Multipolar Climate Diplomacy
Time looks to have run out for the UN Cops process. The next best step may be to take climate diplomacy multipolar.
The COP29 UN climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, had “fiasco” written all over it from the get-go. On Day 1, Thunberg — in Tiblisi, Georgia, hundreds of miles from the action — called it “beyond absurd” that the conference was being held in an “authoritarian petrostate.” Darren Woods, CEO of top US petro-company Exxon — at the center of the action in Baku — called on past and future US President Donald Trump to keep the world’s largest petrostate in COP.
Woods was one of over 1,700 fossil fuel industry executives and lobbyists reportedly in attendance at COP29. In contrast, China’s Xi Jinping and top European leaders skipped the whole thing, and a Trump-obsessed Washington establishment scarcely noted it was happening. Before the week was out, Costa Rican diplomate and former executive secretary of the UN climate negotiating apparatus (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres was process she had played a vital role in creating both “no longer fit for purpose” and “essential and irreplaceable.”
What the stark contradictions and the demoralization tell me is that, nearly 30 years on, the change is not only “no longer fit for [the] purpose” of fighting greenhouse gas emissions and coping with climate crisis. It has been co-opted by the ancien oil regime and transformed into a theater piece aimed at deflecting attention from actions that might reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel use. Climate activists used to provide the theatrics, which focused attention on the urgency of the crisis.
“We need a global system for managing global emissions,” Exxon’s Woods from Baku. Really? Is a global system for “managing” rather than eliminating emissions a good thing — or something the world would be better off without? Is the entire annual COP extravaganza something we’d be better off without? Not just for 2024 in Azerbaijan, but forever? Even though this would leave no global structure in place to combat a threat that is global, perpetrated by a fossil fuel industry that is global?
As things stand, my answer is “yes.” Sometimes the something you have really is worse than nothing.
Maybe next year’s COP30 host, Brazil, will do something miraculous to change that dynamic. If so, wonderful. But I’m dubious. I suspect that time has run out for the COP jamborees and their national pledges, just as it probably has for a 1.5℃ cap on global warming. If so, where to go from here?
Multipolar Climate System
Time has certainly run out for the unilateralist approach to geopolitics and trade that extends all the way back to the US drive to save capitalism in the chaotic aftermath of World War II. China, Russia, virtually the entire Global South, Donald Trump & Co all understand that — even if Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, and a few holdouts at Nato headquarters do not.
In the absence of a coherent alternative, opponents of the old “rules-based system” talk of “multipolarity.” Although that approach arguably isn’t far off anarchy, sometimes nothing is better than something as rotten as the old order has become. And sometimes ad hoc, single-issue diplomacy works okay, with no system support. As when China early last year brokered a deal for Saudi Arabia and Iran to relations; or for Russia and Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea despite their ongoing war. The “indispensable” US was nowhere to be seen in either case.
What oil industry takeover of the COP system tells me is NOT that the ridiculous things Exxon’s Woods and his buddies advocate will actually happen. Rather, it’s that climate diplomacy is following the same multipolar path as the rest of international relations. We are headed towards international Climate Anarchy. Not ideal perhaps. But not necessarily disastrous either.
Figuring out how to accept and work within that reality to reduce energy use, emissions, pollution, and economic growth is better than simply wringing our hands and calling for spontaneous generation of a tidier geopolitical order. If we had time, trying to create a replacement for COP might make sense. But we don’t. The climate, Earth’s systemic functioning, and human relations at all levels are collapsing too rapidly for that.
Multiple poles of climate diplomacy are already appearing. Even as China revs up renewable generation equipment manufacturing and installation at home and abroad, Beijing is taking a low profile at COP. It is apparently looking to shift its clean-energy and climate-adaptation efforts toward new counter-institutions taking shape outside the US-led Group of 20/IMF/World Bank/WTO framework.
A “Brics block” — composed of original Brics members Brazil, India, China, South Africa, and sometimes Russia — has been active in Baku arguing for more direct grants from developed countries for climate assistance to the Global South and less of the assistance for private bank lending that the US and EU are pushing. These countries also talked about climate cooperation at a Brics meeting in Russia early this autumn.
The EU can remain an important promotor of climate action with or without COP through its “carbon border adjustment mechanism ,” a tax on imports of carbon-intensive goods including cement and steel from countries not deemed to have carbon emission controls as strict of those of the EU. The to raise money for the EU and protect its manufacturers, but also to push other countries to cut emissions in order to avoid the tax. This could be a powerful incentive for climate action worldwide — assuming it remains in place in the rightward-shifting European political landscape.
One-off deals aimed at advancing the climate agenda are also proliferating. Indonesia back in 2022 signed the “ (JETP)” with the US, Japan, and other Western countries aimed at bringing the big Asian coal user and exporter’s GHG emissions into alignment with a 1.5℃ warming target, potentially to the tune of $20 billion. Progress has been slow, reportedly due mainly to disagreements over loan terms.
$10 billion trade deal with Indonesia just before COP29 opened, covering clean energy along with food and technology. In this case, a little competition among major powers might not be a bad thing.
The distributed structures for facilitating cooperation among which have grown up under the Paris Accords provide other avenues for sharing insights and information that will help in a decentered international space.
COP, Capitalism, and Crises
Whether or not there’s a last-minute pseudo-rescue of COP29 in Baku, it will fall largely on Brazil to try and save the UN structure. As the Amazon jungle burns amid drought and deforestation, the leftist government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is gearing up to host COP30 a year from now. It will be a tall order, even with Brazil’s famously effective top climate diplomat and former activist . The fact that Brazil is a major oil producer with plans to expand its output in the years ahead threatens to undermine the credibility of the effort.
The foundational problem beneath the surface clashes, though, is the fact that COP has been and remains firmly grounded in the capitalist growth compulsion. It is geared to adapt a largely private, heavily financialized system to move off fossil fuels in ways that are gradual and non-disruptive, so that the globalized world economy can continue to operate with little or no change outside the energy sector and no drag on GDP.
This orientation has been glaringly obvious in Baku, with the emphasis on carbon-trading that allows rich countries and companies to buy rights to continue burning fossil fuels and on Western efforts to spur the big global banks and investment houses to invest more capital in decarbonization and in Global South adaptation to a hotter, often dryer but also more flood-prone climate. The fact that this will burden underdeveloped countries with even more debt is obvious, but to do otherwise would require change more fundamental than the institution currently envisages.
Unless or until this fundamental orientation towards growth changes, COP will remain largely useless in coping with the fast-moving, interacting crises the world is facing. Like so much else in the transition, it appears that change will have to come from below. World leaders won’t design and implement change for us. We have to do it for ourselves.
