Trump punctures the mood at UN climate talks

Papua New Guinea will not be sending a delegation to the UN climate talks in Azerbaijan this week. Its foreign minister says Cop29 is a “total waste of time”.

So what? Donald Trump agrees. While Biden officials are committed to attend talks in Azerbaijan before a landmark Cop30 in Brazil next year, the US president-elect is widely expected to

• cut regulation on drilling for fossil fuels and repeal parts of Biden’s signature climate law;
• cancel $3 billion of climate financing – which he calls “reparations” – pledged by the US to developing countries; and
• withdraw not only from the Paris Agreement but also the international treaty that underpins it, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Last time Trump was elected in 2016, attendees of that year’s Cop in Marrakech said an “orange cloud” descended on the talks. Once again, Trump has punctured the mood.

Location, location. Despair over the Cop process isn’t Trump’s fault alone. Hosting the talks in countries with threadbare environmental and human rights records has become routine, due to a byzantine system of voting in regional blocs. In the last three years gatherings went ahead in

• Egypt, where Alaa Abd el-Fattah, an activist and this year’s Pen writer of courage, remains incarcerated with other critics of Sisi’s regime, despite finishing his five-year sentence;
• the UAE, which used the talks to discuss oil and gas deals with 15 nations and aims to increase production capacity at its state oil producer by 42 per cent by 2030; and
• Azerbaijan, which has a “global freedom score” of 7 out of 100 according to Freedom House and is currently detaining more than 300 people on politically motivated charges. The head of Baku’s Cop team has also been caught on tape discussing fossil fuel deals.

Land of unquenchable fire. Azerbaijan’s nickname stems from Zoroastrian fire worshippers who prayed at temples built where methane from underground burst into flames at the surface.

President Ilham Aliyev still refers to the country’s gas as “god-given”, but these days the name better recalls the thousands of flaring wells that blemish the landscape outside glitzy Baku.

Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel industry, pioneered in the 1870s by the Rockefeller and Nobel families and developed more recently by BP, accounts for 90 per cent of the country’s exports and has left a dirty mark. An ecological assessment by the government found that

• “birds that land in oil-contaminated lakes on the Absheron Peninsula often drown there”;
• chemicals found in the blubber and liver of Caspian seals helped cause “mass mortality of this species”; and
• toxic pollutants “have caused a broad range of negative health impacts within the human population and have increased the cost of living”.

Cop watch. Speaking out on environmental issues is risky in Azerbaijan. Earlier this year, Dr Gubad Ibadoghlu, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics who wrote papers on “petro-authoritarianism” and sales of Russian gas to the EU via Azerbaijan, was arrested and detained on what rights groups describe as spurious charges.

His son, Ibad Bayramov, told Tortoise that Ibadoghlu needs urgent heart surgery and that the UK government has shown a “huge lack of interest” in raising his father’s case with the Azeri authorities. The FCDO said it has “consistently advocated” for Ibadoghlu’s access to medical care and a fair legal process.

Xi’s the opportunity. America’s first withdrawal from climate talks meant that “China stepped into the diplomatic space, and they did it very obviously – they spoke up more,” says James Cameron, a former Cop advisor. Now there’s added incentive for China to become climate champion: the opportunity to market its cheap, low-carbon technologies to the world.

What’s more… China already has a claim to the title. Beijing deployed nearly 300 gigawatts of wind and solar last year – seven times more than the US – and climate experts spent much of the past year speculating whether China’s CO2 emissions peaked in 2023, seven years ahead of target. With or without the US, Cop’s slow progress will continue.