November 11, 2024
COP29: About $2.4 trillion a year is needed, and on the face of it, the figure looks screaming, painful, impossible. In fact, we have been flooded with money.
This is the UN global climate summit. This is in progress, and there is a level of cynicism in this show. Not only that, the real smell of crude oil is also present in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where the world’s first oil well was sunk. It drips with irony, of course, that for the second year running politically repressive petrostate as the host country.
Moreover, the news of Mr. Trump’s victory in the US election has not immediately raised the mood here. These two factors, plus the absence of the main world leaders from China, the biggest polluter, then India, through France, Germany to Canada and of course, Joe Biden, means that we start from a low mood.
Joe Biden’s top adviser, John Podesta, is here today, and the main question for him is, what can the lame duck administration offer to try and save the world from human pollution in the time that is left? And if they have a rabbit to pull out of the hat, how far can White House lawyers go to avoid being dismantled over the next four years of the Trump administration’s denial of the climate crisis?
So for business and the most important thing this year is money. Frankly, the rich West, which caused the climate crisis with carbon pollution, must pay to protect poor countries, some of which are threatened by climate change and sea level rise.
About $2.4 trillion a year is needed, and on the face of it, that figure seems screaming, painful, impossible. In fact, we have been flooded with money. The oil and gas industry has generated revenues of $3.5 trillion per year since 2018, and beyond that there are some small tax adjustments, for example, in the global bond trade, which will provide hundreds of billions per year.
So lack of cash is not a problem. Political will, of course. But there is a sense that the beginnings of some kind of deal may have been discussed. The figure of $ 400-600 billion per year, it seems, has been played.
Keen to push this agenda, and indeed all green matters, of course, local matters from the new Labor landslide government. Keir Starmer has put the green energy transition at the center of the economic offer for the country and the buying country.
Delivery Man is here for that: Ed Miliband. Of course, the British always attend the summit. Boris Johnson’s spirit at the Glasgow conference still resonates in some quarters, but in the end, Conservative enthusiasm for the green transition and global climate diplomacy has waned to the point where Rishi Sunak is often at a loss to attend.
In short, there is a diplomatic mountain to climb in terms of this financial deal, no question about it. And the arrival of Mr. Trump? Well, that doesn’t make things any easier, we’d say. But it’s easy to get sidetracked by the show, seduced into forgetting that politics and diplomacy are only half the story and maybe less than that.
More than this big conference there is something called global business and capitalism and the green transition is increasing at least 11% every year. There is a flow of capital, investment, projects, hopes, promises, which are all over the world, and, yes, including the United States. The process, far from stopping or stuttering, continues to accelerate.
Witness 2023 when EU-wide greenhouse gas emissions drop by more than 8%. This is mainly due to the shift to green energy, now cheaper and more attractive than a decade ago when the Paris Accord on climate was signed.
So don’t see this conference as a solution to the climate crisis, more like a battery that turns the capital flow engine into clean green energy.
