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Eco-summits in petro-tyrannies sound like something out of a comic novel. Sadly, they are all too real
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There is something poetic in the way that the delegates attending the 11-day COP29 climate conference in Baku were forced to listen to their moustachioed autocrat host, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, call his nation’s gas reserves a “gift of god”. The sound of spluttering into 67,000 soy macchiatos must have been audible all the way to Nagorno-Karabakh, the region that Mr Aliyev’s government has allegedly tried to ethnically cleanse.
Mr Aliyev’s remark has prompted a letter to the UN from a clutch of the great and the good demanding that the COPs be reformed and shrunk. That would be a pity. Corrupt and conflicted as central-Asian petrostates may be, it’s nothing compared with the gift of the gods that is the climate cornuCOPia.
The delegates are there, many at our expense, to try to extract trillions of pounds in climate reparations from poor people in rich countries to send to rich people in poor countries.
Assuming they did not travel by donkey, very few of the delegates – did I mention that there are 67,000 of them? – will have paid for their own air fares. Actually, slumming it by “flying scheduled” – as they say in Succession – is for mugs: the number of private jets landing in Baku last week more than doubled to 65, compared with 32 in the same week last year.
The COPpers see it as their duty to lecture you on how you should eat less meat and fly fewer miles. Where do they derive the legitimacy to do this?
Not from the electorate. The issue of climate change barely featured in the American or British elections this year. A few years ago, the topic came dead last of 16 priorities in a UN “Myworld” poll of the concerns of nearly 10 million people in 194 countries.
The beauty of the COP process is that it can go on forever because it never makes a difference. It is, in a word, sustainable. Carbon dioxide emissions keep breaking records. Gas, oil and coal still supply 82 per cent of the energy the world uses. These meetings have gone on for nearly one third of a century already; they are an institution complete with traditions and ceremonies; people have spent entire careers attending them.
The last thing they need is for somebody to solve the problem. If, say, Melon Usk were to invent cheap, clean, endless fusion power tomorrow so we could stop worrying about climate change, the 67,000 would be alarmed: they prefer scolding us and having COPs.
The Taliban are attending the COP this year but most Western politicians have twigged that it is a waste of time. This year: no Biden, no Macron, no Modi, no Ishiba, no Scholz, no Xi. Only one G7 leader has not yet twigged that the whole thing is a performative farce: our very own Sir Keir.
He was even daft enough to make a policy announcement in Baku, committing the UK to an 81 per cent emissions reduction (from all energy: electricity, transport, heating and industry) by 2035.
Using realistic if heroic assumptions about wind-farm capacity factors (and not the fantasy figures preferred by Ed Miliwatt-Hour) by my calculations, that could mean building at least 20 more Hinkley-sized nuclear plants or sextupling the size of existing wind farms in just 10 years. And telling us to give up most meat, dairy, steel, cement, foreign holidays and diesel or petrol cars.
Now that Donald Trump and Javier Milei of Argentina are pulling out of the whole sham, we can begin to see a glimmer of hope that the COP might one day fade into irrelevance. It will probably never die entirely but become about as newsworthy as, say, the Henley Regatta. Just less fun.
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