(CN) — Another United Nations climate summit is over and once again it’s a disappointment.
In the early hours of Sunday, the COP29 meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, ended with organizers announcing a breakthrough on the critical issue of how much rich industrialized nations are willing to fork over starting in 2035 to help poorer countries avoid depending on fossil fuels for their own development.
The answer was $300 billion, a slight improvement over the $250 billion figure put forward on Friday, the summit’s presumptive deadline.
The increase came after a chorus of poorer nations, which are supposed to be the beneficiaries of this money, expressed outrage that the goal wasn’t set much higher. Poorer countries wanted rich countries to pledge $1 trillion a year by 2035.
Funds pledged to bolster green energy around the world are part of a bigger debate over how much richer countries ought to pay for the catastrophic damage they caused by filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, the leading cause of climate change, on their way to becoming heavily industrialized economies.
But for many climate experts, this U.N. summit with its weak promises proved to be the latest in a series of failures since governments first signed onto the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992.
The convention called for annual meetings — or Conferences of the Parties, shorthanded to COPs — to be held where governments would join forces to tackle climate change. The first COP took place in 1995 in Berlin.
But in the 29 years since then, these summits have little to show in terms of success and the accumulation of greenhouse gases continues to grow.
This year’s event in oil-rich Azerbaijan was among the most dismal yet with the host nation’s president, strongman Ilham Aliyev, even praising oil as a “gift of god,” climate protesters facing a police crackdown and world leaders skipping it altogether.
On the COP calendar, this summit was billed as mostly dealing with technical and finance issues, hence the absence of big names. Next year’s summit in Brazil is expected to draw a much bigger audience because nations will unveil plans on how they intend to cut back on carbon emissions.
By Monday, the announcement about the $300 billion pledge left few climate experts impressed.
“There is no meat and there’s not even any bones” to it, said Ilan Kelman, a University College London climate disaster specialist, in a telephone interview.
“It is a goal, it is not a commitment,” he said about the COP29’s final statement about the $300 billion. “What is the mechanism? There isn’t one. Where does the funding come from? It doesn’t say.”
Robert Costanza, a professor of ecological economics at the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, said he held few expectations for the U.N. climate summits because of the power fossil fuel companies have over governments.
“That’s the biggest barrier right now to making progress because renewables are getting cheaper but fossil fuels are still highly, highly profitable and they can use that profit to prevent movement in the direction that I think most of the people on the planet want to happen: To move away from fossil fuels,” he said, speaking by telephone.
He doubted the COPs can fix this problem.
“I’m not sure that the COPs are going to make any inroads into that process simply because the fossil fuel sector has a lot of control over the governments that are making the decisions about what to do,” he said. “Even if they make promises, they can control what actually comes to pass.”
For its part, the U.N. called the $300 billion pledge a “breakthrough” because it tripled the amount rich countries said they were willing to send to developing nations.
“This new finance goal is an insurance policy for humanity, amid worsening climate impacts hitting every country,” Simon Stiell, the U.N. Climate Change executive secretary, said in a statement. “But like any insurance policy — it only works — if premiums are paid in full, and on time. Promises must be kept, to protect billions of lives.”
Stiell acknowledged there was a “very long road ahead” but he praised the Baku summit’s achievement as giving a boost to the development of renewable energy.
The host nation, meanwhile, characterized the new goal as the “Baku breakthrough.”
“When the world came to Baku, people doubted that Azerbaijan could deliver,” said Mukhtar Babayev, the country’s COP president. “They doubted that everyone could agree. They were wrong on both counts.”
But Kelman pointed out that rich countries first pledged to spend $100 billion a year in 2009 and still have not kept that promise.
“It was put on the table as being this is what we need and they’ve spent 15 years not getting it,” he said. “So, it is fully understandable why people are very skeptical of the COP process.”
“It is fundamental to bypass the COP process,” he said.
Instead of expecting major change with agreements announced at COP summits, he said the move away from fossil fuels must occur in other ways. One of the best methods would be for governments to stop subsidizing fossil fuel production, he said.
“Government subsidies, direct government subsidies, to fossil fuel companies exceed $400 billion a year and indirect subsidies have been reported by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] as 10 times that amount — between 4 and 7 trillion dollars a year in indirect subsidies from governments to fossil fuel companies,” he said.
“Our taxes are going to pay the fossil fuel companies,” he said. “If people don’t want to be subsidizing a fossil fuel company’s executive yacht then we need to tell our governments to stop paying fossil fuel companies and to lower our taxes.”
Costanza said the focus should be on holding fossil fuel companies responsible.
“It turns out there are 90 entities in the world that are responsible for two-thirds of the carbon emissions, largely the fossil fuel producers,” he said. “We don’t have to charge everybody for those damages, we go back to the source and say: ‘You guys are responsible in the same way that you are responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill and other environmental spills. We can charge for damages.’”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.