One thing is certain. COP29 didn’t solve the problems left to resolve from the previous event held in the United Arab Emirates, another petrostate last year. Maybe having petrostates host COP events is an absurdity in itself. The explanation for Azerbaijan as COP host noted the regional rotation that the United Nations has been using which put this year’s event in an Eastern European or West Asian locale. Eastern European members voted with Russia blocking countries supporting Ukraine. The choice ended up being Azerbaijan, a country known to export more than 90% of its oil and gas and described as using its income from fossil fuels to fund a renewable energy and economic diversification strategy to achieve net zero by 2050.

Azerbaijan is a quarter-century from that milestone which will coincide with the country running out of its existing fossil fuel reserves. Meanwhile, it will continue to contribute greenhouse gasses to a warming atmosphere. Ending its petrostate legacy by mid-century like so many other oil and gas-producing nations will not mitigate climate change fast enough to stop the planet from surpassing the 1.5 Celsius lower target established by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

What Got Done At COP29?

Five results or lack thereof have come out of Baku and include:

1. A climate loss and damage fund originally set at the previous COP, was agreed to with US $300 billion to be dispensed from Developed World to Developing World nations beginning in 2025.
2.  An agreement to set standards for a global carbon trading market.
3. The beginning of a global roadmap for climate change adaptation.
4. Talks but no conclusions on the development of a mitigation work program to address what the stocktaking of carbon contributions indicates where the work is needed immediately and soon.
5. No agreement on rapid reductions and an industry phase-out of fossil-fuel emissions.

The $300 billion was far below the ask by Global South countries who wanted to see a number between $1 and 1.3 trillion, and a minimum threshold to claim success at $400 billion. That didn’t happen.

On the positive side, a mechanism for disbursement was established with the World Bank agreeing to run the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) for the next four years. The FRLD board will operate from The Philippines. Eligibility criteria are still being defined as are the procedures for disbursement of the money.

At the COP several Global North countries pledged $700 million to initially seed the FRLD. The job for its board will now involve getting the remainder of the $300 billion for 2025. So far, the world’s rich countries have been reluctant to depart with their money.

How COP Participants Aligned Themselves

Like everything within the United Nations, countries tend to gather into groupings based on common geography and aims. The geographical alignments that determine host COP nations are in blocks that include Asia-Pacific, African, Eastern European, Latin American and Caribbean, Western European and Others (the latter includes Japan, Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and the United States.)

There are geopolitical blocks like The European Union and the organization of 22 Arab states.

Then there are policy negotiation blocks that bring nations together not necessarily sharing common geography. These include:

• The G-77 and China are a block of Developing World countries with China representing 80% of the global population.
• The LDC includes 46 of the Least Developed Countries that see themselves as most vulnerable to climate change and its environmental and economic shocks.
• AOSIS represents small island states whose contributions to global climate change are the least but who disproportionately are affected by global warming and sea level rise the most.
• The African Group represents all 54 African nations. Their focus is on getting the FRLD operational and a global carbon market established.
• The EIG is an environmental integrity group of countries from Europe, Asia and the Americas that formed in 2000 focused on mitigation ambitions and ensuring effective governance and transparency in climate commitments.
• The UG or Umbrella Group represents a coalition of non-EU nations including the United Kingdom formed at the time of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The UG is focused on establishing emissions reduction targets and transparent reporting.
• The CRF is a coalition of over 50 rainforest nations that have stewardship over the world’s rainforests.

Other groups with their own agendas include:

• BASIC Group (Brazil, South Africa, China India).
• Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of America (ALBA).
• Cartagena Dialogue, countries from Central Asia, the Caucasus, Albania and Moldova (CACAM).
• SUR (formerly known as ABU) is an alliance involving Latin American and Caribbean (AILAC) countries.
• LMDC is a coalition of Developing World nations with a G-77 overlap.
• Group of Mountain Partnership involves over 550 members including countries, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, and the private sector aimed at protecting mountain environments.

How COP29 Results Will Impact COP30

Every annual COP meeting that puts off tough global climate decisions adds more pressure to subsequent events. The low-ball amounts agreed to for the FRLD means funding at the next COP will need a rapid rise in financial commitments from the Developed World.

Global agreement to put a price on carbon pollution and develop a universal carbon market for governments and the private sector to purchase and trade carbon credits needs to be in place by COP30 or we risk giving polluters a free pass to continue to feed global warming.

Then there is the issue of 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists who showed up at COP29. Their presence undermined much of the event with lobbyists outnumbering many national delegations. Lobbyists introduced distractions and alternate agendas that included carbon capture and sequestration, transitional fuel strategies, nuclear power, cloud seeding and geoengineering. COP30 needs to ban them.

COP30 will be hosted in the Amazon in Belém, Pará, Brazil, from November 10 to 21, 2025. It will mark the first time an area of the planet that is most under threat acting as host. Participants will directly experience how the Amazon is changing because of the lack of prior action to combat climate change.

One trillion dollars is not a trivial amount and 7 trillion is a lot more. The former is less than 1% of global GDP. The latter is more than pocket change for Western governments used to moving a trillion through the global economy daily.

Compared to 7 trillion, spending a trillion annually doesn’t sound like much. The problem isn’t that the money is not there. The problem is how to make the polluters part with it. For rich nations, a trillion represents a small portion of their wealth. The reluctance to pay leaves all of us frogs sitting in a slowly heating pot on the stovetop that is Earth. Time is not on our side to lick climate change.

Is $1 trillion affordable? Yes! Are there mechanisms and funding tools that can be used to distribute the money where it is needed the most which is the Developing World where the brunt of increasing extreme weather events are wreaking havoc? Yes! Can new tax schemes and levies be created to raise the trillion each year? Yes! So what’s stopping the world and its wealthiest from paying the price?

When I say the world’s wealthiest, I’m not just talking about nations but businesses and individual billionaires who can make up a good portion of the trillion needed each year through wealth surtaxes, the ending of fossil fuel subsidies, producers paying an escalating pollution surcharge, and through carbon pricing.

Fossil fuel companies get subsidized today at every stage of operations, from exploration to production, distribution, and consumption. In 2022, those subsidies exceeded $1.5 trillion when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a short-lived global energy crisis. Before that subsidies over the previous decade varied between $400 and $800 billion. This year direct or explicit subsidies have totalled $620 billion which the International Energy Agency (IEA) describes “as a roadblock on the path to cleaner and more secure energy systems.”

Explicit Versus Implicit Subsidies

What are explicit subsidies?

• In the U.S. oil and gas companies can deduct a percentage of their gross income from sales as an expense to encourage domestic production and allow companies to recover their capital costs.
• Companies claim intangible drilling costs including exploration and development wages and materials.
• Then there are government direct payments, grants, below-market-rate loans and loan guarantees, and liability caps in case of fossil fuel exploration and production accidents.

What are implicit subsidies?

• The price at the pump consumers pay represents a significant fossil fuel subsidy. It doesn’t account for the carbon emissions produced and their societal and economic impacts.
• The price doesn’t account for healthcare costs caused by air pollution.
• The price doesn’t account for costs engendered by traffic congestion, accidents, lost productivity, and the additional need to expand road infrastructure.

Implicit subsidies, states the IMF exceed explicit subsidies by multiples. It uses an example of how subsidies get reflected in the retail price of gasoline. The IMF uses $0.30 per litre in its at-the-pump retail delivery price. (It should be noted that here in this part of Canada,  gasoline costs five times that). The $0.30 doesn’t reflect actual supply costs that include value-added and excise taxes which more than doubles the retail price to $0.75. Making up this number is $0.20 per litre representing explicit subsidies the government pays to fossil fuel providers. The balance is implicit subsidies that the public ultimately pays for through taxes and government spending. If the national consumption of gasoline under this example amounts to 100 million litres, then the total subsidies approximate $475 million ($100 million explicit and $375 million implicit).

How Countries Are Tackling Subsidies

Canada is one of several countries trying to end fossil fuel subsidies. In 2023 it created an assessment framework to stop new subsidies and to begin eliminating existing ones. It has put an escalating price on carbon that consumers pay mostly at the pump as a consumption tax. To offset the consumption tax, the government offers rebate payments twice a year to Canadian homes and families. Technically this is a subsidy not directed at the producers but rather at consumers.

Other countries include several members of the European Union, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The vast majority of remaining countries have yet to address the subsidy issue including China which spent $2.2 trillion in 2020 on fossil fuel subsidies mostly aimed at coal producers.

The second biggest carbon polluter, the United States continues to tiptoe through the subsidy issue. Presidential executive orders have been almost the only way to get by Congressional resistance to eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. In 2023, the U.S. paid out $757 billion to the industry including tax breaks and preferential pricing on oil and gas leases.

The G7 countries have roadmaps to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. Within the G20 and OECD countries, the phase-out targets are between 2027 and 2030. Developing countries have varying subsidy phase-out targets. As in Canada, the phasing out of subsidies should be accompanied by programs to protect those with the least means from the sticker shock of higher fuel prices.

Today, every dollar we spend to subsidize fossil fuels makes the global economy more dependent on oil, gas and coal. These three fossil fuels are the biggest contributors to global carbon emissions, 89% of the total in 2018.

Every dollar spent on subsidies facilitates the retention and even the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure locking us into continued use of these carbon-polluting forms of energy.

Every dollar spent on subsidies contributes to 7 million premature deaths annually from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases attributed to poor air quality.

Every dollar spent on subsidies contributes to $5.2 trillion in environmental damage to our planet annually.

It is a generational thing, a cultural thing and an economics thing. Voting history and preferences show that the older you are the less you are willing to support decarbonization climate change policies. Why is this? Older voters who make up a large portion of the electorate in Global North countries tend to be less aggressive when being asked to spend their money on macro-environmental issues. Engaging them requires going local where NIMBYism works. If climate change is drying up local streams, rivers and lakes, older voters are incentivized to act. Younger people, many of them of a non-voting age, see climate change from a macro perspective.

Another reason older voters are less demanding may have to do with not being around long enough to see climate change mitigation impacts. What does get them involved is appealing to their legacy, that is the impact on their grandchildren from climate change mitigation inaction.

Culture shapes climate change attitudes. In the Global North Europeans appear to be more climate change aware than Americans. Canadians are equally more aware than Americans. Comparing the Global North and South is another matter. In a November 2023 global survey of 110 countries, where a large majority of citizens in European Union countries described themselves as knowing a lot about climate change, those living in Global South countries like Benin, Liberia and Haiti, appeared to know very little or stated they had never heard about climate change and its cause.

States behavioural scientist, Dr. Erik Thulin, “Knowing your audience is key…to help us understand in what ways people across the globe…are different in their knowledge and attitudes around climate change.”

Is awareness a valid measure to determine willingness to act?

Global North countries are far more aware of climate change than many in the Global South. This appears to correlate to levels of education, income and access to communication.

Awareness may lead to expressions of concern but does that lead to action?

Not when there are competing priorities, what voters in the upcoming U.S. election would call “kitchen-table issues.” These involve jobs, income, healthcare, education, affordable housing, and crime. Climate change doesn’t make the top five. In fact, in U.S. polling, although voters acknowledge climate change as an important issue, less than 5% rank it as the most important one facing the country.

Younger people are the age demographic most willing to act.

A 2021 ten-country survey of Global North-situated young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 indicated a willingness to alter the way they lived and worked to reduce climate change impacts. These younger people expressed negative emotions and higher levels of anxiety about the subject. They were more willing to become active and even challenge the complacency of older generations, accusing them of culpability in contributing to environmental degradation and global warming.

In a cultural context, do these survey results hold for young versus old in both the Global North and South? Apparently!

Further Global North and South comparisons on willingness to implement climate change mitigation strategies indicate the following:

• Global South countries show greater support for implementing geoengineering solutions and other controversial climate interventions including ocean and cloud seeding, ocean carbon sequestration, enhanced weathering, solar radiation modification, and engineered carbon dioxide removal.
• Global North countries show a willingness to invest in carbon capture as well as natural solutions like afforestation and reforestation. They are less willing to introduce controversial technological solutions and more interested in doing studies.
• Global South countries seek climate change mitigation capacity-building and financial support, technology transfer, and a calling to account from countries of the Global North who are seen as the major contributors to climate change.
• Global North countries look to market-based methods like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems along with technology solutions like carbon capture and sequestration to help mitigate climate change.
• Global South countries increasingly are expressing greater urgency which may have a lot to do with current extreme weather events related to climate change wreaking greater economic damage upon them than on countries in the Global North.

With COP29 taking place in November in Baku, Azerbaijan, countries are being asked to make national climate commitments focused on transitioning from fossil fuels and a rapid expansion of renewable energy. Global North countries are expected to top up the financial loss and damages fund and mobilize further capital from both private and public sources as was agreed to at the time of the Paris Climate Agreement to help Global South countries implement mitigation and adaptation strategies to address current and future climate change. Will good will triumph? Or will personal and national self-interest be prioritized over planetary health? We will soon know.

To accelerate to a low carbon future, whether in the Global North or South, those who lobby for fossil fuel companies and claim our civilization and its prosperity are in peril need to stop calling the setting of aspirational climate mitigation goals and renewable and alternate energy targets delusional. Without setting goals and timelines the drift will continue further imperilling future generations and the planet.