COP29 and the climate crisis: greed versus need

COP29, the UN Climate Change Conference, was held in Baku, Azerbaijan between 11 and 22 November. It took place under the shadow of significant temperature rises across the globe. It also took place in the wake of the US electing Donald Trump, a president who, among other things, is also a climate change denier and unlikely to accept any global consensus at COP29.

Global warming, even for the countries in the freezing North, is no longer in the realm of scientific debate. It’s no longer a bunch of climate scientists sounding warnings about the impact of global warming in our lives. The results are clearly visible, with all temperature records broken not only in north India this summer but also in Europe.

With many regions across the world having already seen a rise of 1.5ºC this year, the target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5ºC has failed. We don’t actually say we have breached the 1.5ºC mark because of a technicality: as per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), temperature rise is computed over a 20-year average. However, to wait 20 years to admit that we crossed the 1.5ºC mark in 2024 is not very helpful.

Just to put this in perspective, the world knew a temperature rise of this magnitude about 125,000 years ago, when homo sapiens was crossing over from Africa into Eurasia. In other words, we are tipping over into completely uncharted territory.

High summer temperatures have a huge impact on agriculture, as well as the livelihoods of those forced to work in fields, factories and other occupations involving continuous exposure to heat.

What’s striking is that over the past few years, rising temperatures have been accompanied by extreme weather events. Higher than usual winter temperatures lead to the melting of permafrost in the polar regions, releasing huge amounts of methane and flipping ocean currents with completely unknown consequences.

The Global North, meaning the US, Canada and Europe, has always believed that global warming is a problem specific to Africa, Asia and Latin America. A Canadian colleague once told me, “Canada could do with a little global warming.” This ‘kindness’ and blindness towards global warming and climate inaction is ironical. Rich countries are not immune to climate change. The US, that hotbed of climate change deniers, has seen 400 climate disasters with losses greater than $1 billion per event since 1980.

COP29 began with the announcement of an agreement on carbon credits and the hope that it would revive carbon markets. While this path may have had something going for it when the world was debating how to fund green energy strategies, it has very little value today.

We already know that most carbon credit projects are only on paper. At best, they help in generating some income for poor countries with forest cover. For example, 90 per cent of carbon credits sold by Verra, the world’s biggest certifier of carbon credits, did not reduce any emissions. All it did was make Verra richer.

Let’s go back to what we know really works. For one, replacing coal, oil, and natural gas with green energy. This means producing electricity for the grid with solar and wind power, for which the costs have come down dramatically over the last decades.

Transport, particularly cars, has seen a rapid increase in battery storage capacity at lower battery prices, making electric vehicles competitive with petrol-driven ones. Long haul goods transport by road is still a problem, as is replacing processes that release greenhouse gases in industries such as steel, cement and fertiliser production.

China, currently the largest producer of carbon emissions, appears to have reached its peak emissions in 2023–24 though its commitment to meet this target was set for 2030. The magnitude of the investment that China has made in renewables can be seen from its investment in solar power, as it emerges as the leading supplier of solar cells. India has also expanded its renewable sector significantly and has ambitious plans for the future.

Earlier, the question was how to store electricity from renewables, given their variable output and our fixed daily demand profile. Building pumped hydro storage has addressed this problem. Grid-level batteries that were proposed earlier had high costs and limited storage duration.

The Purulia Pumped Storage Project in West Bengal, built under the Left Front government, was the first such scheme in India. Unlike multi-purpose hydroelectric projects, which cause large submergence of land in order to store water for seasonal irrigation needs, meeting the daily fluctuations of energy needs requires much smaller storage and, therefore, very little submergence.

The solar energy sector is clearly leading the energy transition in the world. What is surprising is not the scale or speed at which China is building up its solar energy sector but how far behind the others are. According to the New York Times (16 September 2024) China installed a total of 425GW of new solar power. The rest of the world installed only 162GW, with the US — the biggest economy in the world — accounting for a measly 33GW!

India has set itself an ambitious target of 500GW of renewable energy, with 80 per cent of that coming from solar by 2030. This is doable if we also invest in our capacity to build the entire supply chain for solar energy. This includes the production of silicon wafers and solar cells, not just solar panels and solar plants.

If the electricity sector is the number one emitter of greenhouse gases, the transport sector comes second. Electric vehicles (EVs) are at the forefront in personal transport today when it comes to combating greenhouse gas emissions from burning petrol or diesel.

Again, China, with its focus on fundamental technologies, in this case, battery technology, has emerged as the global leader. The major supplier of grid-level battery storage in China, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd (CATL) also supplies Tesla with its batteries. CATL and BYD (Build Your Dream) have emerged not only as leading battery makers globally but are also now entering the EV market as car makers — BYD on its own, CATL in partnership with other manufacturers.

These Chinese companies have made heavy inroads into the European market. The response of the US and the EU has been tariff barriers to protect their own carmakers at the cost of sacrificing climate goals.

Indian car makers are also actively entering the EV sector. Here too, the laggards seem to be the US, where the Elon Musk mystique seems to have blinded them to the reality that batteries alone account for 50 per cent of the cost of an electric vehicle. Tesla’s focus on the elite market has meant missing the mass market segment, with Musk in denial of the Chinese battery manufacturers being competition.

Again, COP29 is unlikely to address any of the real issues of how to expand renewable electricity production and its use in transport and other industries. We aren’t even talking about carbon equity and rich countries taking steps to repair the climate damage they have done. All we want is for them to take some responsibility for the future. Shelling out some money in the name of climate finance just won’t cut it.

The globe today is teetering on the edge of irreversible climate change. Yet, this is not an issue that rich countries prioritise. Their focus is on how to defeat Russia militarily in Ukraine, how to ring-fence China economically, how to use Israel to control oil-rich West Asia and how to continue to rule over the rest of the globe.

With regard to global warming, the G7 has come up not only against what other countries want, but also against what nature wants. This is our challenge today: how to build a better world despite every effort by a handful of countries to sacrifice our future for the sake of their political and economic dominance.

This article first appeared in Newsclick