EDITORIAL: At the ongoing 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Baku, Shehbaz Sharif and leaders of other nations most affected by climate change-induced disasters stressed greater urgency in fighting global warming.
But the conference host, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, one of the first places to start commercial oil production, termed the whole issue “fake news” and strongly defended fossil fuel producers’ right to exploit them. “Quote me that I said that this is a gift of the God, and I want to repeat it today”, he told delegates, adding that countries should not be blamed for bringing their natural resources to the market, “because the market needs them.”
As Alex Rafalowsicz of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative aptly observed, countries are not at fault for having natural resources, but they are responsible for the threat they pose to humanity by extracting them from the ground.
So far, conspicuous by their absence from the climate action conference have been most leaders of G20 nations, which account for nearly 80 percent of global emissions. Particularly noticeable has been the absence of Indian and Chinese leaders.
At a previous conference, both countries had insisted on ‘phasing down’ rather than ‘phasing out’ all fossil fuels. Though China is fast replacing fossil fuels with greener alternatives, India refuses to mend its ways and continues to commission new coal-fired power plants as well as making liberal use of other fossil fuels — responsible to a great extent for the melting of Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) glaciers — the largest outside the Polar Regions.
This is alarming since these glaciers feed river systems, on which depend the food and water security of peoples in Central and South Asia. Environment ministers from the HKH region held a special meeting, organised on the sidelines of the conference by Bhutan, where they expressed concern that over the last decade the rate of glaciers melting had accelerated by 65 percent compared to the previous decade (2000-2010), a worrying trend projected to continue.
Meanwhile, the main agenda of the conference is focussed on two related issues: One to keep global temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius, preferably 1.5C, above pre-industrial levels; and the other, mobilising climate finance to help poor and middle income countries reduce emissions, and take climate change adaptation and mitigation action.
In his inaugural address to the conference, UN climate chief Simon Stiell asked rich countries to dispense with any idea that climate finance is a charity, emphasising that an ambitious new climate finance is entirely in the self-interest of every nation, including the largest and wealthiest.
The wealthiest country and historically the biggest polluter, the US, inspires little optimism, though. President-elect Donald Trump, who dismisses global warming as a ‘hoax’, cannot be expected to make any contribution to the loss and damage fund. Instead, as the US envoy Johan Podesta acknowledged in Baku, the next US administration would “try and take a U-turn” on climate action, though he said American cities, states and individual citizens would pick up the slack.
Be that as it may, how much money the other rich countries are prepared to offer and who can access that finance is yet unclear. What is clear is that besides refusing to pay up for loss and damage caused to developing countries, the Trump administration will also reverse its predecessor’s policy of encouraging green energy with tax credits and subsidies on companies using renewable technologies and consumers buying them. There will be doubts and dramas about the climate change, regardless of the scientific evidence that suggests 2024 is likely to break new temperature records with devastating consequences for people across the planet.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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