The Baku metro announces its arrival at each station with a blast of triumphant music. It sounds as if it has achieved something heroic. For a minute, there is a rush of people moving back and forth. Then the doors close, and the train goes on its way, just as it did before.
One could be forgiven for thinking the COP process is similar. World leaders arrive, signalling their presence with a blast of political statements. For a day or two, they and their bag-carriers hurry back and forth. Then they depart, and go about their business just as before.
In many ways, there is less to COP than meets the eye. This COP, number 29 in the series, is likely to be remembered mainly for three things: the deal on finance; Trump’s election win, creating the expectation that the US will again pull out of the Paris Agreement; and the President of the host country telling the conference that oil is a gift of God, amid concern about fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbering delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable countries combined. But none of these is quite what it seems.
The new finance goal is a global one; it does not specify what contribution any individual country should make. As the researcher of climate diplomacy Scott Barrett once said of the 2°C goal, ‘Everyone is responsible for meeting it, meaning that no country is responsible for meeting it.’ Each rich country will decide for itself whether to stump up any funds, and if so, how much. The overall goal may or may not be met. Many countries would have provided funding in the absence of any global goal; some will refuse to help despite the goal. And since this is an aspiration for the future, not a deal where money changes hands, it is subject to the wishes of governments that have not yet been elected.
Trump’s election win is undoubtedly bad news for the future stability of the climate. Although he cannot reverse the clean energy transition (more coal power plants closed in the US during his first term as President than during the preceding term of Barack Obama), he can do harm by not taking the actions that are needed to accelerate it through all sectors of the economy. But pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement is not the problem: this will be purely symbolic. As China’s climate envoy Liu Zhenmin commented, this will be the third time (if you count Kyoto). It will not alter China’s interests in energy security, clean air, and making and selling clean technologies. Neither is it likely to substantially change the interests of other countries.
As for the oil lobbyists, they do not need a climate change conference to do their deals. Just like Gazprom does not need Russia’s COP pavilion, where it handed out children’s colouring books with pictures of petrol stations, to sell gas. Their presence would matter if the COP was deciding anything substantial, but it isn’t. And that, in fact, is the real problem.
The most striking thing for me at this COP was how often people remarked that the process of negotiation was not doing anything helpful, and how, unlike in the past, very little opposition to this view was expressed.
When you have all the countries in the world around the table, discussing a problem as broad in scope as climate change, normative global goal-setting is about the best you can hope for. So that is what the climate negotiations do, as well as agreeing a lot of processes for accounting and reporting. That is a not a recipe for achieving rapid structural change in the global economy. It is not going to keep anybody safe.
Demand for coal, oil and gas is destroyed by policies that accelerate the deployment of zero emission technologies. As the IEA and UN Climate Change High-Level Champions have advised, there are many ways that countries can work together to make this happen more quickly, at lower cost, and with less difficulty. That includes financial support – not aspirational goals for the future, but actual contributions made in the present, for specific purposes in specific places.
A call from prominent figures in the climate movement for ‘smaller, more frequent, solution-driven meetings’ is along the right lines. This will not emerge from within the process of UN negotiations, where everything is subject to the veto of Saudi Arabia. And neither should it. The grand climate problem is a set of many smaller problems: how to replace coal plants in power systems; how to produce soy beans without deforestation; how to make clean steel competitive in global markets; how to protect agriculture against extreme weather events. Each of these problems can best be addressed by small groups of countries with the right influence and interests, working together in very specific ways. It is no more helpful to invite every country in the world into each of these discussions than it would be to involve 197 parties in an attempt to negotiate peace in the Middle East.
The institutions for practical, focused, sector-specific collaboration on the problems of emissions reduction and resilience have barely begun to be built. This is now the most urgent task for climate change diplomacy. With US leadership out of the question for the next four years, it is the world’s next two largest economies, the EU and China, that must rise to this challenge. Both are committed to the low carbon transition (for different reasons). Both will need to overcome their habit of looking inward – the EU focusing on reaching agreement among its own members, and China treating climate diplomacy as a defensive exercise – and increasingly look outward, to work with each other and with other countries to change the global economy.
Just as the Baku metro makes most of its progress in a tunnel, where no-one can see it, most of the progress on climate change is made through detailed policy decisions in national capitals, largely unnoticed by the international media. Diplomacy will be useful when it makes these decisions easier. It does not need to be triumphal, only effective.