https://www.cfact.org/2024/11/25/cop-29-diplomacy-delivers-perfectly-vague-promises-a-decade-away/
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In Cop 29’s “Finance agreement” diplomacy is truly the art of agreeing to nothing. There is no agreement of substance here because there is no substance to this agreement. Each side gets its number someday and that is all there is to it.
Let’s look at the actual text to see the nothing. But first recall what was supposed to happen. The Paris Agreement committed the developed country members to providing $100 billion a year to the developing countries through 2025. COP 29 was simply supposed to revise that annual payment up beginning in 2026. That did not happen, not even close.
The fiasco started when the developing countries demanded huge impossibly sums centered on $1.3 trillion. That set in motion a series of side steps leading to the present agreement which is very different from the intended goal.
To begin with the $1.3 trillion annual payment is there but it is “by 2035” so ten years from now not in 2026. I can see delaying it until a few years after Trump leaves office but these folks are wedded to their five year plans.
Moreover this money need not come from the developed countries and certainly not from their governments. First it is to come “from all public and private sources.” Second the eligible sources have been expanded to include all the developing countries as well as the developed ones.
These two provisions have fundamentally changed the concept of climate finance. It used to just include mostly government money going from developed to developing countries. Now it sounds like any climate related investment or contribution that winds up in a developing country counts.
Working this out will be supremely challenging. For example if China builds itself an offshore wind array, and they are building plenty, is that climate finance? How about if they build it in Indonesia?
Oh and it looks like coal fired power plants count too. In early drafts of the agreement counting coal plants was ruled out because people were doing that in the name of adaptation. Having electricity certainly helps when extreme weather hits. But that prohibition does not appear in the final agreement so the practice looks allowable.
Then there is the other big number, the $300 billion a year. This is widely assumed to replace the $100 billion a year mandated by the Paris Agreement through 2025. For example CBS has a headline that yells “deal reached at UN’s COP29 climate talks for $300 billion a year (up from $100 billion).”
This is incorrect as here too the new agreement says the goal is “by 2035.” Nor is all (or any) of this distant sum necessarily coming from developed countries as the yearly $100 billion had to. The new agreement just says “with developed country Parties taking the lead.” (Parties means to the Paris Agreement.)
“Taking the lead” is an extremely vague concept. It might mean paying over half say $151 billion. Or just being the biggest donor at say $20 billion. Or even just running a bunch of promotions to get private investors to invest, which might only millions.
The overall fiasco becomes clear when we ask what the finance requirement or goal is for 2026? There is none, nor for any other year ahead until 2035. Nor is anyone responsible for meeting those far distant goals.
In short this is a huge mess and nothing like what the Paris agreement called for. Regulatory confusion is a many-year field of mine and this is as bad as I have ever seen. But this is what you get when a complex big money deal is struck at 2:40 am Sunday by people who have not slept much for days.
Surely the next few COPs and many lesser meetings will be spent trying to straighten out this hopelessly vague and seriously misstated agreement. Or if they want to wait until 2035 with no finance before then, that is fine with me.
A fascinating sidebar is that the developing countries reportedly have something like a combined cost of $10 trillion in official climate plans through 2030. These are all contingent on getting finance which under this agreement need not happen.
The big money game has just opened and it is wall to wall confusion. Stay tuned to see how it plays.
