LAST UPDATE | 14 Nov
This is article is taken from the latest edition of Temperature Check, The Journal’s climate newsletter, which is sending special extra editions covering COP29 in Azerbaijan. To receive Temperature Check to your inbox, sign up in the box at the end of this article.
There’s a lot of work to be done to get countries to agree on the details of the new climate finance goal that’s meant to be coming out of COP29.
Monday’s newsletter covered the sticking points that were expected to come up in the negotiations.
Now that we’re a couple of days in, those points of contention are clear in the rooms. A new working draft text is filled with options and sub-options that will need to be whittled down and refined by the end of the conference if a deal is to be done.
“There are clear dividing lines between countries,” said Teresa Anderson, ActionAid International’s Global Lead on Climate Justice.
Speaking to me at the conference, Anderson said that there’s a general sense of agreement that at least the core component of the finance should come through public grants and that the total should be in the region of $1 trillion, but the dilemmas are in the details.
“Developing countries are clear that they need real money in order to advance climate action but what we see is wealthy countries trying to claim that they don’t have the finance and that private finance can fill the gap,” Anderson said.
Anderson said that wealthy countries are “trying to add all sorts of multi-layer investment goals into the new climate finance goal and developing countries are very concerned that investment and loans are being used to displace the pressure for real climate finance”, adding: “We can’t have investment seen as a substitute for finance.”
“Where there are two areas of broad consensus is that there should be some grants and that we’re talking about $1 trillion or more in money – so the question is, what kind of money? Is it real money, or is it loans? Is it corporate investment? Is it carbon markets? Is it grandpa’s old socks? That’s where the disagreement is – on the quality of that target,” she said.
“We see that the new text reflects that range of positions and definitely reflects developed countries’ attempts to count any kind of finance under the sun as climate finance.”
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The High Ambition Coalition, an informal group of countries that was founded to push for high ambition in the Paris Agreement, released a statement on Wednesday saying that “trillions of dollars” are required. It said that “grant-based” and “concessional” (ie low interest loans) forms of finance are required but that the “right conditions for green investments” (private finance) should also be put in place – essentially, lining up with the position of most wealthy countries.
Ireland is among the countries on the coalition, represented by Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan. After arriving in Azerbaijan late last night, Ryan made his first appearance at COP today, officially starting his stint as a co-facilitator of the talks on climate adaptation.
In between meetings, he spoke to the small contingent of journalists attending the conference from Ireland.
(Well, it started with the small contingent, but a group of people crowding around someone with cameras and microphones is the journalist equivalent of a moth to a flame; our little group rapidly expanded as other reporters in the vicinity hurried over to grab some quotes for themselves. A couple asked me who this fella was. I think another might have addressed him as ‘prime minister’ at one point.)
The climate minister brought up the comments made yesterday by Azerbaijan’s president about fossil fuels being “a gift from God” and that Azerbaijan should not be blamed for selling oil and gas.
Ryan said that transitioning to renewable energy and improving energy efficiency is “the peace project of our time” in order to reduce conflicts catalysed by extraction of oil and gas, then went on to say that he knew Azerbaijan’s president had “said yesterday about God-given fossil fuels and that we have to use them, but God also gave renewables”.
“It comes down from the heavens in the form of solar power and the weather systems. That’s going to be the centre of the energy transition, the economic transition, the just transition,” he said.
Ryan said that renewables are expanding massively but that there is a discrepancy between clean energy investments into developed and developing countries.
“There’s a fundamental justice issue that the capital is there for Europe, for China, for America, but for lower income countries, either they’re frozen out of the markets or the interest rates are a multiple of what they are in the developed countries. That’s what this COP is about. It’s about changing the financial system so that fundamental injustice does not continue into the future.”
On whether Ireland might ever pursue nuclear power, he said: “I don’t think Ireland would go into nuclear, because God looked after Ireland by giving it a lot of wind, and we’ve already shown, even in cloudy Ireland, that solar is now cheaper.”
As it happens, earlier in the day I had met up with Dr Fionn Rogan, a senior research fellow in energy systems modelling at University College Cork, and we talked about where Ireland and the world need to get to on energy.
The last COP that Dr Rogan attended before this one was COP21 in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was signed. He said renewable energy has come a long way since then but we’re still not yet driving down energy emissions far enough.
“Clean energy investment is now double fossil fuel energy investment. There’s a lot happening on the deployment of renewable energy, particularly solar, but that hasn’t fully translated into emissions reductions,” he said.
“That’s part of the challenge. You’ll hear people here at the COP praising the deployment of renewables, which is true, but we haven’t been fully reducing emissions at the same time. That’s a problem.”
Dr Rogan said that Ireland has made progress on decarbonising electricity, though not as quickly as it ideally should be.
“We’re at about 40% renewable electricity and our transition plan is around electrifying everything – electrifying heat, electrifying transport,” he said – but “if the electricity demand is growing faster than the level of renewables are coming online, then we’re not getting that decarbonisation to happen”.
“How we heat our buildings and how we transport ourselves and our goods – we need to decarbonise those and that’s will happen through electrification but also through demand management,” he said.
“In transport, it’s about how we get around, how we go to work, how we commute, how we go to school, how we hang out with our friends, how we go shopping. We are still very car dependent in Ireland. Electrification is part of the solution but we don’t want to have grid lock with electric cars – that’s only marginally better than gridlock with petrol and diesel cars. We need a whole systems approach.”
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