Minneapolis, MN – The 2024 United Nations climate conference, COP29, ended last Friday, November 22, after running into overtime, with little to show for its efforts. Every year, representatives from around the world convene at these conferences to negotiate agreements on how nations will cooperate – or not cooperate – to address the looming threat of climate change.
The attendees of COP, which stands for “Conference of the Parties”, as in, members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), are a wide mix, ranging from climate scientists to NGO delegates, to government bureaucrats, to heads of state. Some take an active role in negotiations while others are just observers. Like at the U.N. more broadly, countries of all types are represented at COP conferences, but it is an open secret that the U.S., Canada and the EU members are the ones who really run the show – and the problems manifested by this unfair arrangement are what took center stage at COP29, especially around the issue of “climate finance.”
When you boil it down, the recurring problem of the COP conferences are as follows:
First, the dominance of North America and Europe in climate negotiations is at odds with the fact that these are the nations who are most responsible for climate change.
Second, the effects of climate change are projected to be most severe in the Global South – not just as an accident of geography, but because those countries have been subject to systematic plundering and deliberate maldevelopment by the so-called “First World,” and now have the least resources to invest in green development or even damage control.
And third, these wealthy nations that have spent centuries rigging the world economy in their favor, and who are increasingly divided amongst themselves, have the least interest in implementing any changes that could further jeopardize their slipping foothold.
The struggle over climate finance
The big subject at COP29 was around the issue of climate finance, meaning, how the world is going to pay for one, the shift towards sustainable economies, and two, fixing the destruction we’re already starting to see from climate change, both in terms of building preventative infrastructure and financing “loss and damage funds” to replace things destroyed by wildfires, floods, and so on.
Throughout the conference, delegates from developing countries – particularly from those in Africa and South America – insisted that the scale of the crisis is going to require investment by wealthier nations on a massive scale, something in the order of $3-plus trillion per year. North America and Europe on the other hand, complained that there was simply no budget for this, that these numbers put forward by other countries were based on bad data, and that more of the burden should fall on the private sector rather than government money.
By the end of the nearly two-week conference, the goal was set that by 2035 the world would be allocating just $300 billion annually, with a sizable portion of that coming from private banks. Panama's climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez captured the mood felt by many representatives as they prepared to head home: “I’m so mad. It's ridiculous. Just ridiculous,” adding, “It feels that the developed world wants the planet to burn.”
The specter of Trump
Just days before COP29 began, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. In the past, Trump has called climate change a “hoax.” He used his powers during his first term to cut back environmental regulations and enforcement and has campaigned on doing more of the same. According to several reports, there was a general atmosphere of anxiety at COP29 that many of these negotiations wouldn’t even matter in a few months, since Trump is even less likely than Harris would’ve been to honor U.S. commitments pledged at the conference.
The other side of this, though, is that the election of Donald Trump signals to many countries that they can no longer expect any good to come from hitching themselves to the United States’ wagon, and that forging new alliances outside of U.S. dominion, such as with the BRICS nations, is going to be a major part of the road ahead when it comes to fighting climate change.
The need for a new system
As outlined above, the COP conferences lay bare a core problem with the world as it currently exists. Everyday people in every part of the world are starting to see the effects of climate change already; scientists in every part of the world agree that our current trajectory is towards catastrophe; but government officials in wealthy Western nations are bound by the intractable laws of monopoly capitalism -“increase profits forever, or die” – and thus are unable to right the ship.
There are few issues like climate change that expose this contradiction so plainly, where right in front of our eyes we see nothing but excuses, half measures, and false promises from the people who, in theory, should have the power to avert this global catastrophe. They instead use their resources to perpetrate genocide in Palestine, wage a proxy war in Ukraine, and prepare for all-out war on China and possibly Iran.
China, on the other hand, whose economy is not bound by the dog-eat-dog logic of the “free market” and aimless capital accumulation, is leading the world in the development and export of green technology. It is poised to become the main player in the world that nations can turn to for development aid. More importantly, that nation's economy is materially governed by a party of the working class, and thus is run in service of the working class, and that means popular policies like fighting pollution and climate change can be pursued for their own sake, not just as secondary measures when it’s politically convenient.
For the sake of our planetary future, those who care about the environment should look to countries like China as a model of what we ought to be fighting for – not just a seat at the table in failing institutions like COP29, but for an entirely different society where power is in the hands of the people, whose interests lie in actually stopping climate change at the source.
Charlie Berg is a member of the Climate Justice Committee – Minneapolis, MN
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