Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As is now something of an annual ritual, last month’s COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan ended on a rather shabby note. Actually, one can describe its beginning the same way. Ilham Aliyev, the dictator who rules Azerbaijan, a country where fossil fuels make up 90 percent of its export revenues, opened the conference calling fossil fuels ‘a gift of God.’ This was something of a regression. Even the dictator who oversaw COP28 last year in United Arab Emirates, where fossil fuels only make up about 40 percent of exports, didn’t quite go that far.

A recent report by the Independent High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance called for developing countries to annually receive around $1 trillion in external climate funding by 2030, $1.3 trillion by 2035. The report estimated half come from public funding, half from private. The agreement reached at the conference says that developed countries, as well as public finance institutions, such as the World Bank, will put up $300 million. The majority of that money should be in the form of low-interest loans and grants, but the wording is loose enough that the commitment is hedged – it says funding could come from “a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral and alternative sources”. The remainder of the $1.3tn will have to come largely from private sector investment in developing countries, with an unspecified amount to come from potential new levies on things like shipping, frequent flyers, oil and gas and other sources. That latter part is still to be flushed out and could very likely be difficult to achieve in practice.

This is especially poignant as the majority of CO2 emissions are emitted by the developing world. Of course, some arguments rage here as well. Should China still be considered a developing country? India? The University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute estimates that from 2023 to 2021, nearly 60 percent of the increase in air pollution has come from India where some three-quarters of electricity is generated from coal. On November 18th, a key measure of air pollution in New Delhi reached a level more than 100 times the limit the World Health Organization deems safe, according to calculations from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Despite an........

© CounterPunch