THE 29th edition of the annual global climate summit officially called the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — a mouthful understandably abbreviated to COP29 — opened yesterday in Baku, Azerbaijan, with the same mixture of optimism and dread that has characterized the past few COPs. In fact, there may be more of the latter this time around, as it is a virtual guarantee that this will be the last climate summit attended by the United States, at least for the next few years, for reasons that are obvious and which I will not discuss any more than I already have.
From a practical perspective, I do not think that inevitability will make much of a difference at this year’s COP29, anyway, except to perhaps sideline the US delegation and to spur some louder calls to “get something done” before the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions starts actively working to undermine global climate action. Unfortunately, the prevailing wisdom is that “getting something done” at COP29 was always going to be a long shot, whether the US was on board or not.
The biggest reason for this, of course, is that for the second year in a row, the summit is being hosted by a petrostate; COP28 last year was held in Dubai, with the chairman of the U AE national oil company serving as its president. Azerbaijan has a huge oil and gas industry, and unlike the UAE, which has the fallback of being a global financial center, it has little else going for it. Thus, just about anything that develops from COP29 is going to be a potentially serious blow to its economic well-being. Of course, Azerbaijan cannot openly try to thwart progress, so just as the UAE tried to burnish its sustainability credentials with an ethically questionable marketing blitz — in effect, trying to convince the rest of the world that the fox was in the henhouse to guard the chickens, not eat them — Azerbaijan has taken the same tack.
As far as the marketing effort, that has not worked out as well as Azerbaijan had hoped. Late last month, an investigation by The Guardian revealed that Elon Musk was cooperating with the Azerbaijani government to boost the exposure of about a dozen government-run troll accounts on X (Twitter), burying posts critical of the country’s petroleum industry and sketchy rights record. It might have been effective had the parties involved kept it from being discovered, but Musk, who is as dumb as a bag of hammers and about as subtle as a brick to the face, apparently ordered that the fix be applied at once, so the spurious posts appeared in September as though someone had thrown a switch; not there one day, and then at the top of everyone’s feed in identical multiples the next.
In terms of what the Azerbaijanis have proposed should be tackled by the COP29 delegates, however, that is rather intriguing. The COP29 presidency is promoting the concept of “clean flexibility,” calling for greater focus on energy storage, transmission grid development, and the development of hydrogen as key priorities. The suggested actions include a global pledge for a six-fold increase in global energy storage capacity by 2030, investment to build 80 million kilometers of new transmission grid by 2040, and a declaration “to unlock a global market for clean hydrogen.”
Obviously, those are a bit vague, and whether or not any of it will be achievable — or if the COP29 delegations can even agree on practical definitions of targets — remains to be seen in what details are discussed. Surprisingly, however, most clean energy advocates seem cautiously optimistic rather than dismissing the recommendations as smokescreens to help the petroleum industry hang onto its revenue streams.
There seem to be two reasons for this, which are relatively simple. First, renewable energy development globally is expanding at a healthy rate. It is not expanding fast enough to keep up with energy demand growth — because it probably can’t, with current technology — but it is still expanding fast enough that even the fossil fuel industry is feeling that it must bow to the inevitable. And more to the point, RE is expanding fast enough that it offers opportunities for a whole lot of businesses to make a whole lot of money if only they climb aboard the train.
Second, the recommendations that have been offered, at least as conversation starters, are not implausible and, in the case of the battery storage target, are already the lowest-possible hanging fruit. According to a recent analysis by energy think-tank Ember, the current pace of manufacturing of battery storage will already exceed the proposed target by eight times if it keeps up. In other words, those countries that agree to the “six-fold increase in global energy storage capacity by 2030” pledge literally have to do nothing to wildly overachieve the goal except to allow the status quo to continue.
In a perverse way, this sets a rather high bar for COP29. It can accomplish something by basically doing nothing, so if it doesn’t accomplish something, it will mean that the world’s governments actively worked not to. It will be interesting to see what happens.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
