Uproar at U.N. Climate Summit as Envoys Say Proposed $250 Billion a Year from West Not Enough
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A draft text released Friday from the environmental negotiators at the U.N.’s COP29 climate alarmism summit would demand that wealthy nations commit to gifting poorer countries $250 billion a year between now and 2035.
Climate activists responded to the proposed contribution with outrage, claiming the sum is “paltry” and “a joke.”
COP29 — formally the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — is the 19th edition of the U.N.’s official assembly to discuss how to globally address the alleged climate crisis. It is currently taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan, and scheduled to conclude on Friday, though the disagreements over the provisions in the outcome text as it stands will “surely push this round of talks into the weekend,” according to the U.N.’s own news service.
The COPs going into overtime is not uncommon. Last year’s COP28, hosted by Dubai, also extended beyond its scheduled timeline as parties to the draft agreement could not agree on convincing all countries participating to abandon fossil fuels. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is one of the world’s most formidable oil powers and granted the president of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the presidency of the summit. That move alarmed and outraged global environmental activists, who accused the United Nations of “greenwashing” — the practice of pretending to be interested in climate change policy for public relations reasons, but doing nothing to eradicate the widespread use of fossil fuels.
COP29 has faced stern criticism in the same vein as Azerbaijan’s economy relies heavily on natural gas. Baku is planning on dramatically expanding natural gas exports to western Europe to fill the void created by sanctions on Russia, which followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Azeri President Ilham Aliyev aggravated the already existing outrage from climate activists by delivering a speech to open the summit in which he declared that fossil fuels were a “gift of God.”
“Oil, gas, wind, sun, gold, silver, copper — all are natural resources, and 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,” he proclaimed.
The latest outrage, however, is the sum that parties drafting the COP29 outcome text agreed to for wealthy countries to offer poorer countries to use to fight alleged climate change. As the U.N. news resource reported, COP29 drafters are hoping to come up with an amount of money for state parties to donate to poorer countries to meet a larger “global climate finance target” to prevent the alleged ongoing heating of the earth.
“This target, or new collective quantified goal (NCQG), is seen as one of the summit’s main deliverables. It will replace the existing $100 billion goal that is due to expire in 2025,” U.N. News noted. As of Thursday, the parties had agreed to “at least $1.3 trillion” in funding by 2035, but no specifics on where that money would come from.
On Friday, Reuters reported that the latest draft of the agreement required industrialized nations to donate $250 billion a year to poor countries in the name of climate financing. The report did not clarify how the wealthiest nations would be identified, but listed the expected victims of the climate funding to be “the European Union, Australia, the United States, Britain, Japan, Norway, Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland.” Notably absent from the list is the world’s worst polluter and second-largest economy, China, which defines itself as a “developing” country despite its massive wealthy.
Reuters described not obligating “developing” countries to finance the plan and a guarantee that voluntarily donating towards the funding goal would not strip them of “developing” country status as a “red line” for China, as well as allied nations such as Brazil.
M Riaz Hamidullah, a Bangladesh foreign office official, told Reuters the current negotiations over the deal were “a bit like haggling in the fish market,” suggesting messy and aggressive deliberations.
Environmentalists and representatives at COP29 of underdeveloped nations erupted in outrage in response to the news that the contributions expected would be $250 billion a year.
“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 the 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.”
The Paris Agreement is a global document that imposes climate demands on countries party to the document. President-elect Donald Trump exited the Paris Agreement during his first tenure in office and outgoing President Joe Biden restored Washington’s commitments as part of the deal. Trump is expected to exit the agreement again when he returns to the White House in January, leading many at COP29 to approach the talks with concern that Biden’s enthusiasm for climate spending, and American funding, will soon evaporate.
The outlet EnviroNews Nigeria collected incensed statements from a variety of prominent environmental groups who dismissed the $250 billion a year as “paltry” and “insulting.”
“We refuse to accept a hollow finance deal that betrays climate justice and mocks the polluter pays principle,” Fred Njehu, Pan-African Political Strategist, Greenpeace Africa, said in response to the draft. “To my African colleagues – this is our moment to stand united. No deal is better than a deal that condemns our continent to further climate devastation. Developed nations must pay their fair share now.”
“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, was quoted a saying. “The $250 billion per year in public finance is peanuts, doubling a failed $100 billion goal instead of addressing real needs.”
An official with the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network called the draft “inadequate and shameful”
An estimated 50,000 people flew into Baku, generating substantial carbon emissions, for COP29. Nearly 1,800 of those were lobbyists for fossil fuel corporations.
“As with last year’s COP28 climate talks in Dubai, significantly more fossil lobbyists have been granted access to COP29 than almost every country delegation,” the international organization Global Witness, observed of the event. “The 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists registered in Baku are only outnumbered by delegations sent by host Azerbaijan (2,229), COP30 host Brazil (1,914), and Türkiye [Turkey] (1,862).”
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