COP 29 was the worst one yet
Karl Marx once quipped that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP, puts us at 28 farcical repetitions and counting.
We shouldn’t be surprised. These conferences have always been, as Greta Thunberg put it in the Guardian, “greenwashing conferences that legitimise countries’ failure to ensure a liveable world and future”. They are, at best, PR exercises led by the rulers of a capitalist system fundamentally at odds with a liveable planet.
Still, they somehow manage to get worse every year. Held during the second-last week of November in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, COP 29 was the second conference in a row to be held by an authoritarian petro-state (last year, it was the United Arab Emirates). Ninety percent of Azerbaijan’s exports are oil and gas, which its president described as a “gift of God”. Amnesty International has accused Azerbaijan of using COP 29 as a pretext to crack down on environmental activists.
A “joint communique” of the leading states at COP 29 dubbed it “COP 29-Climate and Peace.” This is a total joke. According to a piece in AzerNews, an English-language newspaper in the country, Azerbaijan supplies around 40 percent of Israel’s oil imports and is trying to become a “significant player in the global defence market”.
The so-called climate conference for peace is hosted by oil, gas and bomb barons currently helping fuel a genocide.
There was also an element of corruption and profiteering. In pre-conference talks, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister, Elnur Soltanov, was caught on video boasting that his country “will have a certain amount of oil and natural gas being produced, perhaps forever”.
Fossil fuel lobbyists and representatives of trade associations outnumbered the delegations of almost every country at COP 29. They used the conference to wine and dine with world leaders, lobbying and dealing as they went. So the conference wasn’t simply a useless greenwashing exercise—it probably made things worse.
One topic of discussion was securing a “new climate finance deal”: an attempt to convince high-income countries to provide more funding to support “the poorest and most vulnerable countries in adapting to climate change”, as explained by the World Resources Institute.
But without any serious commitment by the major polluting countries to stop or even slow their use of fossil fuels, the “new deal” is a bit like promising a thimble of water to someone you’re spraying with a flamethrower.
Three decades of these conferences have gotten us nowhere. The world is currently on track to reach two to three degrees of warming, which would be catastrophic.
Leading climate experts wrote to the United Nations last week, calling COP “no longer fit for purpose” and suggesting that conferences should be held in countries that support action on climate change. But even if you removed some of the worst elements of COP, the fundamental problem would remain. Capitalists and their governments, despite the rhetoric, will simply not give up their fossil fuel profits, even if it means the planet burns.
More than 100 years ago, at a very different conference held in Baku, the Russian revolutionary leader Grigory Zinoviev called on “workers of all lands and oppressed people of the whole world” to unite against capitalist barbarity. We must recapture some of that revolutionary energy to survive this catastrophe.
