What Comes Next after COP 29?
With the dust settled in Azerbaijan, three clear takeaways from possibly the weirdest climate summit yet.
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In a year of elections defined by anger and widespread burn-it-all-down sentiments, perhaps the most notable fact of the UN’s COP 29 climate talks was that negotiators in Baku didn’t entirely follow suit.
Not that anyone was happy with the outcome of the much-anticipated “climate finance COP.” On paper, this was going to be the COP where the rich countries responsible for much of the emissions driving climate change finally committed to an ambitious finance deal to help the developing countries hit hardest transition away from fossil fuels and adapt to a warmer world.
Tell World Leaders: Phase out Fossil Fuels and Transition to Clean Energy.
In reality, in 2024, rich nations facing growing populist backlashes at home were never going to agree to the $1.3 trillion annual goal that developing nations and China demanded. And when the gavel came down with an agreement that instead offers only $300 billion annually by 2035, developing nations weren’t just unhappy – they were furious.
As Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change, put it, “Developed nations always throw text at us at the last minute, shove it down our throat, and then, for the sake of multilateralism, we always have to accept it, otherwise the climate mechanisms will go into a horrible downward spiral, and no one needs that.”
That talks ended with a bad deal rather than no deal at all was actually no small victory. As Climate Reality Vice President for Science and Solutions Ryan Towell noted from on the ground, “Talks almost completely broke down many times. Developing countries were walking out.”
One way to read the fact they didn’t is as an implicit recognition of the stakes at COP 29. Not just for the finance deal and the success or failure of these talks, but – especially with the election of a US president preparing to take the country out of the Paris Agreement – for the future of global climate efforts.
But if two weeks of talks in the self-proclaimed “Land of Fire” made anything clear, it’s that the movement is facing a whole landscape in the lead up to COP 30 in Brazil next year and what may be the most important COP summit ever. Shaped in part by three factors in particular.
Fossil Fuel Interests Are Done Pretending
In 2023, COP 28 in the UAE made headlines with countries agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels in their energy systems. It wasn’t the agreement to completely phase out coal, oil, and gas advocates were demanding. But it was somehow the first time in history a COP document mentioned the prime driver of the existential threat negotiators gathered to tackle.
At the time, the agreement – deeply flawed and full of industry give-away loopholes big enough to sail an LNG tanker through – felt like a potential first step toward a true phaseout and a rapid shift away from fossil fuels. The “Beginning of the End” of the fossil fuel era ran the headlines.
It may also have been a blip.
For all the advance billing as the “finance COP,” COP 29 turned out to be just as much the “fossil COP” with a two-week petrostate and industry flex that made the case for COP reform better than any white paper could.
Setting the tone here was Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, who opened proceedings defiantly praising his nation’s oil and gas reserves as “a gift of the god.” No surprise, of course, coming just a few days after the Azeri chief executive of the conference itself was caught on camera offering to use COP 29 to broker oil deals.
Then there was Saudi Arabia, which began working just days after COP 28 to undermine the pledge it had just signed, so transition and phaseout never entered the agreement lexicon again.
In Baku, Saudi negotiators weren’t even hiding their intentions, twisting the arcane COP process to repeatedly shift conversation away from any consideration of fossil fuels and run down the clock, successfully blocking moves to add substance and next steps to last year’s “transition away” declaration. Behind closed doors, things went from bad to mind-boggling, with a Saudi negotiator somehow getting editing access to draft agreement text when no other nation could and reportedly deleting key language on just energy transition goals.
Meanwhile, over 1,700 fossil lobbyists attended the conference as delegates – more than represented almost any other country.
So what can we do? While preventing savvy petrostates from sabotaging discussions is complicated, the path to limiting corporate bad-faith influence is a little more straightforward. Speaking at a special Climate Reality event midway through, former US Vice President Al Gore outlined five potential criteria for any fossil fuel delegate to attend future COPs:
- Do they have a real and credible net zero commitment in the company they’re from?
- Do they have a plan to phase down the production of oil and gas?
- Are they committed to full disclosure of their global warming pollution?
- Are they spending an adequate share of their windfall profits on the transition to clean energy?
- Will they end their anti-climate lobbying and greenwashing?
As he told audience members, “If they can’t pass that test, they ought not be allowed to participate in these COPs because that proves they’re not here to help.” And though limiting lobbyists alone won’t solve the influence problem, it could be a good place to start. Because based on what we saw in Baku, something has to change.
Climate Finance Needs a New Marketing Department
One of the clearest takeaways from Baku was the limits of the moral case for climate finance. Few dispute that climate impacts disproportionately poor nations with virtually no contribution to global emissions or the massive investments necessary to avert catastrophic warming – estimated by one study to reach $6.3–6.7 trillion annually by 203o.
The trouble for developing nations is that in 2024, rich Western countries have limited political appetite to reach anything like the $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 demanded.
As painful as it is to admit, what election after election in 2024 told us is that – by and large – climate seems to be slipping down the list of priority concerns for the voters donor country delegates in Baku had to come home to. What polls tell us is top of the list in both the US and EU is the cost of living at home. With populist parties with anti-climate and domestic-first agendas now ascendent, it adds up to an environment where increasing support from public coffers to finance energy transition abroad to anything like the levels required is going to be tough. No matter how clear the moral case.
It might be time for a strategic rebrand.
One of the core facts of the climate crisis is that we succeed or fail together as one planet. Developing countries need energy to grow. If rich countries won’t provide the financing and technology to enable them to overwhelmingly choose clean energy sources to power this growth, they’ll simply go to the next cheapest or more readily available option. Which may be oil, gas, or coal.
There is a now-or-never quality to the choice. Developing countries today account for roughly half of global energy consumption (though at a much lower per-capita rate than richer peers) and this is poised to grow by at least 30% in coming decades. Which means investing in new capacity and infrastructure with a decades-long lifespan. If this investment heads largely toward coal plants that pollute for decades, any talk of limiting warming to 1.5 or even 2 degrees begins to look like a cruel joke.
As former USAID Administrator Raj Shah told Politico, "without cheaper access to finance, coal and diesel are projected to supply energy for the nearly 3.5 billion people today who consume less than 1,000 kilowatt-hours of power annually . . . 'If we don't make the changes now, in two decades, we lose the fight on climate. Period. "
The developed world has a simple choice. Figure out the financing one way or another to support rapid energy transition in developing countries or face the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
This will of course require some creative thinking. One suggestion for the US has been a Marshall Plan for clean energy, where climate finance under a business-focused White House becomes a vehicle to expand markets for American green tech firms abroad. Another with more global reach is the idea of “solidarity levies” championed by Barbados, Kenya, and France, which would place low-level taxes on high-wealth and carbon-intensive activities like private flights, cryptocurrency, and stock and bond trades. For all the questions both ideas still have to address, they’re indicative of the need for fresh approaches to a sticky problem.
Because with the clock ticking, we need a new way forward. If the moral case for climate finance doesn’t go far enough, maybe the business case can. And if that too fails, there’s simply the case for survival.
The Climate Fight of the Next Decade Will Not Look like the Fight of the Last One
There was no mistaking the shadow of an incoming Trump presidency looming over COP 29. The US delegation, so often a major player in COP negotiations, was as South African Environmental Minister Dion George told Politico, “more ‘subdued’ when ‘normally they talk a lot.’”
Subdued because without any expectation the next White House would honor the promises of the current one, the US was, in the words of Professor Richard Klein at the Stockholm Environment Institute, “not just a lame duck, it's a dead duck. They can't commit to anything."
The result, as Adam Tooze wrote in the FT, “Insofar as there is to be a global climate leader it can now only be China.”
The reasons are not hard to grasp. China is both the world’s largest emitter and clean energy superpower, producing 35% of its electricity with renewables. The nation is showing the world what the future of electric mobility looks like, with 8.1 million EV registrations in 2023, or nearly 60% of the global total. China is also home to the overwhelming majority of global clean energy manufacturing capacity, with the resources to back national commitments with industrial muscle.
The downside of course is that authoritarian governments are notoriously resistant to citizen demands and global pressure for climate action. There are inherent dangers too in concentrating too much vital clean energy manufacturing in a single nation. Not merely for the supply chain vulnerabilities it introduces, but also for the concentration of power it gives a government willing to use export restrictions on key clean energy ingredients like critical minerals in trade war tit for tats.
In a best-case scenario, the success of China in using clean energy manufacturing to drive growth becomes a model that even climate-skeptical governments in the West look to as a model. Regardless, with the US stepping back, the face and voice of climate action is changing profoundly – and we all have to figure out how to adapt and keep moving forward.
