Climate gabfest a cop-out for emitters big and small

COP looks distinctly like a form of eternal life. After all, Greta Thunberg will need somewhere to hang out next year.

“COP looks distinctly like a form of eternal life. After all, Greta Thunberg will need somewhere to hang out next year.”

Another year, another COP. Or to give it its full title, Conference of the Parties, UN Climate Change Conference. The one just gone was held in an industrial part of Madrid. The plan was for it to be held in Chile, but that country cancelled. It was COP25.

In keeping with more recent COP gatherings, there were as many unofficial participants as there were official participants. We are talking tens of thousands of attendees.

Individuals representing all sorts of environmental groups and other assorted activists from around the world somehow find the funds to attend the conference, which goes for two weeks. An extra two days were added to COP25 in the hope that the 200 countries represented could reach various agreements. They could not.

It follows on from a series of unsatisfactory COPs, including most famously the one held in Copenhagen, but also the last four. The one exception to this long list of COP flops was COP21, which was held in Paris and established the framework for the latest international climate change agreement.

Many of the details of that agreement were not settled at the time. Ever since, it has been one argument after another on those details with nary any resolution in sight. Indeed, we are now at a stage where it is worth posing this question: what is the point of COP?

In this context, it’s interesting to observe how the COP process has developed across time; it began in 1995. Initially, the conferences were narrowly focused and country representatives and a small group of scientists attended. An ongoing source of tension was the role that developing countries should play in terms of reducing the growth of greenhouse gases.

For many years the consensus position was that developing countries should be completely exempt because they had not caused the problems in the first place and were not well-placed to bear any costs that emissions mitigation might entail. This was the deal under the Kyoto Protocol.

Note that in the 1990s and early 2000s, the contribution of developing countries to emissions was relatively small, even including China. Fast forward to the present and China is now the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases and India is also a substantial emitter.

Last year’s increase in China’s emissions of carbon dioxide exceeded Australia’s emissions in total and were close to the total emissions of the EU.

The way the Paris Agreement handled the issue of developing countries was to defer any commitments they might make to reducing emissions until after 2030 and to seek some voluntary reductions to the emissions-intensity of their economies in the meantime.

In exchange for these promises, developing countries would be compensated via a fund that would pay for climate change mitigation and adaptation. The targeted figure to be donated by developed countries was $100bn a year by 2020.

Unsurprisingly, the contributions received by the fund have not been remotely close to the target. While the US initially provided $1bn of funding, the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement means there have been no further contributions.

Australia, likewise, has ceased to contribute, having made a small initial donation. The Prime Minister has declared that overseas aid directed to climate change will be spent closer to home.

Back at COP25, there were some trivial commitments of additional donations — less than $100m spread across several years. At this stage, it looks as though the fund mechanism will fail, an outcome that disappoints a very large number of countries that eagerly signed up to the Paris Agreement in the expectation of an additional flow of funds.

The main agenda of COP25 related to article six of the Paris Agreement: voluntary co-operation/market and non-market based approaches. The core of what needed to be worked out was the definitions and principles that should govern international trading in carbon credits.

The argument is that countries or companies should be able to buy carbon credits from overseas countries to meet their obligations rather than undertake more costly domestic abatement.

Brazil, which remains a signatory to the Paris Agreement, sees real advantages in carbon trading in relation to past and future forest management activity. The sticking point came when Brazil sought to count this activity as a contribution to its own carbon abatement while also trading the associated carbon credits. This double-counting was a bridge too far for the other participants.

In the end, there was no agreement in relation to article six.

And notwithstanding the coverage by the local press, the issue of Australia’s use of the Kyoto carry-over credits was not even on the agenda.

Given that the vast majority of countries have no carry-over credits to use — Canada, for instance, failed miserably to abide by its Kyoto commitments — it’s not surprising that there is little support for their application.

Having said that, it’s a complete sideshow when it comes to the main issues. And that’s not even acknowledging the fact Australia may make its 2030 Paris commitments without recourse to the use of the carryovers.

What COP25 really demonstrates is that the vast majority of countries will not put moral purpose before their economic interests.

It’s all very well for activists such as Jamie Henn of 350.org to moan that “the level of disconnect between what this COP should have delivered and what it’s on track to deliver is appalling and is a sign that the very foundations of the Paris Agreement are being shaken up”. But the reality is that it’s impossible to see the COP process delivering anything more than vague and unenforceable commitments while the costs of mitigation remain so high.

That’s why the focus of the COP26, to be held in Glasgow at the end of next year, should be on technology. It’s only with technological breakthroughs that there is a chance that most countries will act to reduce emissions because it makes economic sense as well.

Claiming that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel-generated energy is simply misleading in the context of the absence of effective and economical storage. It’s why China is powering ahead with the construction of coal-fired electricity plants.

Carbon capture and storage has real potential but needs further R&D funding. A more systematic discussion of adaptation to changing climate patterns could also be useful.

The alternative is for the UN to abandon the COP process altogether, although that seems unlikely. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, COP looks distinctly like a form of eternal life. After all, Greta Thunberg will need somewhere to hang out next year.