As I noted yesterday, last evening I accepted an invitation to speak on a panel…
COP29 another Cop Out by the world’s richest nations
Over the past week, I have already indicated that a major climate activist event was going on in Newcastle, Australia, which is the largest coal export port in the world. The event – The People’s Blockade – run by the activist group – Rising Tide, which involved thousands of people concerned about climate change gathering near the harbour and engaging. But it also involved protest flotilla’s launching into the shipping channel of the Port in an attempt to block the coal shipments. The cops were everywhere and were heavy handed acting under the imprimatur of the State government which tried to ban the festival but lost courtesy of a last minute Supreme Court ruling that declared the State’s attempt was illegal. At the same time as this grassroots event was unfolding, the elites of the world gathered in Baku (Azerbaijan) under the banner of the – UN Climate Change Conference (a.k.a. COP29) – which is the main global forum for addressing coordinated strategies for the resolution of climate change. The problem is that the talkfest is really just another cop out. Nothing much was achieved and the mainstream economics fictions were at the centre of this inaction – ‘fiscal space is limited’, ‘debt unsustainable’ and all the rest of the bunk, were rehearsed. And accepting the fiction that most nations can run out of their own currency, then steered the discussions to how private finance can be facilitated by government to stump up financial support for green transitions. And at that point, we know nothing much other than more profit seeking will eventuate.
The contrast between the two approaches – the grassroots and the corporatised – to the climate issue was massive.
The Newcastle event was about ordinary people who want the coal sector closed immediately yet are relatively powerless in the face of the multinational corporate greed that drives the sector, which is aided and abetted by captive state and federal governments who side with the interests of capital, while pretending to be doing something about the climate issue.
Conversely, and starkly, COP29 was a whitewashing affair (I wouldn’t even say greenwashing) where the elites danced around the issues for fear of upsetting their corporate buddies, and closing some lucrative revolving doors between the polity and the corporations, while reinforcing the narrative that the solution to the emergency lies in the participation of the private financial markets, as if that sector has the interests of the common folk at heart.
Agenda Item 8 on the COP29 – Agenda as adopted – was “Matters relating to finance”, which really was what the meeting was focused on, albeit with a faulty understanding of the capacity of the currency-issuing governments or organisations (in the case of the EU).
That faulty understanding then leads the discussion astray into all sorts of schemes and quantum that simply will never solve the problem at hand.
The COP29 was held in the aftermath of news that large fossil fuel companies were stepping back on earlier announced plans to cut output.
For example, in 2020, BP, the oil and gas company announced it would reduce production of those commodities by 40 per cent on 2019 levels by 2030 as part of its much touted goal to be net zero by 2050.
By 2023, they had reneged and modified the goal to 25 per cent in the wake of the accelerating global energy prices that followed the Russian incursion into Ukraine.
Last month (October 7, 2024), the Reuters report – Exclusive: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy – indicated that they were abandoning the target and shifting attention to:
… several new investments in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico to boost its oil and gas output …
Profits rule.
The same trend is happening across the world.
Australian governments continue to approve the development of new coal and gas projects which will take the footprint of these sectors way beyond any reasonable limits.
When governments make these decisions, the corporate sector clearly understands that the policy terrain is sympathetic to ever more fossil fuel extraction and use.
With the world currently operating at “1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate” (Source)
In Australia, Earth Overshoot estimates that we would need 4.5 Earths if we all lived like US citizens in terms of energy use.
1.7 means that we have to reduce the demands on the planet’s biocapacity.
Which means that economic growth must be curtailed unless we can find a way to reduce the overshoot while still expanding.
And, good luck with that strategy.
Even the Rising Tide Protest Festival, heard speakers that talked about sustainable growth (funded by corporate taxation).
That last linkage – funding growth with taxes – drove me mad and I wrote about that last Thursday – A 78 per cent tax on fossil fuel companies in Australia is not required to fund a Just Transition away from carbon (November 21, 2024).
It is understandable why the allure of ‘growth’ dominates.
We associate a ‘lack’ of growth with recession and rising unemployment and hardship.
Any idea that degrowth might be beneficial is thus hard to conceive.
The neoliberal austerity mindset is also amplified in times of recession because governments observe their fiscal deficits rising as a result of the operation of the automatic stabilisers – less activity, less people working, falling tax revenues and rising welfare payments.
The mainstream economic commentary then can invoke all the usual fictions that the deficits are dangerous – public debt will cross the ‘threshold’ between solvency and bankruptcy, interest rates will rise (as the demand by government on scarce savings will rise), inflation will increase (due to excessive government spending), future taxes will rise (to pay back the debt), etc.
All false but powerful in the public narrative where the voters are generally ignorant of matters economic and have been encouraged, bullied, whatever, to associate insights gained about their own household finances with those of the government finances.
No such association is valid but that doesn’t stop the link being made.
As such, governments can easily sell the idea of on-going ‘growth’ to a public that is scared of triggering all these shocking outcomes – government going broke, taxes and interest rates rising etc.
It is such a powerful set of linkages that trying to mount a case for degrowth is nigh on impossible.
Which brings me to COP29.
Several speakers at the Newcastle event on Saturday when I was in attendance noted that the costs of rising sea levels, hotter climate etc were being disproportionately borne by disadvantaged communities in Australia, particularly coastal indigenous communities in the north.
That observation generalises to a global scale.
The sheer devastation of forests, rivers, subsistence agriculture etc in the poorer nations as the richer nations extract as much resources from these countries as they can to boost their wealth is massive.
Which is why the more vulnerable and poorer countries at the COP29 Summit were petitioning for much larger financial support from the wealthy nations and more rapid transitions away from fossil fuel extraction and use.
We now know that not much was achieved at COP29.
There we no “firm climate finance targets” even though there was an agreement “to increase funding to help developing nations tackle global warming” (Source).
The developing nations had lobbied for $A1.3 trillion annually by 2035, they will get $A461 billion annually.
In other words, nothing much.
The usual corporate-speak came out of the Summit – so the massive shortfall in financial commitment was sold by the UN Secretary-general as “a base on which to build”.
In other words, nothing much.
The Panama representative was quoted as saying:
… this is what they always do. You know, they throw texts at us at the last minute, shove it down our throats. And then for the sake of multilateralism, we always have to, like, accept it and take it.
In other words, the fortunes of the developing world are still at the behest of the wealthy countries and their corporate sectors.
A comment from Saint Lucia’s representative was stark when referring to the vicious cycle of extreme climate events and the debt burdens borne by these nations:
Our developmental gains are undermined, as national infrastructure, built with significant multilateral loans, are destroyed before the debt is paid, and we must rebuild from scratch.
The perfect trap – that the IMF and World Bank have refined over the years to enrich their own executives and the wealthy nations.
The comment from Australia’s climate change minister was beyond printing – fudging around with numbers to confuse the reader into thinking they wanted to do something when in fact they are still approving new gas and coal mine projects.
Onward to the 2026 COP30 in Belém, Brazil with no concrete action agreed.
So the capacity of the developing nations to pursue a transition away from fossil fuels will be directly limited.
But moreover, the fact that the developed nations (developed in a capitalist sense) refuse to bite the bullet and we now have the US besotted by ‘drill, baby, drill’, means that the causal linkages between the poor and rich nations will continue to endanger the former.
The emphasis in the Agenda of the meeting was clearly financial but the rich nations have little thirst for using their own currency-issuing capacity, which is infinite, to honour the moral obligation they have to the poorer nations that bear the brunt of the wealth generation systems that extract resources from them.
The final – Decision -/CMA.6 – document focuses on ‘Finance’ – even though the Agenda has other considerations for discussion.
We read that:
1. There is “limited fiscal space, unsustainable debt levels …” constraining public funding of climate goals.
2. Seek funding from “a wide variety of sources … including alternative sources”.
3. “Invites international financial institutions, including multilateral development banks as appropriate, to continue to align their operational models, channels and instruments to be fit for purpose for urgently addressing global climate change, development and poverty …” – which includes governments reducing the ‘costs’ of financing from private sources – that is, making it easier for the banksters to profit with lower risk.
So the message was clear in the other documentation and discussions – governments are financially-constrained and after the fiscal support during the early years of the pandemic, have built up debt levels that must be reduced – all of which means they are unable to fund the climate change measures that are deemed to be necessary.
And, as such, they should make it easier for private financiers to get involved.
The fact that governments are still approving and facilitating fossil fuel projects was not mentioned – no surprises there.
Further, where multilateral agencies are involved we can expect conditionality to be at the centre of the financing agreements – which you should read as imparting an austerity bias on other social expenditures and policies that make it even easier for first-world resource extraction corporations and their financial buddies to vacuum out profits from the poorer nations.
COP29 also ignores the dependency issue.
I first started to analyse that issue in this blog post – Delinking and degrowth (September 5, 2024).
The problem facing poorer nations is manifest.
The 1.7 consumption number means that the world as a whole has to stop using resources at the rate it currently is.
The reduction has to be massive – not fiddling around the edges.
Citizens in the advanced nations will have to seriously curtail their consumption across the spectrum – food, housing, transport, etc.
Lots of activities that people find interesting will have to cease.
There is no clear cut way defined whereby that transition can unfold in a satisfactory manner.
That is problem number 1.
But, to alleviate poverty, it is hard to see how degrowth can occur, immediately in the poorer nations, which means the adjustment of the richer nations will have to be that much greater, especially given the variations in dependency ratios across the world.
Rich and poor nations have high dependency ratios but for the rich nations it is ageing, while for poorer nations the high dependency ratios are driven by a young population, with lots of people coming into the adult workforce seeking work over the next decade or so.
But, if we could contrive a successful degrowth strategy in the richer nations – and one hopes that is achievable – then within the current structure of world production, resource use and trade, that would massively disadvantage the poorer nations.
That is because of the poorer nations are dependent on the richer nations in two ways:
1. That the poorer nations are suppliers of natural resources and cheap labour which allow the richer nations to prosper.
2. The richer nations create institutions and mechanisms which prolong and reinforce the state of dependence and keeps the poorer nations poor.
This dependency allows some poorer countries to achieve some form of industrialisation, typically using second-hand technology sold to them under oppressive contracts by the rich nations, and which trap them in a financial dependency through loan deals etc.
However, the idea that the global economy is structured in such a way that core rich nations exploit the peripheral nations and keep them in a state of underdeveloped dependency where unequal exchanges between the two ‘levels’ results in a net wealth flow to the core nations, must become a crucial aspect of the way we might construct the degrowth agenda.
The poorer nations are not just ‘poor’ versions of the rich nations, as the mainstream development theories hold.
Their underdevelopment is functionally required to advance the development of the core.
So problem number 2 relates to the two-part process that the poorer nations must traverse:
1. ‘Delinking’ their economies from the richer countries – that is, working to unravel the binds that colonialism placed the poorer nations within – a process that Samir Amin called ‘autocentric development’, which is different from autarky.
They must prioritise their own domestic objectives – food sovereignty, wage justice, employment guarantees, etc.
They must eliminate the ‘middle class’ (Comprador Bourgeoisie) which has prospered within the poorer nations through their brokering of the foreign interests.
2. Then pursuing degrowth themselves within a more constrained environment as a result of poverty.
None of these issues were dealt with by COP29, which really means that its deliberations were largely irrelevant in the context of what is required.
Conclusion
I am working more on actual blueprints for delinking and will write more about that in the future as the research unfolds.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2024 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
There was also an ANTICOP this year in Oaxaca:
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/11/15/anticop-2024-concludes-with-indigenous-peoples-climate-proposals/
Seems like they spoke more sense at that meeting.
The “how many Earths are required to live like the average American?” or average Westerner (5.1 Earths in the case of the average American) is misleading because it is based on the assumption that an ‘ecologically responsible’ per capita Ecological Footprint (EF) at the global level is equal to the Earth’s Biocapacity (BC) divided by the current world population. This assumes that the current world population of 8.15 billion people is ecologically responsible. It therefore deflects criticism from what I believe is one of the strongest drivers of ecological damage – an excessive global population. It therefore deflects criticism from countries like India, which are grossly overpopulated.
It is absurd to say that India is acting ecologically responsibly because 8.15 billion people living at India’s per capita EF only requires 80% of one Earth. With a population now approaching 1.5 billion, India = 0.8Earths tells you more about the unacceptable levels of poverty and huge income disparities in India than its environmental record. India is currently the third largest generator of GHGs in the world. How can this be when its per capita GHGs are so much lower than a country like Australia? Because India has close to 1.5 billion people; Australia has 27 million people.
Don’t get me wrong – the per capita EFs of Western nations are unacceptably high and need to be reduced, if only for equity reasons. But countries like India and China must do something about their excessive population.
To put things into perspective, imagine a country which currently has a per capita EF of 1.6 global hectares (gha), which is equal to current global per capita BC (therefore supposedly ecologically responsible – i.e., one Earth). For the next ten years, it maintains ZPG and keeps its per capita EF at 1.6 gha. It would be ecologically responsible – yes? No, according to Earth Overshoot Day, if world population rose and the global per capita BC fell to, say, 1.4 gha. The irresponsible actions of the rest of world would render the actions of this country irresponsible. In fact, it is possible that another country which also had a per capita EF of 1.6 gha, but which allowed its population to rise and its distribution of income (consumption) to deteriorate, such that its per capita EF had fallen to 1.4 gha, to appear ecologically responsible!
The same ‘fair’ per capita EF should be a target imposed on all countries with an initial adjustment made for historical resource consumption with a gradual convergence to the globally fair per capita EF (initial adjustment downwards for Australia, USA, etc.; initial adjustment upwards for Myanmar, Tanzania, etc.). This would allocate each country an annual aggregate EF target. Countries could opt to do nothing about their excessive population and its continued growth, but they would be forced to reduce their per capita EF to remain within their aggregate EF limit (budget). Domestic pressure to maintain the per capita EF, or increase it, would then motivate these countries to do something about their population numbers. It would do the opposite in Australia – it would be forced to reduce its per capita EF and find ways to squeeze out more value from the resources it consumes and distribute it more evenly, the latter best done as economies adjust with a Job Guarantee to ensure a meaningful job is attached to the incomes received by the lowest paid people (not simply a welfare cheque or UBI).
P.S. My home city of Adelaide is striving to host COP-31 in 2026. The Premier of South Australia is parading around as if Adelaide was bidding for the Olympics. High on the list of the reasons why Adelaide should be bidding for COP-31 is the huge ‘economic boost’ from the enormous number of international visitors (no mention of the huge quantity of GHGs that would be generated given most visitors would be flying halfway around the world to get here, or that half of the city would probably be rendered out-of-bounds for Adelaideans for two weeks).
“But countries like India and China must do something about their excessive population.”
Human nature precludes any prospect of sensible, constructive discussion and agreement on this matter, yet it is the only matter we should be considering, given all else that falls from its effects.
I agree with what you and Bill have written, but the herd of elephants rampaging around the room that everyone is trying to avoid is how to reduce the global population – not just in India or China – by a sufficient amount in time to mitigate the worst of the environmental impacts created by this civilisation to prevent our own species extinction.
Pro-choice is all fine and dandy but requires a significant uptake and takes decades to show a decline in population – but not necessarily it EF. We don’t have the luxury of time for a nice soft ‘transition’ – and in any event, it would be a waste of time, money and hope.
The masters of the universe will have already considered this and concluded the best option is a comprehensive cull, which is likely in progress and has been for a few years. Wars have their uses after all. How terribly sad, but true.
I recall listening to a veteran of the Great War – he fought at Contalmaison on the Somme for the Royal Scots and lost three brothers in one week of fighting. All 4 brothers were under 20 years of age. He remarked that “people only change when they are shown what Hell actually means and are shocked enough never to go back there again”.
Unfortunately we are about to confront that prospect again.
@Philip Lawn, @Mark Russell The UN forecasts that China’s population will decline from 1.426 billion (2022) to 1.313 billion by 2050 and below 800 million by 2100. Drastic. (China’s geographical location as well as government gives it rather more choice as to whether it wants to make up for the domestic decline with immigration).
Patrick B – what will China’s per capita EF increase to in the meantime? Australians could hardly complain if it rises to something like it is in Australia at present, but they could still complain if China is contributing to the destruction of the planet because its population is ridiculously excessive, which it still will be at 800 million.
Australia and India are fierce but friendly rivals in international cricket. The Australian cricket team was thrashed by India in the recently concluded Test match. I loved my cricket as a child. When the Indian team was touring Australia in the summer of 1977-78 (I was 13 years old), I had a good knowledge of Australia’s population at the time (14 million). I had no idea what India’s population was. I remember the radio commentator saying that Australia was up against a nation with a population of 650 million. I was shocked. It conjured up images of people living like sardines. I might have been an early-teenage kid, but I instinctively knew what an absurdly overpopulated country India was, even then.
It’s hard to believe that in my short life (60 years at present), the world’s population has increased from 3.25 billion to 8.15 billion. When I was four years old, Paul Ehrlich warned about the ecological impact of doing nothing to quell population growth (Population Bomb, 1968). How right he was. If the world’s population was still 3.25 billion, we wouldn’t be talking about a lot of the environmental problems we presently face. At the current global per capita EF, we would only need 0.7Earths to sustain the global economy, which would be ecologically sustainable! And there are people who claim that a large population is not an environmental concern. They insist that it’s only per capita consumption that matters. I always advise these people to go back to primary school and learn multiplication.
COP 29 failed, as will COPs 30-40, wherever they are held, because it is not in the interests of those with economic power to resolve global north-south development issues in the pursuit of mitigation and adaptation to climate change impacts, let alone consider reducing GDP or GDP growth to bring the global economy into line with the resource capability of the planet.
That the most powerful nations globally have the highest emissions, currently and/or historically, and also the greatest ability to undertake the necessary change, does not mean an appeal to participate for wider humanity’s existential goals will be remotely successful.
It hasn’t thus far.
A life driven by the pursuit of profit and/or capital gain has an inevitable disjunct between the personal self interest that the corporate mentality engenders, especially fossil fuel interests, and a sustainable lifestyle not based on material consumption.
Neoliberal growth economics, and pretty much the entire edifice of the global economy is absolutely predicated on such hegemony and consequent inertia, and its adherents will simply resist the necessary behavioural change, pushback, and seek to validate that position by fair means and foul. Such is moral hazard.
I think there is an equivalent moral hazard for those of us in western industrial economies setting out the rules for achieving long term global sustainability by insisting that those densely populated nation states take responsibility for disproportionate population reduction.
The extreme values for energy consumption are one Norwegian using c.550x the energy of an average Nigerian annually – but thankfully there are only 5.5m Nowegians, and not 225m.
As EF is the ratio between consumption and biocapacity, it is a convenient but limited measure. The biocapacity of the various areas of earth are as variable as the consumption levels of different societies, and applying a single theoretical biocapacity average is problematic in generating meaningful generalisations, especially if thinking globally but acting locally is a remotely reasonable proposition.
The danger with the whole global supranational setup, of which COP is but one aspect, is the point made by Bill regarding neo-colonialism – i.e.
“richer nations create institutions and mechanisms which prolong and reinforce the state of dependence and keeps the poorer nations poor”.
We already have the imposed values of multinational neoliberalism globally. I share Bill’s cynicism regarding the World Bank and IMF, and we must be very careful not to transfer their approach to degrowth thinking too.
@ Patrick B. – had China’s population been forecast to decline to around 2 million, then I might have had a glimmer of hope – but it’s just a forecast right? The fall in birth rates, fertility et al has been discussed recently by Tom Murphy and his comments reflect those of Philip Lawn here regarding the EF as the primary driver fuelled by the population size. The earth’s carrying capacity has been around 800m to 1 billion for millennia until FF came along to the party. It may be optimistic to think it will remain as high as that given the depletion of resources and contamination of land, sea and air.
I’m a couple of years older than Philip and grew up in a mining community in central Scotland. Not every family had a motor car or television or telephone. You learned to live within your means – there was no loans or credit cards or overdrafts. Now with more than double the population, everything else has changed. Most people have a car. Some have two or many more. A professional family may have four cars, an RV and SUV and three or four overseas vacations every year. The shop daily instead of weekly and their plastic waste fill more trash buckets in a week as we used in a month for everything.
People are not going to change their behaviour. They will not give up what they perceive is theirs to do as they wish. The more wealthy they are, the more entrenched, perverse and destructive their behaviour. Although it seems ketamine has a part to play at the top of that tree.
If there was some kind of cosmic intelligence and it was taking stock of planet earth, I suspect it would inflict some kind of catastrophic event that would serve as a cull and a reminder that human supremacy is a complete fallacy and should never be entertained again. In the absence of a cosmic intellect disciples of the supremacy cult will continue inflicting their own cull.
There is a massive ignorance extant as to what is needed to respond to ecological overshoot as well as a logical disconnect by many on the progressive change side that continue to believe that we can keep on living like we do and expect to repair-reverse climate overshoot with renewables.
Our species suffers from shifting baseline syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline and take the starting point norms of our personal existence to be those from when we first started to appreciate, looking back from today to childhood years, the way we lived on this planet. It is rarely appreciated that this little window of time of unprecedentedly rapid changes during the last two hundred years, since commencing exploitation of fossil fuels, is a one-off aberration along the timeline of human existence. Because of our personal baseline views there is a strong tendency to think that it has always been somewhat like this (as it is today), hasn’t it? The carbon pulse that we are living through can never happen again. Compare the rate of growth of population or mean temperature of our planet during human existence prior to the last two hundred years and since and explain what you see. And that’s not even asking for a similar consideration for all the related ecological degradations that we have inflicted on our home before and after the beginning of the anthropocene.
Humanity appears to have entered the enshittocene (a new term of art from MMT understanding https://doctorow.medium.com/retiring-the-us-debt-would-retire-the-us-dollar-30f366e0bc40 Cory Doctorow https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc). Notwithstanding that the field for coining of enshittification was that of the online world, it immediately connotes a broader generic application to all areas of human endeavour. How apt that the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of this year is “enshittification” selected from this shortlist https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/WOTY_2024_shortlist_FINAL.pdf.
I recently heard an explanation as to why seemingly progressive/leftie politicians draw back from thinking past their existing macroeconomic paradigm. That being their (false) dilemma: “How do I help the workers interests and bring capital to heel but also be forced to ask capital for the funds to do it and do it in a polite enough way so as to not crash the economy?” If only those politicians were forced to spend the time to do the work to understand descriptive MMT instead of dealing with whatever distraction is thrown at them. They, like most of us, run on heuristics and don’t like to think because that requires effort. Dealing with urgent immediate faux crises rather than the important ones is the way it goes. Culture wars first, existential crises can wait.
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” ~ John Maynard Keynes.
“Humanity appears to have entered the enshittocene”
In Queensland, they have drained the great central basin so they can play with their toys. Well, if the Saudi’s can have a ski slope in the desert…
Just out of interest, how many folks here still use commercial or private airlines?
Australia: The Coming Climate Hell. https://youtu.be/LzuE2qkUMsQ?si=loOqtxOLEsBhcMun
Ahmed Najar, writing for The Electronic Intifada, has commented that:
“As COP29 brings world leaders together to address the climate crisis, one pressing question looms large for me as a Palestinian: Should a country that systematically destroys both the environment and the lives of an entire people be allowed a seat at the table?
The climate summit’s mission is clear: to protect our shared planet for future generations, to safeguard the vulnerable, and to uphold principles of sustainability and justice. ”
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-should-have-been-excluded-cop29/50016
@Graeme D A different question would be whether these COP conferences are worth anything, but if we take a view that they are better than nothing, then I’d say maybe the answer is yes, the US should be allowed a seat at COP29 because it’s a major player in deciding not just the fate of c.5m current palestinian lives in Gaza and the West Bank, but the fate of billions of future human and other lives on our planet. If nothing else, it gives powerless nations the chance to shame it more publicly. The powerless nations should not then concede to signing yet another ‘agreement’ that holds the rich nations to nothing. But, certainly the US and Israel (and the UK and Germany who still supply arms and succour for genocide) should not be treated as normal civilised states to sing and play football with.