COP30 in Belem: No Commitments, No Progress, and a Worsening Climate Trajectory – Habib Maalouf
COP30 in Belem: No Commitments, No Progress, and a Worsening Climate Trajectory – Habib Maalouf
As expected, the 30th climate conference in Belém, Brazil, failed to achieve any significant goal of reducing emissions and limiting climate change and disasters. The opposing countries, or rather the lying countries, did not take any steps towards eliminating or stepping back from fossil fuels. Over a period of two weeks, the countries that met in Brazil were unable to reach even a “voluntary” agreement to begin discussions on a road map that would eventually lead to the gradual elimination of fossil fuels, as stated for the first time in the Dubai Declaration of 2023.
After a bitter confrontation between a large coalition that includes
developed and developing countries, the Arab Group led by the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia and its allies, and Russia, on the one hand, and another group that
includes other developed and developing countries, on the other, in light of
the remarkable absence of the US.
Some developing countries imagined that they had achieved part of their goal in the global talks, which was to triple the financial support available from rich countries to help them adapt to the effects of the climate crisis, despite knowing that they would not receive $120 billion annually for adaptation before the year 2035, instead of the year 2030 as was promised!
Last year's agreement in Baku, Azerbaijan, recommended that these developed countries pump $300 billion before 2035, that is, nearly half of the amounts allocated for adaptation, as demanded by developing countries. However, the developed countries do not usually fulfill their obligations. Previously, at the climate summit held in Copenhagen in 2009, they had pledged to pay one hundred billion annually starting in 2020, and barely committed to twenty percent of these amounts!
The state of the planet today has changed a lot since 2009, just as it has changed since 2015, the date of the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement, in which the countries of the world pledged that the rise in Earth’s temperature would not exceed one and a half degrees by the end of the century. Needless to say, we reached 1.5 degrees two years ago, and it seems we would be exceeding it quickly, because no one committed to anything, and global emissions increased instead of decreasing. What benefit would it do for developing countries to increase their funding to address adaptation issues after ten years, when they will be unable to bear the cost of addressing the losses and damages that began with climate disasters, which also exceed these numbers by three times, according to recent estimates by international insurance companies?
In Belém, there was much celebration before the conference, due to its
location near the rainforests. People hoped that financing a mechanism to
protect them would be the number one topic. Unfortunately, the final agreement
did not adhere to a clause related to stopping deforestation. It was a great
disappointment for nature defenders at the Rainforest Conference held near the
mouth of the Amazon River.
Before the conference, countries were supposed to submit new national
emissions reduction plans, but they did not meet the commitments needed to
maintain the 1.5°C limit, which has already been exceeded. Instead of
condemning this failure in the final statement to hold states accountable, the
conference agreed to create an “accelerator” program to address the shortfall
in nationally determined contributions (NDCs), a report on which will be
submitted to the Conference of the Parties next year, to be held in Turkey
under the presidency of Australia. Thus, the examination of these (already
meager) contributions will be delayed. To compensate for this shortcoming, the
agreement included a text urging countries to “fully implement the NDCs while
striving to improve their performance”!
In Belém, some civil society networks cheered the approval of the final
agreement, which included the “just transition” that social justice activists
have long called for. Such a step means establishing a global mechanism and
principles for a just transition, helping workers affected by the transition
away from fossil fuels and the transition to clean energy, facilitating
financing, supporting professional transition capabilities, supporting small
projects, training workers in renewable energy technologies, creating platforms
for dialogue between governments, society, workers and companies, exchanging
experiences between countries, etc. They are all mechanisms that require little
funding, most of which goes to opening and managing dialogues between the aforementioned
parties and wasting time for years and years. They benefit from the waste of
companies and countries that rely on fossil fuels for their economies to extend
the expansion of their interests and provide sufficient time for them to
increase their profits before any discussion of finding a mechanism to exit
fossil fuels within a specific road map that the networks of interests of the
oil countries refused to discuss at the conference itself!
This interpretation of a just transition no longer has meaning. Rather,
it has turned into a cover to buy time, in which civil society organizations
contribute and benefit from its small revenues to market it as well. At a time
when the concept of a “just transition” is supposed to at least hold developed
countries responsible for the accumulation of their emissions since the
industrial revolution that took place in their countries, and for them to move
first to a new civilizational system that relies and lives on less and clean
energy, and bears the responsibility of compensating developing countries by
granting them renewable energy technologies for free, and compensating workers
with old technologies. Knowing that the transition to renewable energies and to
rare and critical earths and minerals instead of fossil ones will not happen at
this speed or with this superficial mechanism that we presented and was
approved in Belem, but rather when a country like the United States of America
finds the infrastructure for this transition, that is, rare minerals and gets
its hands on quantities that compete with those that China now has a 70%
monopoly on the global level. This explains why US President Donald Trump,
after tearing up the Paris Climate Agreement at the beginning of his second
term, immediately went to an agreement with several countries to secure rare
earths and minerals. He signed an agreement with Australia to cooperate in the
mining and processing of critical metals and rare earth elements, and to secure
supply chains. He also signed a framework with Japan to secure the supply of
these minerals, and with Malaysia, he signed a memorandum of understanding for
cooperation in these critical minerals, and with Thailand to develop the chain
of these minerals, and recently with Ukraine to establish an investment fund
for reconstruction based on the revenues of these minerals and the development
of mines, etc.
On the other hand, it became clear in Belém how China and Russia
blocked key provisions mentioning the exploitation of “base minerals”,
recognizing the environmental and social risks of extraction and protecting
miners, while talking about a just transition. This explains the superficiality
of the text that was approved on the just transition, which does not include
the clause on the historical responsibility of developed countries such as the
United States of America to bear the cost of the transition, nor does it
mention how to manage the material that is supposed to be transferred and
control the supply chains of countries such as China and Russia. To indicate
the meagreness of this topic, which does not provide anything in the climate
talks, the meager text of the transition was accepted. The text related to
setting a road map for exiting fossil fuels was rejected. More than 80
countries announced their support for including the commitment to “divest from
fossil fuels” in the final result, but a larger number of oil-producing
countries and those within their orbit rejected this.
This has forced opposition to turn the “move away from fossil fuels”
(which scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate
breakdown) into a voluntary commitment rather than the legally binding decision
that many had hoped for.
Before the end of the Brazilian climate summit in Belém, the presidency proposed the possibility, in the last hours, of approving a roadmap to exit fossil fuels, leaving each country free to choose its own path, in the manner of the “nationally determined contributions” in the 2015 Paris Agreement. This indicates that the path of mutual lying is still dominant, and everyone will be satisfied with not being obligated to anything... at a time when new records are set every year in increasing emissions, increasing global temperature, increasing climate disasters, and increasing international lying! This indicates once again that lying is still the main theme of the negotiations and that decisions are only taken unanimously, at a time when consensus only occurs on headlines that are empty of any commitment... There is no longer any point in handing over the negotiations to countries or those controlled by companies and their representatives who enter with official delegations and control everything. The initiative is supposed to pass to the people who must organize and cooperate to save the climate by changing the controlling regimes and controlling this destructive international competition and conflict. All of this is far from the logic of developing countries, which have been saying for more than a quarter of a century that “countries that have used all energy sources during the past two hundred years and have reached the peak of industrial growth (and yet have not stopped using them) are calling on us to stop growing.” “The right to growth and security is fundamental to every nation.” And replacing it with a logic that says that the Western development model that has prevailed since the industrial revolution and destroyed the planet must stop and be replaced by a system that is less voracious about everything. Developed countries must bear their historical responsibility for a just transition to a model closer to nature and compensate developing countries so that they do not follow the same path they took, to save the planet, the climate, and the current and future peoples, who also have the right to the Earth’s resources that have been depleted by the unlimited development model.
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