I have for decades been assuring both colleagues and comrades that the climate negotiations are not a sick joke, that “COP” is not short for “Conference of Polluters,” that the negotiations matter. The argument has become easier to make as more people have come to see the implacable necessity of an international way forward. As imperfect as the COP process is, a world without multilateral climate negotiations would be far worse.
Still, there comes a time, amidst the floods and the firestorms, when even the practiced realism of seasoned observers must break down. This time didn’t quite come at COP29, though it came close. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times, “the assessment has to lie between failure and disaster—failure, because progress is still possible, or disaster, because a good agreement will now be too late.”
The climate problem demands an earnest and cooperative international response, but Baku instead saw the Global North present the Global South with a “grim ultimatum”—agree to an inadequate offer of support or risk the collapse of the only international process where it has significant voice and influence. By its end, the Global South had been forced to accede. With the clap of the president’s gavel, and despite a broad push to assert that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” it got a very bad deal indeed.
There was also action on the emissions trading front, where the rules were finally nailed down. But the rules are pretty bad and the deal is more likely to generate a flood of illusory offsets than a flood of quality investment. Also, and importantly, neither carbon trading in particular nor private finance in general can honestly be expected to entirely finance a successful climate transition.
On the public finance side, the pressure to relitigate the Baku deal, already high, can only increase. The last-minute adoption of the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3 trillion”—a critical commitment to find a real path forward—is likely to define the COP30 agenda. The problem is that, barring an unanticipated political shift of the first order, the Belém COP, too, will fail to rise to the occasion.
A number of things are now obvious. The shape of the future is not among them.
We know, for example, that Donald J. Trump is likely to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement (and maybe even the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), and this despite the terrifying, and rising, instability of the climate system. To pick one horror from among thousands – we now know that the AMOC, the Atlantic Overturning Meridional Circulation, is far more likely to collapse than was hitherto projected, and soon, and with “devastating and irreversible” consequences.
There is much to say, about Trump, about the political crisis, and about the climate reckoning. I will hazard just one claim – the “neoliberal order,” as historian Gary Gerstle calls it, is clearly behind us, and though we are still trudging through Gramsci’s interregnum, there are signs that it, too, is ending. The order, or disorder, that replaces it will have everything to do with the planetary boundaries we’re now crossing, and with the political and equity challenges they present. Its precise nature will be defined by how, and how successfully, we face these challenges.
Our key message is that stabilizing the climate quickly enough to prevent catastrophe is going to be expensive, but that we nonetheless have the money. Or, rather, the global rich have the money, and – one way or another – they are going to have to pay, as per Foreign Policy’s rather inelegant formulation, to “help fix the planet”.
The 2024 Civil Society Equity Reviews includes:
An updated look at fairness, and unfairness, of the current NDCs , out to 2035
A concise overview of the equity challenges posed by the unavoidable need for a rapid global fossil-fuel extraction phaseout
A quick survey of the key barriers to climate mobilization — the protracted inaction of the global North, the organized obstruction of the fossil-fuel industry, and the parasitism of the global rich.
An overview of the most obvious possible sources public climate finance on the necessary scale — hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.
The discussion of the need to begin with large scale, short-term finance reforms, while preparing the ground for the system change that will be needed to fully transition away from the inequitable, fossil fuel dependent society we have today.
The finance challenge
How much would it cost to save ourselves and our civilization? You’ll find plenty of details – and footnotes – in the report. What I will say here, and what climate policy activists around the world are stressing, is that the figure is denominated in trillions, not billions, of dollars a year, and that a good deal of this must come as public finance. This latter necessity – the need for the new global finance goal, the “New Collective Quantified Goal”, to have a large grant and grant-equivalent public finance core – is now, finally, at the center of the UN climate negotiations.
Trillions of dollars in public finance, obviously, are not yet on offer. Indeed, with authoritarian populism on the main stage – and not just in the US – the battle for public finance for the public good is mired in the myths and agenda of the right. Instead of fighting a long-term battle for a new international finance architecture, one fit for the purposes now before us, we are forced to engage in endless short-term battles to prevent further tax cuts for the rich, further attacks of our social safety nets, further deregulation, further militarism, further dismissals of any fundamental sense of global solidarity. All that said, this last year has nonetheless seen an explosion of work designed to show that we have the money.
The Civil Society Equity Review is not alone in making this case. See for example here, and here, and here, and here, and here. But the 2024 Civil Society Equity Review report is notable for the deliberate manner in which it lays out the path forward, for the way it names and quantifies the barriers to decarbonization and for its careful, explicit distinction between finance sources that are immediately available, given only political and economic reforms, and more fundamental transformations that will require deeper system change.
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We’re moving now into a new phase in the climate battle, and because it has so much to do with finance, it is important to stress that there is more on the table than just money. Think of the global South’s overwhelming international debt, which can never be repaid. Think of our massively unbalanced and unsustainable international trading system. Think of the planetary divide between the rich and the poor, and how the global rich exploit it at every turn.
Still, we have the money, or could, and this is extremely good news – to stabilize the climate system in time, we’re going to need a “global just transition”, and it’s not going to be cheap. This is the main point here, but we also have to realize that there’s a danger in focusing too tightly on finance. Doing so can create the impression that finance is the key to a future that can, in effect, be seen as a lower-carbon version of business as usual. But this is not the case. Sure, climate transition must begin here in the “real world,” but there’s no such thing as climate-friendly business as usual. If we pretend there is, we will only find that other elements of business as usual will undermine effective climate action.
Fortunately, the situation is fluid, and filled with possibility. People everywhere are concluding that we’re at a tipping point, and perhaps we are. The climate negotiations, certainly, are heading for crisis. Perhaps the finance showdown will lead to clarity, and break the deadlocks that have mired the negotiations now for decades. That said, superficial reforms will not be enough, precisely because equity is a prerequisite of rapid decarbonization. Nor will equity as a mere principle suffice. We also need equity as a nexus of political realism, for it is quite impossible to imagine collecting, or releasing, the trillions of dollars that the global finance transformation will demand unless this is done in a manner that is very widely – and internationally – seen as fair.
Rapid planetary decarbonization will only be possible if the global North pays its fair share of the cost. This is only possible if the rich, everywhere, do the same. Nor is this an exorbitant demand – a trillion dollars a year in public climate finance would be enough to get things moving. It is not much, but it is an implacable necessity. That’s the point.
Wen Stephenson, who recognized its importance, invited me to do a Q&A session about it and its core arguments for The Nation. It was a lively exchange, and you can read Wen’s synopsis of it here.
And Bill McKibben has quoted it, and me on it, in his substack newsletter, The Crucial Years. Bill has a good eye for a punchy quote,, and notes that the report decries the “organized obstructionism of the fossil fuel industry and the parasitism of the global rich.”
Just before the recent climate summit in Dubai, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, with some exasperation, came out with the following rather amazing statement:
“Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
Al-Jabar was posturing when he made this quip about caves, but he can almost be forgiven. We badly need a roadmap for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” By noting the lack of one, he underscored its absence. This is true even if he spoke as a flack of the fossil fuel cartel.
Speaking of COP28, it helped settle the question of the COPs, which still troubles the climate left. The COPs are easily dismissed as “blah blah blah.” But they are, in a word, necessary. We would be in far greater trouble without them, and this is true even though the COPs are condemned to make decisions by consensus, even though they engender endless greenwashing, even though, with next year’s COP29 slated for Azerbaijan, two in a row will be hosted by straight-up petrostates.
The climate negotiations are finally circling core issues. COP26 saw a decision to “phase down” coal, and COP28 opened with the Loss and Damage fund finally lurching into existence. Then came COP28’s key decision text, which called for “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Only a month later—with President Biden’s move to “pause” the approval of new liquified natural gas terminals, a decision the White House explicitly linked to COP28— the COP decision demonstrated real world benefits. It could have many more in the future, including outside the United States.
Meanwhile, COP29 is set to see the next big battle begin in earnest, as climate finance takes center stage. This battle could (if all goes well) culminate in 2025, where COP30 will be hosted by Lula da Sila’s Brazil, and deliver a meaningful decision on that crucial front. This is not the time to performatively insist that COP stands for “conference of polluters.”
Having said all this, I must immediately add that the climate negotiations have thus far failed, as decisively witnessed by the steadily rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration. COP skeptics are quite right about this. But in their failure the international negotiations are hardly alone. Domestic climate action has had many victories, but it has hardly put us on a path to deep and rapid decarbonization. Nor has the green technology revolution brought planetary emissions into a peak-and-decline pathway. Nor—and this is not easy to say—have the world’s direct action and climate justice movements filled the gaps. Politically, they may be everything, but they too have failed to stop the warming.
One key point: the COP28 text does not simply call for transitioning away from fossil fuels but rather stipulates that this transition must be “just, orderly, and equitable,” a much more challenging prospect. This led Sivan Kartha, a climate equity specialist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, to add that the “deepest fissure” in Dubai was between those who simply want a rapid fossil phase out and those who insist that, to have any hope of success, such a phase out must be fair.
Many of us agree—but what does such fairness imply?