Fredric Jameson is no longer here to remind us that imagining the end of the world is easier than imagining the end of capitalism, but the just concluded COP29 climate summit has refreshed our memory. Although securing profits is the primary goal of fossil fuel corporations along with the governments that love them, and the end of the world merely a collateral-damage byproduct, the COP29 climate summit once again showed just where priorities lie.

The very location of the summit, Azerbaijan, a country in which oil and gas bring in about 90 percent of its export earnings, is enough to determine what will be deemed a priority, no matter the cheerful statements on the COP29 website.

The 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (as COP29 is formally known) ended with agreements that fall far short of what is necessary to prevent runaway global warming and with no mechanism for ensuring that those inadequate pledges will be met. In other words, business as usual.

This was the second straight climate summit to be held in a major fossil fuel producer, after last year’s COP28 in the United Arab Emirates. That one ended with the world’s governments “encouraged” to “transition away” from fossil fuels while promoting finance capital as the savior. Not to be confused with the achievements of prior climate summits. The 2022 COP27 in Egypt ended with “requests” to “revisit and strengthen” 2030 climate targets. Oh please consider stopping your environmental destruction if it’s not too inconvenient. That was preceded by COP26 in Glasgow failing to enact any enforcement mechanisms; COP25 in Madrid concluding with an announcement of two more years of roundtables; COP24 in Katowice, Poland, promoting coal; and COP23 in Bonn ending with a promise that people will get together and talk some more.

You get the idea. And there were more “decisions” at COP29. For example — try not to jump out of your seat in excitement upon reading this — the summit leaders will “undertake a special assessment of access to climate finance at the twelfth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (2030) with a view to assessing progress in relation to the matters referred to in paragraphs 21-24 above and identifying further opportunities for enhancing access to climate finance in accordance with the aim of the new collective quantified goal and in line with Article 9, paragraph 9, of the Paris Agreement.” The world’s governments also “Decide to periodically take stock of the implementation of this decision as part of the global stocktake and to initiate deliberations on the way forward prior to 2035, including through a review of this decision in 2030.”

To translate those “decisions” into plain language, the summit concluded with an agreement that more access to finance, including loans, would be nice and that they will gladly check on the world’s progress six years from now, in 2030. Worse, even last year’s goal to “transition away” from fossil fuels — whatever that might mean in practice — was deemed too controversial and thus was jettisoned from final texts, reportedly due to heavy arm-twisting by Saudi Arabia.

Not much of a sense of urgency there. As to the role of finance, it would be useful for us to remember that from 2015, when the Paris Climate Accord was signed, through 2022, 60 of the world’s biggest banks invested US$4.6 trillion in fossil fuel projects. Four United States-based banks were the worst offenders, according to a report by seven environmental organizations, and three Canadian banks are among the top dozen in the world for financing fossil fuels. Each of these are big contributors to fracking and tar sands production. It’s not only companies like Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

If you have money, you can shift the responsibility

The slogan emblazoned on Azerbaijan’s official COP29 website is “In Solidarity for a Green World.” If by “green” is meant money, then that slogan means what it says. On the page listing the climate summit’s accomplishments, the figure of $1.3 trillion is shown as a new commitment. What does this $1.3 trillion consist of? The largest portion, $1 trillion, represents “Financial flows from compliant carbon markets” that may reach that total by 2050. The remaining $300 billion represents a yearly goal of money sent by developed countries to developing countries to subsidize the latter’s work to counteract the effects on them due to global warming.

Let’s take the first portion first. What are “Financial flows from compliant carbon markets”? That is legalistic language disguising that what is meant are so-called “carbon markets” under which polluting advanced-capitalist countries can pay lower-income countries to offset their global-warming activities rather than take measures inside their own countries. The establishment of this “carbon market” was agreed at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015 and took nine years to negotiate. The consummation of those talks does not mean that potential $1 trillion trading value will be money well spent.

In an interview with Inside Climate News, Alden Meyer, a senior consultant at E3G, which describes itself as an “independent climate change think tank,” explained what was agreed:  

“It’s called Article Six of the Paris Agreement, and there’s two major components of it. One is setting up a new sort of international body to allow trading of so-called offsets or credits, where a country that has a hard time meeting the commitments it’s made in their own country might make investments in another country where reductions would be considerably cheaper, and they could count those reductions against their own commitments, even though they weren’t happening in their own territories. … [Carbon trading] benefit[s] richer countries because … they can often be less expensive than making the investments in your own backyard. And so that’s another concern that some developing countries have had about this. They say, basically, you’re taking the benefits of the low hanging fruit in our countries when it comes to emission reductions and using it to avoid cracking down on polluters in your own country.”

So more burden will fall on Global South countries despite the fact that the Global North has contributed vastly more greenhouse-gas emissions to the atmosphere. Even when Global North countries reduce their domestic production of greenhouse gases, their exports have often more than made up the difference. For example, Climate Action Tracker reports that, from 2010 to 2022, United States exported emissions increased 216 percent, Canada’s increased 52 percent and Australia’s increased 40 percent, although Norwegian and British exported emissions have remained stable during this time frame.

They can pledge but they don’t have to pay

And then there is the $300 billion per year commitment to help Global South countries mitigate the effects of global warming. Those countries had been asking for $1 trillion per year from the developed countries of the Global North, but the latter refused to commit to any total until nearly the end of the summit. Two blocs of countries, the Least Developed Countries and the Alliance of Small Island States, are reported to have at one point walked out on the negotiations in frustration. Further, objections from countries including Bolivia, India and Nigeria were overridden, with a last-minute agreement pushed through without the objections getting a hearing. The final communiqué trumpeted the fact that the $300 billion figure tripled previous commitments, but sidestepped that the $300 billion are pledges with no mechanism for fulfillment. Previous similar commitments have either not been fulfilled or have been done only after several years.

Regardless, developing countries saw the $300 billion figure, less than one-third of what they see as needed, as insulting. A United Nations summary of the summit admitted that “India’s representative strongly denounced the new goal, calling it a ‘paltry sum’ and emphasizing, ‘We seek a much higher ambition from the developed countries [and the amount agreed] does not inspire trust that we will come out of this grave problem of climate change.’ ” Sierra Leone said the $300 billion pledge showed “a lack of goodwill” and a representative from a group of small island nations noted, according to the UN summary, “what a very different boat our vulnerable countries are in, compared to the developed countries,” adding that “We are literally sinking.”

The continuing result of the world’s most powerful countries and the countries most dependent on fossil fuel exports catering to fossil fuel company profits is that global temperatures are well on their way to soaring well beyond the 1.5 degree Celsius Paris goal and the 2 degree C. outer limit of avoiding a catastrophic runaway climate. Global temperatures are already approaching 1.5 degrees C. above the pre-industrial average and the past year’s parade of hurricanes, droughts and floods demonstrate a climate already becoming dangerously extreme. Even if all pledges for 2030 were met — and there are no enforcement mechanisms to ensure that — global temperatures are forecast to rise 2.6 degrees C. from the pre-industrial average, well beyond the Paris goal and the outer atmospheric limit; even a 1.5 degree rise will surely be destructive.

More ominously, the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency portends a sharp reversal of even the tepid U.S. government’s attempts to address global warming, and the likely ascension of a Conservative government in Canada in 2025 will result in another disastrous reversal given not only that Canadian fossil fuels reserves are significant but that much of it is in the particularly dirty tar sands. The last time there was a Conservative government in Ottawa speaking against tar-sand exploitation was considered a crime. Further, it is worrying that the Conservative government of Alberta, the province where the tar sands are located, has busied itself with denying global warming exists. A report in DeSmog dryly notes:

“Rather than fossil fuel-driven CO2 levels being a grave danger to critical planetary systems, [a party] resolution stated, “the Earth needs more CO2 to support life and to increase plant yields, both of which contribute to the Health and Prosperity [sic] of all Albertans. Almost all delegates voted in favour of wording erroneously stating that current CO2 levels, at 420 parts per million, are “near the lowest level in over 1,000 [sic] years.” This figure is off the mark by about three million years — an era when the Earth was on average about three degrees warmer (up to 20 degrees hotter at higher latitudes) and sea levels were 25 metres higher.”

Maybe we should count the Pentagon as a country

Such resolutions would be too at variance with reality even for COP29 delegates. But their inability to deal with global warming with sufficient seriousness is not only embodied in the results detailed above but that militarism was never mentioned, much less discussed. The U.S. military is “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” according to a Brown University Watson Institute report. These emissions are larger than many mid-sized industrial countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, and greater than all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from iron and steel. The Pentagon, since the 1970s, consistently accounts for nearly 80 percent of total U.S. government energy consumption. The Brown University report says:

“Why does the US military consume so much energy? First, the Pentagon’s fighting ‘tooth’ employs equipment that guzzles fuel at an incredible rate. The logistical ‘tail’ and the installations that support operations are also extremely fuel intensive. Even the military’s non-armored vehicles are notoriously inefficient. For instance, the approximately 60,000 HUMVEEs remaining in the US army fleet get between four to eight miles per gallon of diesel fuel.”

Russia’s war on Ukraine is also a heavy contributor to global warming, New Scientist reports, with the impact of the war causing US$32 billion in damages based on total emissions that are larger than many countries.

Nor can the work of lobbyists be discounted from the dispiriting results of COP29. More than 1,700 oil, gas and coal lobbyists were registered for the summit. But their work might not have been difficult as “Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, was caught on film agreeing to facilitate oil deals at the negotiations,” the Guardian reported. The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has called oil and gas “a gift from God” and made clear his intention that fossil fuel extraction will continue at high rates. Public relations companies working for oil and gas companies also attended in large numbers. Ten public-relations firms alone sent dozens of representatives, with those 10 firms holding at least 91 contracts to boost fossil fuel company reputations, according to a DeSmog report.

Earth is poised to see 2024 become the hottest year since records began, and October 2024 actually exceeded the Paris goal, coming in at 1.55 degrees above the pre-industrial average. The Caribbean Sea experienced its warmest temperature on record in October, continuing a trend of high temperatures, which contributed to a highly destructive hurricane season. “It appears unlikely Earth will again see a year in the 20th-century temperature range for many years to come, unless there is major volcanic cooling, a major geoengineering push, and/or a sustained, worldwide effort to reduce fossil-fuel emissions,” concludes Jeff Masters in the Eye on the Storm blog, essential reading for understanding global warming.

Is corporate profit really worth the destruction of Earth’s livability? Continuing business as usual will mean an effective end of the world if by “world” we mean a fully habitable planet with a climate, however variable, within human experience. Quite literally, parts of Earth’s surface could become uninhabitable by the end of the 21st century if global warming continues, separate from rising sea levels, disrupted agriculture and more severe storms. Rather than contemplate an end to capitalist business as usual, much less the end of capitalism before that economic system leads to catastrophic environmental collapse, the world’s industrialists and financiers, and the governments that cater to them, are willing to bring about an end to the world. Or perhaps they do know the consequences but calculate they will be gone before catastrophe happens.

Our descendants — living in a world of flooded cities, food shortages, resource depletion, mass species die-offs, unprecedented human migration and large numbers of people dying should business as usual continue — are not likely to believe that their ruined world would be a fair tradeoff for a handful of industrialists and financiers of the past getting obscenely rich. We live in a global economic system under which it is profitable for a handful of powerful people to profit from the destruction of the environment, and this behavior is richly rewarded. Why should it be? In a rational work, with an economic system geared toward human need rather than the profit of a few, it surely wouldn’t be.

---