Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr
Nov. 22, 2024 — Every year, the UNFCCC / process leadership throws up a distraction and the environmental lobby groups and mainstream press fall for it … hook, line and sinker.
Last year at COP28, the focus was the UNFCCC text that would get oil companies to magically scale back their emissions and shift to renewables.
This year, at COP29, Saudi Arabia and other countries including the USA are pretty much ignoring what they agreed a year ago, which happened with much back slapping.
Also this year, the UNFCCC process leadership have set up a huge fight about “the quantum” of climate finance.
Again, the environmental lobby groups are falling for the distraction…saying how outrageous it is to give $250 billion a year by 2035 instead of $100 billion — and they do have a point.
One key negotiator said it was “extremely, extremely disappointing,” in an emailed reply to questions.
What’s constant in all this is that more than three quarters of the world’s emission are not priced at all.
Polluters (rich and poor) simply don’t pay. Most places that do pay still pay far too little per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (an average $35 a ton vs a needed price of close to $100, according to economists.)
They are missing the couple of hundred billion of euros raised by Europe, for instance, the past 20 years or so. That’s handy to spend on climate finance for Namibia green hydrogen, hospitals in rural Germany and schools in southern Italy…right? That limits tax rises, right?
Polluters must be made to pay.
Only 25% of the world does this. It needs to happen everywhere.
Selling rights to pollute creates a public asset for the first time, but you’ve got to start doing it. That because the people doing the damage have to stop doing so for free under that system:
EU’s bonanza
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/use-of-auctioning-revenues-generated
Note 2023 and 2024 are missing from the above chart. The light blue does seem a little ….pathetic, EU — comon!
As the carbon cap declines, fewer carbon allowance are sold, making them scarcer and boosting their value. This creates an incentive to cut emissions …AUTOMATICALLY — you don’t need yearly COPs to make it happen.
I asked “the network” why they don’t focus on permanent changes to market rules …and at least four of them didn’t really have any clear answers. Maybe CAN needs new leadership, too?
See 8 minutes, here, where I ask CAN to explain their obsessions with the wrong things:
This COP is not about that, one said.
Markets just move emissions from one place to another, said a second.
“Carbon markets can only exist above the ambition of nationally determined contributions — NDCs (correct)” (utter rubbish) …a person said. (The EU carbon market is the KEY to that region’s ambition, the market is well within its NDC and it is WHY it has cut so many emissions so fast.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/total-greenhouse-gas-emission-trends
“Ooooooooo we don’t like markets even though we don’t understand them”…sums them up.
This type of wooly thinking is why the world is in such a bad state.
Oil companies can’t believe the environmentalists are so gullible.
What oil companies really fear is market changes that erode demand for their products.
Climate Action Network should be advocating for that. (Instead they accuse me of being an advocate of carbon pricing — I just want polluters to pay so the incentive to cut back is there … so my kids can live in a decent world.)
Here is an evolved nature lover — there are some around, thank goodness:
Part of “the network” — the America Latina part — are they hindering, rather than helping?