News / Muddy waters at COP29 obscure climate consensus – progress elsewhere, though

© Rana Mirzayeva

That COP29’s week in Baku has turned into an embarrassment is impossible to ignore.

Delegates may have set out with the best of intentions for a productive negotiation on climate finance; but were unprepared for the deeply unserious culture-war morass into which they have been subsumed.

Some 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists have been admitted to the summit. Argentina was the first to pull out of negotiations – unsurprising given that president Javier Milei has called climate change a “socialist lie” and, economically, does not believe the state should be left in charge of roadbuilding, let alone overseeing a green transition.

In contrast to last year’s event, where an undercurrent of fossil fuel industry business dealings was considered an embarrassing secret, Azerbaijan’s representatives appear unabashed in pushing pro-fossil fuel talk and dealmaking.

And they have also pointed out Europe’s hypocrisy in its extravagant demands for imports of fossil energy, following the cutting-off of gas supplies from Russia.

Germany, Italy and the UK are planning 80GW of fossil gas-fired power capacity between them, according to Beyond Fossil Fuels and Greenpeace research, while touting pledges to decarbonise their energy grids by 2035. France has pulled out from the summit entirely.

Al Gore, former US vice president, characterised the situation in grim terms: “…the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree,” he said. Transitioning from fossil fuels has been “hardly mentioned” and “the petrostates have too much control over the process”.

But what pledges and commitments could be made by the US’s Biden delegation, with climate-sceptic Donald Trump on his way to the White House? The only progress that seems to have been made is a downward revision of the target of $1.5trn, in climate handouts to developing countries, to $1tn, itself seeming distant.

What a relief, then, that next to negotiations at COP29, talks at shipping UN body the IMO appear to be moving forward at a blistering pace.

Rather than re-litigating whether climate science is real, the notion of a fuel emissions levy – where funds raised by taxing CO2 and methane emissions from rich-world shipping would be distributed to support decarbonisation in the developing world, particularly vulnerable island nations – nears the implementation phase.

IMO decarbonisation targets – whatever it decides to call them – are far-reaching and ambitious. And they are driving action in ship design, with early carbon-capture systems installed on ships, experiments with biofuel and power-to-x fuels and even a revival of wind propulsion.

In the airline industry, effort is already under way to build up a supply base for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and while certainly far from perfect, shareholders are exerting pressure on operators to bolster their climate commitments.

And in trucking, all-electric vehicles are slowly trickling into fleets, in some cases even proving capable of limited competition with their diesel forebears, despite being more than a century behind them terms of research and development.

Whether COP29’s delegates manage to agree that climate change is real, or that a reduction in the use of fossil fuels is necessary to fight it, the private sector is not waiting on international co-operation between governments to take action.

The situation was summarised well, by, of all people, Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, who has gone on the offensive in Baku this week.

“I’m not sure how ‘drill, baby, drill’ translates into policy,” he said, in reference to the Trump campaign slogan. “Let’s establish a global accounting system for carbon,” he told The Economist. “It doesn’t benefit our country going in and out, in and out.

“We will continue to advocate for the world to address greenhouse-gas emissions, and the world needs to do this on a collective basis.”

The Loadstar’s coverage of COP29 is sponsored by EVERGREEN LINE: leading the development of a sustainable global container transportation system.

To find out more about EVERGREEN LINE’s sustainability strategy please click HERE.