive the last few days of COP.

COP29 finance talks at an impasse

As time runs out on COP29, negotiators are stalled on the same questions that brought them to Baku: How much money to raise for climate action in developing countries, and how to raise it.

The main point of contention, negotiators say, is a paradoxical conflict between those two questions: No one can agree to a fundraising target without first agreeing on how it would be met, but developing countries want to veto any accounting structure that would result in a lower target. There are also divisions amongst developing countries on the extent to which private investment could be counted toward the target, and on whether to compromise with richer nations on the portion of finance that could be delivered as loans, as opposed to grants.

“It’s not going well,” Juan Carlos Monterrey-Gomez, Panama’s special representative for climate change, told Semafor. “After more than two years of technical negotiations and every kind of convening you can think of, we haven’t really advanced much.” There is “definitely a risk,” he said, that the summit ends without a deal.

More light in more places

The number of people worldwide lacking access to electricity fell to a record low in 2024, reversing a setback last year.

Electricity access improved in all regions of the world, including in sub-Saharan Africa where 80% of the global population that lacks energy lives. Major power plant projects in India and Indonesia have brought those countries to full power access for the first time, and distributed solar and microgrids are making inroads in Africa. But overall the world is not on track to achieve universal electricity access by 2030, the International Energy Agency warned, without more investment in expanding the grid.

Trump headwinds for wind

The incoming Trump administration could mean turbulence ahead for the already-struggling US wind industry. On the campaign trail, US President-elect Donald Trump promised to end new offshore wind projects — a longheld pet peeve of his — on his first day in office. And his choices to lead the Energy and Interior departments are both bad signs for wind, analysts at the market research firm Capstone warned this week.

In a worst case scenario, with a congressional repeal of wind tax credits, new wind project construction could fall up to 30% onshore and 45% offshore by 2035, according to BloombergNEF. Short of that, the administration is still likely to throw up hurdles to lease auctions for projects on federal land, cut wind-related R&D spending, and potentially place tariffs on turbine hardware imported from China, all of which would compound the rising prices and supply chain snarls that have hammered the industry in the last few years. Then again, offshore wind is popular with some Republican lawmakers, including incoming Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD).

China overtakes Europe

Cumulative metric tons of CO2 produced by China since 1850, putting it ahead of the European Union for the first time. China’s total historic emissions still lag far behind the 532 billion tons produced by the US. But the country’s rapidly-expanding carbon footprint is an important factor in the COP29 talks: China wants to remain aligned with developing countries and avoid direct responsibility for climate finance. Yet though it has by far the world’s largest clean energy industry, and its per-capita emissions remain relatively low, the new data indicate that China’s share of the global carbon budget is getting harder to overlook.

SAF’s green premium

More government action is needed to make sustainable aviation fuel cost-competitive with traditional fuels at the necessary scale, a top US Energy Department official told Semafor. A growing number of airlines are willing to buy SAF to replace conventional jet fuel, drawn by tax credits in the US, and pushed by European regulators and airlines’ climate-conscious corporate customers. But there aren’t nearly enough early movers willing to stomach a “green premium” that can be up to 10 times the cost of conventional fuel, said Vanessa Chan, the DOE’s chief commercialization officer.

Without more buyers, manufacturing won’t scale up, and production costs won’t come down. “We have this chicken-and-egg situation,” she said. “Everyone is first in line to be eighth or ninth.” To lower the cost curve, the number of full-scale SAF plants in the US needs to grow from four today to at least eight, she said. And to get there, more policies are needed, which could include a SAF blending mandate, more generous tax credits that are based on a fuel’s carbon intensity rather than on production volume alone, and a better system to allow corporate fliers to count SAF-fueled flights against their company carbon footprint.

New Energy

• Oil majors, especially BP and Chevron, are ramping up production of biofuels, especially SAF.
• Australia declined to join a new agreement between the UK and US to share advanced nuclear power technology.

Fossil Fuels

• The US crude oil market is flashing its biggest warning signs of oversupply in at least nine months.

• A group of 25 countries and the European Union agreed to include a commitment banning new unabated coal power plants in their next Paris Agreement climate plans. The group doesn’t include China, India, or the US. Vietnam, meanwhile, plans to ramp up coal power next year.
• Namibia thinks that oil and gas can allow it to double its GDP. Some Namibians remain skeptical the drilling boom will actually benefit them.
• The Canadian province of Alberta is planning to use Trump’s return to office to streamline approval for new crude oil export pipelines.

Tech

• For a new generation of architects, net zero buildings aren’t enough — the hot new building trend is buildings that are net climate positive.

Minerals & Mining

• The Kremlin is taking new measures to restrict exports of enriched uranium to the US, leveraging one of its few remaining unsanctioned energy resources and threatening the revival of the US nuclear power industry.

Food & Agriculture

• Only 3% of global climate finance goes to farmers, leaving the food system on the margins of COP29.

Alden Meyer, senior associate at the think tank E3G. Meyer has attended all but one of the 29 COP summits (he missed COP7 in Marrakech to work on power plant emissions legislation in Washington).

Donald Trump may be interested in using steep new tariffs to pay for tax cuts next year, but Republican lawmakers are far from sold, Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Kadia Goba reported.

“I don’t like tariffs, Number One. I think the consumer pays them. So they’re regressive. They’re a sales tax, basically,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told Semafor.