The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP29, is currently occurring in Baku, the capital city of the major oil producing country of Azerbaijan. The annual meeting hosts negotiations between world leaders to address the catastrophic climate crisis.
Even though the COP meeting often hosts many of the world’s top political leaders, the annual negotiations have never brought us closer to overcoming the ever-worsening climate crisis. The Paris Agreement, for example, which came out of COP 2015, was one of the most famous climate treaties of all time. Politicians around the world said it was an enormous achievement. However, most climate activists at the time predicted it would be a failure. They were right: almost 10 years later, none of the world’s richest countries have taken the action that they committed to in the Paris Agreement.
Every year since, the COP meeting has become even more of a joke. At the current meeting, the top leaders of the 13 largest carbon dioxide-producing countries are absent. Showing up in full force, however, are the executives and lobbyists of companies responsible for the climate crisis. At least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists are in attendance, along with the CEOs of oil and gas companies such as Aramco, BP, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies. Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, was even given a prestigious speaking role at a high-level meeting. These lobbyists and executives attend COP in huge delegations, outnumbering the attendees from almost any country, so they can influence the conference’s decisions to protect their industry’s survival at the expense of humanity’s survival.
Unfortunately, fossil fuel companies’ influence over the COP meetings is nothing new. What is new, however, are the trends like nicknaming this COP the “Finance COP.” Everyone from politicians to UN officials to banking executives are announcing that this year’s COP is focused on the idea that wealthy countries should have financial obligations to poorer countries suffering the worst consequences of the climate crisis.
These advocates of so-called climate finance, however, do not propose that the fossil fuel corporations should be forced to pay for the damages they cause. In reality, the ideas discussed in the UN conference rooms are about private investment, international loans and bonds, and carbon markets. In other words, the world’s leaders are simply finding new ways to profit off of this global catastrophe. Requiring that solutions to climate change be tied to profitability will ensure a continuation of the same old problem. This will only lead to poor countries being burdened with even greater debt to the giant financial institutions of the wealthy countries. Climate finance will prop up and prolong the root cause of climate change: our global economic system of capitalism.
Even former heads of COP and the UN are declaring that the current direction of the conference is ineffective. But for poor and working people around the world, their mild criticisms do not go far enough. The global capitalist class and the politicians they control are the common enemy of the majority of the world’s population, whether they are the people in regions subject to the most extreme climate disasters, the workers of fossil fuel companies forced into deadly working conditions, or the residents of sacrifice zones experiencing toxic air and water pollution near fossil fuel facilities. It will take a worldwide movement of these and other working and oppressed people to make the massive changes we really need to prioritize our collective survival.
