The 29th UN Climate Change Conference meeting, also known as the Conference of Parties (COP) is in session in Baku, Azerbaijan, for yet another talkfest. It will end this week. As has happened in the last 28 editions, nothing much can be expected in terms of moving the agenda of fighting climate change forward one iota.
There have been three key global agreements on the environment. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. Every year, the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention has been held.
Despite all these meetings global agreements and massive resources, the situation in the world remains dire. Nothing has changed. The world is no nearer to achieving its targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions than when it first began. The situation has become even more dire.
The problem has three pillars. The first is that the earth’s temperature is rising at an unprecedented rate. Secondly, this rise in temperatures is driven by human activities using fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas. Thirdly, the impacts are global and are already manifesting themselves widely.
Experts say that the world must limit global warming to 1.5 per cent degrees Celsius or prepare for catastrophic natural disasters on a global scale.
There can no longer be any argument that climate change is happening and wreaking havoc globally, especially in developing countries that have little capacity to deal with disasters. Further, this situation will not be reversed without decisive collective and concerted action.
But despite all the seeming activity, why has there been no movement? This is because of the global environment mafia. The world is now dominated by highly funded, heavily bureaucratised, and rigidly dogmatic global environment bodies whose lethargy has just suffocated the global environment ecosystem.
This system has spawned a coterie of bureaucrats who have captured the environmental agenda and held it hostage to their idiosyncrasies. These bureaucrats have lost all touch with reality on the ground. Indeed, to them, COP has become a ritual. They have been doing this for 29 years, and are not capable of seeing any urgency, or changing their way of thinking to deal with emerging issues.
They have become a veritable mafia. Because the global climate agenda is being financed and executed through them, they have little motivation to stop the gravy train by working hard to find the urgent solutions needed. They are completely embedded in their comfort zones.
Enter US President-elect Donald Trump. Trump has no time for highly bureaucratised multilateral institutions in general but is even more impatient with those in the environment ecosystem.
In his first term, he pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, noting, correctly, that it had achieved little of its mandate since inception. President Joe Biden promptly returned the US to the treaty. Expect Trump to reverse that order. Indeed, the estimated $9.8 billion that went into climate financing from the US in 2023 is likely to be severely curtailed. There is trouble ahead for the environment mafia.
What will all this achieve? A complete shake-up of the climate change mafia. The environmental ecosystem must reconstitute its thinking and mindset. As the saying goes, it’s insanity to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
The global environment institutions must recalibrate how they work. A new paradigm must come into being. Without climate financing from the US, the climate change ecosystem will struggle. But only when the incestuous relationship between these global institutions and their allies in the countries with the biggest emissions becomes untenable can the narrative change. Trump has cast the first stone.
This is all for the good. This is the shake-up the global environment ecosystem needs to jerk it out of its ivory tower. So, after all, Trump might be the best thing that happened to the war against climate change, his hardline stance notwithstanding.
