By Mathew Carr
Nov. 18-20, 2024 — I spoke to a head of delegation from an emerging country late today (Monday), walking along one of the giant corridors of COP29 in Azerbaijan lined with eateries and light-brown lounge chairs, and he seemed to hint at hope for the outcome of the Baku climate talks.
He said he was both “hopeful and scared.”
Fear is a great motivator.
One of the most inspired moves of Mr Donald Trump’s election win was his threat to sue CBS news for $10 billion…four days before the voting day. (The CBS threat was largely ignored in the autopsies of Trump’s win by the same gormless news outlets)
He knows how to scare people to get what he wants, partly because people have been trying it on him for decades.
And he just might succeed at it, too, this week.
Or … the UN and the G20 may realise they need to solidify the world’s multilateral system of checks and balances …so the likes of Mr Trump (and Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, perhaps) can never go so unchecked, again.
The prospect of Mr Trump seems, partly at least, to be behind the climate talks’ approval of more carbon market rules that might spur an additional level of finance …(Greenpeace also is a bit scared, one of its representatives told me earlier today).
I put this notion that UN action (on UN carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris climate deal) could hamper Mr Trump’s ability to roll back climate measures earlier today to the USA’s head of delegation Mr Richard Duke.
Mr Duke was understandably cautious in his response. There is now “tremendous momentum” on at least some carbon markets that are incentivising against the destruction of forests, he said. “Clarity on Article 6 here this week can only help” advance the multilateral carbon market work, he added.
You can listen to his comments by clicking here:
While they have approved new carbon market rules well before the end of the climate talks scheduled for Friday (they may overrun) …multiple UN climate envoys are worried for the state of the world in four years’ time …and some of them are even thinking their national government’s behavior might start to emulate Trump.
What if every country wants to “make themselves great again” by burning the heck out of fossil fuels or razing forests to make lovely exportable wooden furniture and tasty beef steaks; what if they want to bomb reefs that are currently teeming with rare tropical fish …just for the food (more on that later)?
The prospect of Trump might spur generosity on climate finance not just from the Biden-Harris administration (see the Amazon stuff above) …but from many richer and middle-income countries that want to encourage the world’s 200 nations to toe the “sustainability” line.
Think woke means broke? Well …just look at this climate cash….might end up being the legacy of COP29.
One delegate reckons $800 billion of government-related cash is where it will pan out for 2025 (vs $100 billion previously) …by the end of the Baku talks … with an extra $200 billion from philanthropists and as much as a further $1 trillion a year from carbon markets by the end of the decade.
The $800 billion from governments could spur three or five times that with clever leveraging/financial risk structuring. That’s another $2.4 trillion…per year.
That’s moving toward where the world needs to be to cut emissions by about half by 2030.
Greed seemed to take over the world the past decade because the Paris climate deal, struck in 2015, was only meant to start in 2020.
That complicated climate framework is still not really doing much because nations have largely not done the hard implementation work….emissions continue to rise (probably this year will be another record but a warm start to the northern-hemisphere winter may save the day).
The vast number of political elections this year have made leaders wary of doing things that would have added further to the cost-of-living crisis caused by the Ukraine war and the earlier pandemic.
The world and America should have sorted out markets to make them more sustainable in 2016. Trump’s first election win then thwarted progress somewhat (except in clever countries like China and Brazil…and maybe India).
I’ve surveyed several climate negotiators since Saturday about Trump’s impact on sustainability and markets and I will present the results here over the next few days.
Hopeful and scared are emotions shared by many.
Here…is the Republic of Congo thinking maybe it’s time to “Make the Congo Great Again”? Seems so.
The Netherlands does not know whether Mr Trump’s climate stance is merely a negotiation stance …or not.
Dutch climate minister Sophie Hermans tackled Mr Trump’s impact on the climate talks after another journalist asked …and I followed up by asking isn’t there more urgency this week because of Trump moving back into the White House in January? Listen to the interchange:
The US election result does not mean Hermans feels less responsible about what Europe needs to do, she said.
She indicated she had not really thought about whether Trump has created urgency at these talks …really?
Hermans dodged my question about whether Trump’s comments on climate are actually a type of climate negotiation stance.
“In this dynamic world, the EU should be a stable partner on climate,” she said.
An observer from the US told me the Biden-Harris administration are working very hard at the moment to lock down money from their climate policies ….so Mr Trump can’t reverse that spending. This includes for the Inflation Reduction Act, the most climate-protecting US law in history.
Could Donald become “Saint Trump” ? Could we possibly get decent carbon pricing under Mr Trump, given his commerce dept. pick?
Lot of weirdness right here:
(More to come)
Notes
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