The COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, opened on Monday with a declaration that climate alarmism is still in vogue, even with President-elect Donald Trump returning to the White House and a stern lecture for wealthy countries to stop thinking of climate funding for developing nations as “charity.”
“Now is the time to show that global cooperation is not down for the count,” U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell told the jet-setting COP29 attendees, who burned staggering amounts of fossil fuel to convene in oil-rich Azerbaijan.
Stiell was addressing concerns among the climate faithful that Trump will once again pull the United States out of the non-binding 2015 Paris climate agreement, as he did during his first term. President Joe Biden recommitted the U.S. to the Paris agreement on his first day in office in February 2021.
Politico on Sunday saw Trump casting a long shadow over COP29 since he could “move faster and with less restraint” to pull out of the Paris agreement after his landslide victory in the 2024 election.
“The United States’ absence from the deal would put other countries on the hook to make bigger reductions to their climate pollution. But it would also raise inevitable questions from some countries about how much more effort they should put in when the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas polluter is walking away,” Politico fretted.
Somehow the climate movement is just fine with the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluter, China, doing little except mouthing some lip service at climate conferences and making money off other nations buying solar panels and electric vehicle batteries, markets China has completely cornered.
China announced last year that it will exceed its Paris Agreement emissions goals by over 110 percent by 2030, and growing industrial powerhouse India has likewise ignored its “commitments” to reduce carbon emissions.
China, India, and Russia are all founding members of BRICS, a rapidly-expanding economic bloc that openly declares its members will not make any sacrifices for climate change because they view it as purely a U.S. and European responsibility.
No matter what Trump does next year, a much longer shadow falling across COP29 should be the growing realization among industrialized nations that the Paris Agreement goals were always insane. No country can afford to meet them without collapsing its industries, destroying the standard of living for its population, and spending trillions of dollars that no nation actually has in the bank.
“Countries are very committed to Paris, I don’t think there’s any question about that. What I do think is at risk is whether the world is able to follow through on what it committed to in Paris,” World Resources Institute climate chief David Waskow told Politico.
Other climate experts tried to goad Trump into staying with the Paris Agreement because withdrawing would supposedly allow China to “continue out-competing America on solar panels, electric vehicles, and other green technologies.”
This was an amusing bit of phrasing because it tacitly acknowledged that China is already out-competing America after four years of the more Paris-friendly Biden administration. China’s white-knuckled grip on green energy components might be loosened someday — assuming environmentalists are willing to stand by and allow other countries to dig up their rare earth minerals with enthusiasm approaching China’s — but that day will not be soon.
China has enough power over the rare-earths market to keep competitors out by surging supply and cratering prices, which makes fabulously expensive mining start-ups look like bad risks.
China produces about 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and produces about two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles (EV), wind turbines, and EV batteries. The United States produces about two percent of the world’s solar panels. Not even the biggest booster of green energy seriously argues the U.S. could hustle those markets away from China, so there is virtually zero competitive advantage to be lost by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.
Stiell told the COP29 audience that wealthy nations must stop thinking about climate funding for the Third World as “charity.” He might consider having a word with all of the activists who are bubbling about “climate reparations” as the hot new trend in global socialism.
“An ambitious new climate finance goal is entirely in the self-interest of every nation, including the largest and wealthiest,” Stiell declared.
“Ambitious” is a mild term for what COP29 has in mind. The goal for wealthy nations to finance climate transitions in the developing world has been $100 billion per year since 2009, but that plan will expire next year, and the climate change movement wants to replace it with trillions per year in spending. They also want the money to be disbursed as “grants” instead of “loans” that might one day merit repayment.
The president of the COP29 gathering, Mukhtar Babayev — a former executive with Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR — acknowledged that the trillion-dollar demands might be unrealistic, so the Third World might have to settle for mere “hundreds of billions” in climate funding from the First World.
The conference in Baku will discuss ways to make these demands seem more palatable to wary Western executives and tapped-out governments — for example, by pitching climate funding as profitable investments in Asian, African, and Latin American green industries.
The Associated Press (AP) reluctantly noted that political activists are trying to hijack COP29 by showing up at the venue wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves and waving banners that demand both “climate justice” and a halt to “fueling genocide” against the Palestinians.
“It’s the same systems of oppression and discrimination that are putting people on the frontlines of climate change and putting people on the front lines of conflict in Palestine,” declared Friends of the Earth International protester Lise Masson, whose demands included both more “climate finance” spending by the U.S. and Europe and less military support for Israel.
