COP27 Climate Conference Ends In Weak, Iffy Financial Deal For Climate Victim Nations

Agreements reached at the recently ended UN COP27
climate change meeting in Egypt are vague and
don't seem likely to make much headway with climate change. 

 The just ended COP27 UN climate global conference resulted in some deals, some agreements, but things seem vague enough that I don't know what exactly will be put into action. 

I don't think these annual meetings are actually getting much done, but I guess you have to give people credit for trying. 

The COP meetings comes each year to encourage nations to cooperate in tempering the worst of climate change and dealing with its effects. This year's two-week long conference ended Sunday as nations hammered out at least some tentative paths forward.

This year's conference focused largely on the fact that poor countries, which never emitted much greenhouse gas, that are bearing the brunt of climate change. Meanwhile, richer countries, which have belched out those emissions for decades aren't compensating these poorer nations.

In negotiations that extended two days beyond what had been the scheduled close of the conference, richer countries agreed to establish a loss and damage fund to support those more impoverished regions.

I predict this will be a mess going forward. Sure, COP27 agreed to create this fund, but didn't work out the details. Countries involved have a year to cross all those t's and dot all those i's. 

The agreement struck Sunday also doesn't spell out which countries will be required to contribute to the fund. They also didn't specify when the bills to pay into this fund are due. 

Yikes. 

As NPR notes, past COP conferences have established various funds. Many nations, including the United States, haven't followed through on billions of dollars of promised cash. 

With so many nations and interests involved at the conference, there were a lot of moving parts, so striking a deal was complicated.

NPR gives this example: 

"The U.S. is the largest historical contributor to climate change by a large margin. Today, China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. But Chinese representatives at COP27 said, while the country is open to voluntarily contributing to loss and damage, it should only be an obligation for historically wealthier countries like the U.S. and European Union."

However, Europeans pushed back, saying a fund that didn't collect money from current big emitters of greenhouse gases, like China and India, was unacceptable.

As NPR explained, United States participates kind of kept their mouths shut, though the Biden administration had previous said it wanted to focus on using existing humanitarian aid channels and not create a new, separate fund. 

The goals coming out of this year's COP are ambitious to say the least. NPR again:

"'In all, the world needs to invest at least $4 trillion every year to create a low-carbon global economy,' the final agreement says. Raising that sort of money will require a 'transformation' of the entire financial system.'

Yeah, good luck with that. 

By 2030, damage from warming could cost the world from $290 billion to $580 billion a year by 2030, according to at least one estimate. 

COP27 clung to the goal of keeping total global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's getting harder and harder to do, as we're getting closer and closer to that threshold. 

To get to that goal, many nations, including the European Union have pushed nations to reach peak emissions by 2025, followed by declining emissions. 

China and India want to allow emissions to rise through the end of the decade. 

COP27 didn't end with any firm deadlines for new emissions commitments. So that doesn't help. 

Estimates out there say that if we want to keep warming checked at 1.5 degrees Celsius, emissions would need to drop by 45 percent by 2030. That's just a little over seven years. Not much!  Current estimates are that emissions will only fall by 10 percent by 2030.

The annual COP conferences, though definitely well-intentioned, are awfully unwieldy and chaotic.  Too many cooks are spoiling the pot. There's all these conflicting interests, there's these sideshows of celebrities swooping in to tell us they are big climate saviors, activists do their thing, which seems to fall on deaf ears. 

I honestly don't have a solution to this mess. The world has managed to make the rate of increase in greenhouse emissions somewhat less, but the trend line is still up. Meanwhile, the world grows hotter and hotter. 

Money still talks louder than anything.  Horrible regimes like Russia and Saudi Arabia are still making money hand over fist from fossil fuels, so they're not going to give up on this cash cow.

In western democracies like the United States, oil interests are also slowing progress on finding alternatives to fossil fuel.

As long as oil remains big time profitable, no substantive agreements will be made, be it through big UN conferences or other means. 

Probably the only solution is to make alternatives like wind, solar or what have you more profitable than fossil fuels. Like I said, money talks.