Why the Baku climate summit is not about fossil fuels
After almost two weeks of discussions at the climate summit in Baku, most agenda items are still undecided. How does UvA climate lawyer Joyeeta Gupta perceives the summit? “Slowly, rich countries are losing power. At the end of the day, 6 billion people live in developing countries.”
Whether there will be a clear decision in Baku on who will foot the bill for climate change? UvA professor of environment and development in the global South Joyeeta Gupta (60) estimates those chances are slim, on the Thursday morning of the second week of the climate summit in Baku. “But negotiations are totally unpredictable,” she adds right away. “It won’t be the first time a breakthrough is achieved at the last minute because emotional weapons are thrown into the fray, as was the case in Kyoto and Bali.”
The climate summit is a United Nations conference first held in Berlin in 1995. The aim of the summit is to make global agreements to halt climate change. 198 countries participate, which is unique: no other gathering in the world attracts so many countries.
Gupta knows the climate summits from the inside. As a law PhD student at VU University in the 1990s, she attended several climate conferences and was also involved in many consultations from her position at VROM, the former environment ministry. “Such a climate summit is really a circus. Besides the delegations of 198 countries, there are all kinds of scientists, NGOs and buisiness man present who do business there.”
The elephant in the room
The main objective of the Baku summit is climate finance: money to be paid by rich countries that cause climate change to poor countries that suffer its consequences. On that inequality, Gupta is doing research at the UvA.
And that research shows, among other things, that 80 per cent of remaining fossil fuel resources are in developing countries. To limit climate warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the major part of those sources must remain underground. In other words, developing countries are not allowed to tap into the oil and gas under the ground and therefore miss out on huge revenues. At the same time, they are already experiencing the effects of emissions from developed countries that have already consumed their resources. Gupta: “So developing countries are being shortchanged on both sides and that is why they are so angry.”
Gupta already described this inequality in her thesis. Rich countries are liable for climate change and will have to pay compensation, the argument that developing countries are now also putting on the table in Baku. Gupta: “At the time, that argument was dismissed as something unimportant, but it is being taken more and more seriously. Slowly, rich countries are losing power. At the end of the day, 6 billion people live in developing countries.”
At the same time, the discussion on money is still extremely rigid in Baku. And besides, it is aimed at the wrong targets, according to Gupta. “The funding is for climate adaptation, to counter the effects of climate change, such as building dykes. Whereas money should also be freed up to quit fossil fuels, to invest in public transport and renewable energy.”
This is hardly being done yet, according to Gupta. There is an initiative, the Just Energy Transition Partnership, where rich countries invest money in six countries, including South Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia, to contribute to the energy transition. But that money ended up coming mainly in the form of business loans - not donations, that is - and was used to switch from coal to gas.
Stopping fossil fuels is the big elephant in the room, according to Gupta. “It has not yet come up so directly at any climate summit. Rich countries don’t want it on the agenda. But neither does China or India, for example, because of their huge coal reserves. Logical, because if you stop using fossil fuels, there will be a huge amount of unemployment and high infrastructure costs. Nobody wants to pay for that. But it has to be done, otherwise we will never move forward with renewable energy. There has to be a decision on that. And clear agreements on who is going to pay and how much.”
“Everyone does something” is not enough
When it comes to fulfilling the agreements made at the climate summit, Gupta is pessimistic. “It has been agreed that all countries are committed to climate education. But how much understanding does the Dutch government and people actually have of climate change? The prime minister has never addressed the country on the climate crisis, as was the case during the corona pandemic. For the new government, climate is not even a priority. We really need to wake people up. A commercial from the government says, ‘Everyone is doing something’, but that’s just not enough, we need to go all the way to zero...” Gupta stops talking for a moment. “I really get angry about all this.”
After the failed Copenhagen summit in 2009, Gupta herself did not travel to the climate summit. The conference became increasingly expensive and crowded over the years. “The last time in Copenhagen, the NGOs stood outside waiting for someone to leave the building to get in: it was like a car park.”
Since then, she mainly focuses on writing scientific articles and exerts influence through other bodies. In recent years, she has also been working on education of social bodies. About twice a week, she speaks about climate injustice. “Many people don’t understand that if you continue to emit greenhouse gases, it becomes unlivable precisely in developing countries and people are forced to migrate. You can’t say, we won’t allow migrants in and we will continue emitting.” Last week she spoke in Italy at a conference on the future of the economy, and also to a room of Dutch women over seventy. “What I hope is that they enter the discussion with their children and grandchildren.”
