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Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan. For three years in a row now, the United Nations has chosen to hold its flagship environmental meeting – the UN Conference of the Parties, or COP – in a country largely dependent on oil revenues for its economic well-being. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News, currently in Baku, Azerbaijan covering COP29. We examine the problems associated with holding this ever-expanding event in a petro-state, discuss the logistics behind the selection, and consider the key takeaway policies from the conference.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Bob Berwyn (BB) | 00:22 – And there’s people every day here telling me stories about their islands, where their wells are full of salt water, where they can’t grow food anymore, where their shoreline communities are being flooded. And then go into these, uh, sort of glitzy reception in pavilion areas where people are backslapping each other and making deals and smiling and drinking espressos. I mean, there’s hundreds of boots that everyone has its own little espresso stand. And, you know, it feels like a business convention.
Narrator | 00:56 – Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan for three years in a row. Now the United Nations has chosen to hold its flagship environmental meeting, the UN conference of the parties or cop in a country, largely dependent on oil revenues for its economic wellbeing. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News. Currently in Baku, Azerbaijan covering Cop 29. We examine the problems associated with holding this ever expanding event in a petro-state. Discuss the logistics behind the selection and consider the key takeaway policies from the conference.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:50 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Bob Berwyn from Inside Climate News. Bob, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Bob Berwyn (BB) | 02:04 – Hello Alex, and thanks for having me back again. I appreciate it.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:08 – Well, it’s always a pleasure. I wish there’d be better news as an expat based in, uh, Austria, you have a, a different perspective, a unique perspective on the American political process, and it’s been a very difficult one for all of us to deal with. But we’re not going to talk about that moving forward on Sea Change Radio as much as possible. It’s just too depressing. So let’s focus on something else depressing, which is last time we had you on, well, I don’t know if it was the last time we had you on, but we did talk to you last year when you covered the Cop 28 Conference, the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Dubai this year. It’s in another petro-state, not that far from it. It’s in Azerbaijan. And this one might be even more depressing from what I’ve been reading about it. From your coverage set, the stage, if you will, for what this conference means and what the message is coming from the United Nations ho having it hosted by Azerbaijan.
Bob Berwyn (BB) | 03:09 – Sure. Depressing is probably, uh, a good word. Saddening is another good word. And it is the third year in a row that the conference has been hosted in an oil dependent petro-state with, uh, authoritarian tendencies. So, uh, there were concerns going in about restrictions on civil liberties and dissidents of the government here being imprisoned. And quite some restrictions on protests. You probably recall that sub past cops, there have been fairly large, uh, demonstrations in the streets of the host cities, really with thousands of people turning out. And that’s been kind of ratcheted down the last three years to the point that this year demonstrators are only allowed inside the blue zone. The so-called Blue Zone of the conference, which is for the duration of the event, is designated as United Nations territory. So the United Nations rules apply rather than the host country laws. But even in that space, at yesterday’s main demonstration by civil society, which is here represented by hundreds of environmental groups and various types of citizen groups, they weren’t allowed to do their, their regular chants and, and so on. So when they had their, their main demonstration yesterday, they were restricted to sort of humming and snapping their fingers. That was the only thing that the, uh, the host country would permit in its agreement with the United Nations. And, uh, those folks saw that as a, you know, again, as another new restriction on their ability to get their messages of concern about the escalating climate crisis to the delegates and to the negotiators. Um, not that those folks are not aware of those concerns anyway, but this has been sort of an important part of this ritualized process. And it was really sad to see yesterday. And, you know, many of the demonstrators had put tape over their mouths to sort of symbolize that, that silencing. And it was really tough to see in talking to them and interviewing them after the demonstration. It was a lot of us were near tears.
AW | 05:42 – Where are these demonstrators from generally?
BB | 05:46 – They’re literally from all over the world.
AW | 05:49 – So people are flying in from all over the world to protest, and yet they’re muzzled essentially?
BB | 05:53 – Correct. Yes.
AW | 05:56 – We read a lot about, and we hear a lot about greenwashing and sports washing from these petro states where they, they’ll build a big stadium to host a soccer tournament, et cetera. It seems like the U United Nations COP conferences have become part and parcel with these big sports events or things like that. There’s not a huge revenue stream for hosting a conference like this compared to like the World Cup, I’m imagining. So it’s more of a big picture greenwashing for a fossil fuel dependent nation. Is that correct?
BB | 06:32 – Yeah, I would say that that’s been correct the last several years with the, with the cop the last, uh, this year and the two previous years. And I hear what you’re saying about sports events, totally agree with that, with the World Cup and Qatar and some of these big sports, international sports organizations are very money-oriented. And as we’re starting to see right now, there’s a very direct connection between emerging authoritarianism and, and the sort of extreme neoliberal capitalism that has developed over the last few decades. And I don’t think there’s a huge amount of money to be made on a cop, but it does. The host countries can use it. And Dubai last year was a great example of this, to try and show that they are sustainable and, and on board with global climate efforts, even if they’re not Dubai is clearly not, it’s planning to increase fossil fuel production for the foreseeable future. They were trying to make oil deals while the conference was going on. Um, but to, you know, to casual observers in, in other countries, you know, they might look at this and say sort of like, he described, wow, well this climate conference is going on in Azerbaijan, so, you know, they must be on board with this. And, uh, and they’re not, you know, the country’s president said in his opening speech at the conference that, that fossil fuels are a gift from God and that they plan on using him and developing him and exporting him as long as they can. I mean, he didn’t beat around the bush.
AW | 08:18 – So one could look through rose colored glasses and see these oil rich nations making a play for the environmental movement to be grouped with sustainability leading countries around the, the globe in, in an optimistic glass half full kind of way. One could look at this and say, oh, well, you know, deep pocketed countries need to be on board with climate change solutions. Just like people have said, well, oil companies have a lot of money, eventually they’re going to be able to be leaders in the sustainability space. They’re going to be building the wind farms and solar farms of tomorrow. It seems like a very pollyannish view, but I’d like to hear your perspective on that comparison.
BB | 09:08 – Yeah, I mean, I, and those two go hand in hand, and I think both parts of what you said are, are ac are accurate. I was at the OPEC booth yesterday in the, in the delegates pavilion area to do an interview with somebody. And what they highlight is their, you know, their financing of development efforts and their assistance to developing countries with, uh, economic development and so forth. And they see that as their main role in this. And their newest twist now is to focus on things like, uh, hydrogen energy, which is derived from natural gas in most cases, uh, or from fossil gas, I should say. I need to stop using that term. Natural gas. It’s fossil gas.
AW | 09:59 – Yes. I remember reading Bill McKibben’s piece on that. We’re like, we need to stop calling it natural gas.
BB | 10:05 – It’s o hard to get out of that. I mean, they sold us that word. And, uh, when I write, obviously have a chance to reflect and I never use it, but in conversation it, it slips out.
AW | 10:17 – Well, if you use fossil gas, some people might not actually know what you’re talking about. ’cause it really hasn’t become part of the lingua franca.
BB | 10:24 – Yeah. There has been this sort of inclusionary vision of the UNFCCC from the very beginning to say that if we’re going to have a durable, sustainable agreement, everybody needs to be at the table and buy into it. And that’s one of the reasons it’s taken so long. Yet at the same time, when you start to see outright obstructionism and ongoing obstructionism and, and you know, we can single out, we can go ahead and single out Saudi Arabia because as a researcher who wrote a paper on this told me last year, they don’t care about criticism because it’s a totally authoritarian state. So they don’t really care what anybody thinks or says, you know, they’re just going to do their thing and promote fossil fuels as long as the rest of the world allows them to do that. And so, if I could pivot a little bit, there are renewed calls for cop reform right now, which is encouraging to me. It’s something I’ve written about quite a bit for Inside, Climate News. And just a couple of days ago, a pretty illustrious list of folks including top climate scientists, the former head of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, who led the organization, uh, preceding and up to adoption of the Paris Agreement, which is kind of the, you know, the high point of this process, signed onto the letter and said, this is really no longer fit for purpose and we need to change this, uh, in some way to, to make more progress on reaching the global goal of, of limiting warming to, you know, as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline as possible. And we’re already there actually now, you know, we’re, we’re right at that threshold with 2024 projected to be the first year that the global temperature reaches that, that sort of red line. And if I can just add on to that, you know, my frustration has grown each year and so has my sadness because it’s hard emotionally to talk to people that you know, are struggling. I mean, there’s people every day here telling me stories about their islands, where their wells are full of salt water, where they can’t grow food anymore, where their, you know, their shoreline communities are being flooded. And then go into these, uh, sort of glitzy reception and pavilion areas where, you know, people are backslapping each other and making deals and smiling and drinking espressos. I mean, there’s hundreds of boots that everyone has its own little espresso stand and, you know, it feels like a business convention, um, not like a, a sort of a life or death, crisis that they’re talking about. And, and I walk out of there sometimes with tears of my eyes. And I had that yesterday when I was talking to the protestors after that demonstration. You know, I’m supposed to be a reporter and I’m supposed to keep a distance and, you know, and be calm and cool and rational about it, but it hits me really hard and I, I feel it, I feel it.
(Music Break) | 14:02
AW | 14:45 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Bob Berwyn, he’s a reporter for Inside Climate News. Bob, before we dive into the nuts and bolts of the policies that are being discussed at the Cop 29 Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, can you give us some insight into the United Nations decision making process and how they’ve decided for three consecutive years to hold this conference in a controversial petro-state? I mean, this is the first year I understood it a little bit. “Oh, oh, let’s just see how it goes.” It seems like now the for sale sign is up.
BB | 15:24 – It’s pretty easy to explain. When the, when the UNFCCC was started in 1992, they adopted sort of a, you know, rules of procedure. One of them is that, um, the, the host country will rotate to different re to a different region each year to simplify it. It’s actually even more complicated than that. The, the default place for these talks is Bond Germany. That’s where the UNFCCC is headquartered. The secretariat of the organization is headquartered, and the meetings are to be held there unless another country offers to host them. And since then, a tradition has developed a rotation tradition has developed where each year it goes to a different region. The United Nations countries are grouped into, I think, seven regions. The Americas, uh, central East Asia, the Pacific, I don’t remember what they all are. In any case, this, this last time it was the turn of Central East Asia. And, those countries, then, the countries that are part of that group, they decide amongst themselves informally which country will host it in that region. Last year’s announcement for Baku came terribly late, much later than usual because there were other aspects of geopolitics involved. Namely, Russia, which is also part of that same region, was not willing to accept a host country that had imposed sanctions on it, or that sort of was overtly opposed to the aggression in Ukraine. And so Azerbaijan was kind of the last country left standing in that group. And so it almost went to here by default. So I hope that that explanation helps a little bit.
AW | 17:32 – I understand logistically how they decide, but just from a philosophical standpoint, it seems beyond the pale to me.
BB | 17:40 – I think there’s a lot of people that would, that would agree with you. Yeah.
AW | 17:44 – Why even have it in different places at this point? I mean, we have a planet that’s linked in many ways. People can be connected like you and I are talking right now from San Francisco to Azerbaijan, and it sounds perfect. So it doesn’t seem to have to be like the Olympics. Why can’t they just have it in Bonn every year?
BB | 18:03 – One of the ideas for reform is to change that structure. For example, to have the conference every two years, the actual negotiations every two years, or every year in one place, and then have all these side events and only very tangentially related activities occur in kind of regional climate weeks. That’s just one specific example that’s, that’s floating around out there. And, you know, maybe with this new letter that came out, and I’ve got a story, uh, that’s coming out on that in a day or two, those ideas will get some traction. But like any large organization, there’s a lot of inertia within this UN process, and they sort of adopt things and then they just stick with them because, uh, because it’s, it’s easier, you know, to just keep doing stuff the same old way. Right. A lot of us, a lot of us fall into, into patterns like that these events have also grown, you know, outsized. And in fact, the most recent story I wrote about, COP describes that and has a graph showing how, you know, the first 10 years, about 5,000 people came to the COPs, and it was mostly negotiators and technical support staff. And then as the stakes grew higher, more and more people showed up to where, in Paris you had about 35,000 people for the Paris Agreement in 2015. And people thought that was pretty huge. And then last year it went up to somewhere around 80,000 people in Dubai because it was so heavily promoted by Dubai, even though really, there are no more major deals to be made at COP. I mean, we have the Paris agreement. It says countries will do what they can based on their abilities to prevent global warming from going above 1.5 degrees. And the focus now really should be on implementing that, on making sure that countries deliver on what they’ve already agreed to do. Instead, we keep getting new, new agreements. I think of them as these kind of, you know, shiny yet hollow bobs, like Christmas ornaments as we’re getting close to the holiday season, that really keep distracting from this, you know, from this primary goal. And it would really seem to make sense to me and other experts, people who’ve studied this and written peer reviewed papers on the process to really trim this back down again and, you know, let the negotiators and the representatives of the countries get down to business. The other thing that’s happened as a result of that growth is that the UNF CCCs secretariat, so the administrative part of this has been handed all these new mandates by these 198 member countries to do this, to do that. Yet they haven’t gotten any increased funding for that. And in fact, some countries have been pretty delinquent, including the US on, you know, making what payments they’re supposed to make toward this process. So they’re stretched on budget, they’re stretch stretched on staff to, to run these meetings. You know, if somebody wanted to come up with a proposal for reform, they’d work with the UNFCCC Secretariat, but, their staff is busy working on all these new missions that the member states have given them without giving them more money to hire more staff to work on this stuff. So it’s become a bit of a Catch-22. It definitely feels a treadmill.
AW | 22:05 – It’s kind of counterintuitive having more and more participants where more and more inertia gets created in this almost absurd Tom Robbins novel. It 5,000 people sounds like a lot of people to be negotiating these complex carbon related sustainability policies. This is not fun. This is not like going to a Super Bowl or something like that, you know, this is hard work. 80,000 people, sounds like it’s turned into a bit of a circus.
BB | 22:37 – Yeah, I would, I would say that’s a pretty apt description, and I use that analogy in talking to my colleagues at Inside Climate News about it, where the, you know, the negotiations are sort of the, the main event really, the big tent. And then you have all these, you know, sideshows with a couple years ago it was a big methane agreement. And, and, uh, the year before that in Glasgow was a global agreement on deforestation, which none, none of the objectives of these additional deals have been met. There have been, there’s been very little progress, you know, just, uh, I’ll take deforestation because I know that best, you know, actually deforestation keeps going up, you know, despite all these countries making a big announcement in Glasgow that they were going to end forest loss by 2030. There’s no sign of that happening yet/ When the news media focuses on these conferences, and it’s one of the few times when there’s really, you know, a concentrated focus on climate, you know, the coverage ends after Cop with Great, we have a deal to end global deforestation. And then there’s very little follow up either from the people that signed onto the deal or from the media to describe what actually happened. So I think a lot of people are left with the impression, oh, great, we’re going to have more forests and they’re going to take carbon out of the air, and we’re going to deal with, you know, at least part of the climate crisis that way. So it creates a very much a false sense of, of confidence and security. That’s something is actually happening at these, at these meetings. And again, you know, there’s, it’s, it’s really clear. I mean, the Paris Agreement is really clear. It’s brief. It’s only like, I don’t know, 10 pages or something and, you know, pretty much spells out what we’re supposed to be doing right now and we need to get down to implementing it. And that’s, that’s what this letter that came out the other day, clearly, you know, clearly said as well.
AW | 24:49 – In a few years, what are we going to look back on and say, regardless of how toothless these announcements may be, you mentioned methane, previous ones, and deforestation. What’s COP29’s trademark going to be in your estimation, Bob?
BB | 25:04 – It’s built as the finance COP. And the big goal is to significantly increase global financing for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries primarily. So mitigation means giving them the means, to develop economically in a low carbon way. And adaptation means giving them money, providing them with means, and giving them money to deal with the climate impacts that are already happening at a, at a frightening rate, especially in the past year, I don’t think there’s been a day where we haven’t seen reports of a, you know, or very few days where we haven’t seen reports of big fires somewhere in the world, um, of floods lately. It seems almost on a daily basis, all over the place. The physical part of this is not changing because people are talking, the physical realities of climate change are, are happening. The heat keeps building up in the oceans. It keeps melting ice, it keeps drying out soils, it keeps killing forests. And the only thing that’s going to stop that is to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So right now, we’re operating under a system of a goal that was adopted several years ago. Pardon me, I don’t remember the exact year of a hundred billion dollars of annual climate finance. And the goal this year is to get upwards of a trillion dollars. So it’s kind of a quantum, kind of a quantum increase and some of the big discussions about which countries should be included as countries that should pay and which countries should receive it, exactly what form that financing should take. Whether it’s loans, whether it’s grants and, and those sorts of things. And so this COP will be measured in the end by whether or not it reaches that goal and whether or not countries actually follow through on it.
AW | 27:41 – Well, if listeners were depressed about the results of the US election, we’ve given them something completely different to be depressed about today. I know this isn’t easy work that you’re doing, and I really appreciate the dedication to your craft and informing us all about this Bob Berwyn from Inside Climate News, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
BB | 28:02 – You’re welcome.
Narrator | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Chris Joss and Dr. John. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.