COP29, the United Nations annual climate alarmism summit, ended in overtime this weekend with an agreement in which wealthy countries are obligated to invest $300 billion a year into “climate finance” for the next decade — outraging environmental activists who dismissed the sums as laughably small.
The $300 billion agreement was $50 billion more than the wealthier participants were proposing as of Friday, when the summit was expected to end. Nonetheless, some extreme climate activists hoped to see commitments of as much as $1 trillion in wealth redistribution from richer states to “developing” countries, to be invested in mitigating the effects of alleged climate change.
The parties agreed to the extra $50 billion after climate agitators pilloried the proposed $250 billion in public statements last week.
“The proposed target to mobilise $250 billion per year by 2035 is totally unacceptable and inadequate to delivering the Paris Agreement,” Amb Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s Special Envoy for chair of the African Group of Negotiators, told leftist British newspaper the Guardian. “$250 billion will lead to unacceptable loss of life in Africa and around the world, and imperils the future of our world.”
“This latest draft text on the New Collective Quantified Goal is not just a joke – it’s an insult to the billions of people in the Global South living on the frontline of the climate crisis,” the head of the Climate Action Network International, Tasneem Essop, reportedly said. “The $250 billion per year in public finance is peanuts, doubling a failed $100 billion goal instead of addressing real needs.”
Reports from the inside of the event, hosted by fossil fuel giant Azerbaijan, described a “bitter,” exasperated, and ultimately disappointed contingent of activists. Bloomberg, reporting on site, offered dramatic details including several countries walking out of talks at some point and conference rooms running out of food, leaving diplomats irritated.
The COP events – formally the “Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)” – are annual meetings in which party nations agree to commitments intended to combat the alleged climate crisis. The meetings have become increasingly contentious as the United Nations has offered hosting duties to nations with a vested interest in boosting the fossil fuel industry. Last year’ COP28 host was the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which gave the presidency of the event to the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.
This year, the president of host Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, opened COP29 by declaring oil and natural gas a “gift from God” and stating, “countries should not be blamed for having them, and should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market, because the market needs them.”
The main negotiation priority of COP29 was replacing the current commitment by “developed states” to invest $100 billion a year in climate financing, which expires in 2025. The negotiators agreed to a deal that tripled that investment.
“Also included in the agreement was a broader goal of raising $1.3 trillion in climate finance annually by 2035,” the German outlet Deutsche Welle reported. “This would include funding from both public and private sources, which economists say matches the sum needed every year to address global warming.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared himself disappointed with the presumably low funding commitments in remarks concluding the summit this weekend.
“Developing countries swamped by debt, pummelled by disasters, and left behind in the renewables revolution, are in desperate need of funds,” he claimed. “An agreement at COP29 was absolutely essential to keep the 1.5 degree limit alive. And countries have delivered.”
“I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome – on both finance and mitigation – to meet the great challenge we face,” he lamented, adding, “But this agreement provides a base on which to build.”
Guterres scolded countries to rapidly act to pool money in response to the deal: “Commitments must quickly become cash. All countries must come together to ensure the top-end of this new goal is met.”
The agreement, Bloomberg observed, did not clarify exactly where that money should go.
“Going forward, contributions to multilateral lenders such as the World Bank from India, China and other developing countries will count, potentially paring what’s expected from rich nations,” the outlet explained. “It’s also still unclear just what counts as climate finance, a problem even under the prior agreement to provide $100 billion annually.”
As “climate finance” could be in the form of loans with interest, they could become lucrative options for wealthy nations and disempower the poor, heavily indebted countries that the financing is intended to help, alarming many in the environmental movement.
Bloomberg described the parties negotiating the deal as hungry, “bitter,” and despairing.
“Delegates streaming out of the final session painted a mostly bleak picture of the result. Few negotiators counted themselves happy, and many more described a bitter taste left in their mouths,” the outlet detailed. One group of countries walked out of the talks entirely, though they did ultimately return to the negotiating table and accept the $300 billion deal, “mere billions instead of the more than $1 trillion per year that had been sought.”
The wealthiest states at COP29 also appeared to leave disheartened after failing to add the world’s worst polluting state, China, as well as fossil fuel giants Saudi Arabia and the UAE to the group of countries expected to contribute towards the $300 billion.