Their reasons varied, from head injuries to domestic troubles to principled stands against the host country’s human rights record, but taken together, the regrets struck an ominous tone. Coming at the end of what is going down as the hottest year on record, it was easy to feel that the annual meetings of signatories to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), plus the circus of non-governmental organizations, lobbyists and negotiators that has grown up around them, have failed to deliver. Or, in the words of James Marape, president of Papua New Guinea, they’re now “a total waste of time.” 

For the last 30 years, COP has been the planet’s main vehicle of hope for averting climate catastrophe. The third-ever COP, held in Japan in 1997, birthed the Kyoto Protocol, the pedestal for multilateral climate action. The landmark Paris Agreement was forged in the corridors of COP21 back in 2015. Now, a decade later, as global temperatures rise past the critical 1.5°C mark and the world’s most powerful country ushers in a climate-denying leader, COP’s mission has never been more urgent – while faith in its process hits ever new lows. 

No one factor has undermined confidence in the COP process more than the influence that fossil fuel interests exert over it. Over time, the industry has become only more obstreperous – and less discreet; for COP29, host country Azerbaijan extended special guest passes to more than 132 global oil and gas executives and their staff. As former U.S. vice president Al Gore put it during the meeting, “The fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree.” Now there are growing calls to wrest control back. The gazillion-dollar question: will it work?

Turning COP into a venue for greenwashing 

Oil and gas did not show up to the COP party uninvited. Article 4 of its foundational document, the UNFCCC, affirms the need to “give full consideration” to the impact that mitigation measures will have on countries “whose economies are highly dependent on income generated from . . . fossil fuels” – lending legitimacy to the voice of oil and gas in climate negotiations. And from the outset, the industry positioned itself as essential to the transition to a cleaner future. Among the groups that attended the first COP meeting, in 1995 in Berlin, were the International Gas Association and the National Coal Association. 

If they are going to be there only to be obstructors, and only to put spanners into the system, they should not be there. They could have an amazing impact on accelerating decarbonization, but they’ve decided not to do it.

– Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief

But in recent years, fossil fuel’s presence at COP has become more brazen. The last three meetings have been hosted by petrostates (Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan) and presided over by individuals who could hardly be considered dispassionate about oil and gas. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who was president of COP28, is also the chief executive of the U.A.E.’s state oil company; during the conference, he vehemently defended fossil fuels, claiming that phasing them out would “take the world back into caves.” At last year’s conference in Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev called oil and gas “a gift of God” and said that countries like his – which derives more than 93% of its export revenue from fossil fuels and intends to boost gas production by a third over the next decade – “should not be blamed for having them.”

At the same time, the number of conference participants who represent the industry has surged. According to a report by the London-based NGO Global Witness, 503 fossil fuel lobbyists attended the COP26 meeting in Glasgow in 2021. The following year, at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, the number rose to 636. Last year, under mounting pressure from environmental organizations, the UNFCCC required all COP participants to disclose their affiliations, enabling the oil and gas presence to be better quantified. According to Kick Big Polluters Out, a coalition of 450 organizations working to protect the climate policy arena, 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP28 in Dubai and more than 1,770 attended COP29 in Baku: roughly 3% of all attendees in both cases.

In an open letter to UN leadership, published during COP29, a group of climate-policy heavyweights – including former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, former Irish president Mary Robinson and former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres – called for reform. Among their suggestions: that future COPs be hosted only by countries that have demonstrated a commitment to the Paris Agreement and that corporate players who are not aligned with the UN’s climate goals not be allowed to attend. They specifically cite the overrepresentation of fossil fuel lobbyists. 

“They call into question the legitimacy of the entire conference,” says Harjeet Singh, a climate activist who has been attending COP meetings since 2008. “They are granted pavilions, they’re given official space for their greenwashing.” 

Singh is global engagement director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, a campaign calling for an end to fossil fuel expansion and production. Launched in 2015 by a group of Pacific Island nations, the initiative now has the official support of 13 national governments and the European Parliament. But the headwinds blow strong at COP, where the number of delegates representing the world’s 10 most climate-vulnerable countries is routinely eclipsed by the number of those lobbying on behalf of oil and gas.

It’s not just lobbying. Briefing documents leaked to the BBC in the run-up to COP28 in Dubai revealed that the host country intended to use the forum to forge deals between the U.A.E.’s state oil company, ADNOC, and at least 27 countries in attendance. Likewise, Elnur Soltanov, chief executive of COP29, was caught in an undercover video using his position to promote investment in SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s national oil and gas company, and its gas-production expansion plans. 

The perversion of this – akin to having arms dealers run peace talks – has cost even the most conciliatory voices their patience. For years, Figueres, who served as executive secretary of the UNFCCC from 2010 to 2016 and played a pivotal role in crafting the 2015 Paris Agreement, argued that fossil fuel companies belonged in climate policy negotiations. She’s changed her mind. “If they are going to be there only to be obstructors, and only to put spanners into the system, they should not be there,” she told an audience at the Columbia Journalism School in the run-up to COP28. “They could have an amazing impact on accelerating decarbonization, but they’ve decided not to do it.” 

The behemoth task of changing UN policy 

Figueres’s predecessor, Yvo de Boer, who helmed the UNFCCC from 2006 through 2010, sees it differently. He argues that the UN’s core principle of decision-making by consensus means that the interests of all parties to the convention – currently 198 countries – have to be respected, and that those interests are increasingly embedded in fossil fuels; the economies of a growing number of countries, particularly in Africa, depend on oil production. “When the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, it was just Saudi Arabia banging its fist in protest,” de Boer says on the phone from The Hague. “Now there are some 40 oil-producing countries in the room.” 

De Boer believes that COP’s failures should be blamed less on fossil fuel meddling than on the unlevel playing field that skews the economy toward brown choices: fossil fuel subsidies in particular. Currently acting as an advisor to Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company, on its energy transition strategy, de Boer also believes that collaboration is preferable to alienation when it comes to the fossil fuel industry. “I think it was General MacArthur who said he’d rather have his enemies inside the tent, pissing out, than outside the tent, pissing in,” he says. 

Many would prefer to see no pissing at all. Canadian climate activist Catherine Abreu is part of a movement pressuring the UNFCCC to adopt a conflict-of-interest policy that would bar fossil fuel interests from the UN climate meetings. In 2022, a group of constituencies made a joint submission to the UNFCCC secretariat, asking it to establish clear conflict-of-interest criteria and to apply them to conference applicants with an aim to “prevent entities with private, polluting interests from unduly influencing or undermining UNFCCC activities.” While no such accountability framework has been adopted, Abreu says the idea is gaining momentum and has been endorsed by the European commissioner for climate action. 

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“Working on climate change, you’re operating in a world full of partial victories,” says Abreu, who works for the European Climate Foundation, an independent philanthropic initiative based in The Hague. “It’s a matter of putting all these smaller wins together.” 

Preparing for her departure to Baku, Abreu points to two recent such wins: the UNFCCC’s insistence that lobbyists declare themselves as such when registering for COP, and the much-contested phrasing of COP28’s outcome document, which acknowledged the need to “transition away from fossil fuels.” What felt like a breakthrough at the time would be undermined at COP29, when Saudi Arabia vetoed any mention of fossil fuels in the meeting’s final agreement.

But Abreu maintains COP’s value. “It’s the only process that brings all countries together,” she says. “If we didn’t have this space, we’d have to create it. Is it perfect? No. We have to see what we can achieve through this process – and if it’s not functioning, how we can change it.” 

Changing UN policy means turning a very big ship, as all parties have to be on board, but advocates of a conflict-of-interest mechanism point to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Adopted in 2003, the convention was severely challenged by the aggressive lobbying tactics of the tobacco industry. In 2008, Article 5.3 was added, requiring all signatory states to keep tobacco companies and interests out of public-health policy discussions. Were a comparable instrument to be adopted by the UNFCCC, fossil fuel lobbyists would not be riding into COP meetings on the coattails of official delegations. 

It sounds simple. “But what constitutes fossil fuel interests?” asks Jessica Green, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto who specializes in the politics of climate change. Strictly speaking, she says, the label would apply to many governments that are party to the UNFCCC. And they can’t just be kicked out; reiterating de Boer’s point, she emphasizes that the legitimacy of the UN system is premised on the participation – not exclusion – of member countries. 

The stakes are high for COP30. The round number raises expectations, as does the host country, Brazil, where climate policy tensions are writ large. Home to both the world’s largest rainforest and its most extensive ultra-deep oil reserves, Brazil will provide a very different COP stage from its Middle Eastern predecessors, and a more complex cast of characters. It’s hard to imagine Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, a distinguished environmentalist, allowing fossil fuel interests to derail a climate summit in the middle of the Amazon forest she has fought most of her life to protect. 

And Ana Toni, Brazil’s national secretary of climate change, who led the country’s delegation to COP29, has struck a defiant tone. “We were the first ones to say, ‘Let us stop deforestation,’” she said in an interview with Agence France-Presse at the meeting. “The same we’ll do with fossil fuels.” 

If there was ever an opportunity to rein in fossil fuel influence, this would be it.

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post Can fossil fuel lobbyists be barred from global climate talks? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The voluntary market for carbon credits – separate from cap-and-trade markets regulated by governments – has grown slowly over the last few years, hobbled by loose definitions and lax credit verification. A recent peer-reviewed study of more than 2,000 carbon-credit projects found that only 16% of the projects achieved the carbon savings claimed.

Growth in this market could ramp up significantly, however, after the Conference of Parties (COP29) meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, approved a framework for recognizing carbon credits in the global accounting of carbon emissions. For the first time, carbon credits will be recognized under the Paris Agreement, enabling countries and companies to use offsets to meet their carbon-reduction targets, potentially giving a huge boost to carbon-credit trading.

The International Emissions Trading Association estimates a carbon market under Paris Agreement rules could save as much as US$250 billion per year by 2030 in mitigation costs, far larger than the savings under the current market.

“We have ended a decade-long wait and unlocked a critical tool for keeping 1.5 degrees in reach,” said COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev.

Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S. group advocating market-based solutions to climate change, cautiously praised the deal. “While its true impact will hinge on strong implementation that delivers measurable benefits for people and nature, this agreement represents a historic opportunity to elevate carbon markets as a tool for meaningful climate action.”

But some critics said that nothing of substance was achieved in Azerbaijan since the existing carbon market system remains. They fear the market will grow quickly, providing an inexpensive and easy way for emitters to meet their climate pledges without doing the hard and expensive work of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

The COP29 guidelines will create “cowboy carbon markets at a time when the world needs a sheriff,” said Carbon Market Watch, an international advocacy group.

Persistent skepticism for carbon credits

Carbon credits are certificates issued by projects like reforestation or renewable-energy ventures for emissions avoided, reduced or removed. The certificates are purchased by large or hard-to-abate emitters like oil companies or airlines in order to offset their own emissions.

One of the big problems with the COP29 agreement is that there are no standards for what constitutes a quality carbon credit. Renewable-energy projects, for example, have sometimes been credited with generating “avoided emissions” even though the projects have resulted in no measurable emission reductions because the projects would have been built regardless of the credit. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market – a private organization – recently rejected renewables for its carbon-credit standard.

The fact that nations can set their own standards in country-to-country deals is a large loophole in the COP29 pact, making it “the biggest threat to the Paris Agreement,” Oxford University researcher Injy Johnstone told AFP (Agence France-Presse).

At least one major international bank, HSBC, is voting with its feet. Only days before COP29 approved the carbon agreement, the bank shut down plans to launch a major carbon trading desk, according to Bloomberg. The shutdown is a sign that buyers and traders have cooled on carbon offsets. Delta Airlines, Google and EasyJet are among a growing list of companies that have abandoned carbon-offset purchases, focusing instead on work to reduce their own emissions.

Do offsets still have a role in reducing emissions?

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), widely viewed as the gold standard for corporate carbon-reduction plans, recently expressed skepticism that carbon credits should be used by companies to offset their emissions.

SBTi has announced it will hold a consultation in 2025 on a new Corporate Net-Zero Standard, which is expected to include guidelines on how corporations can use carbon offsets to support their net-zero targets. SBTi’s final standard is expected to play a large role in establishing international guidelines for carbon-offset buyers.

While COP29 rushed through its carbon market framework, a related COP conference on biodiversity in Cali, Colombia, took a go-slow approach to the development of a similar market in nature-protection credits. A proposed framework presented at the conference would exclude trading of so-called biodiversity credits on secondary markets. If implemented, this exclusion would limit global trading in biodiversity credits.

“Global offsetting in biodiversity doesn’t work and we don’t support it,” said Amelia Fawcett, co-chair of the U.K./France-led International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits, which unveiled the proposed framework. She told the conference that nature credits should be used only in a very limited way, in local situations to offset harm in the same ecological ecosystem where the credit is traded.

An Lambrechts, a biodiversity expert at Greenpeace, said that development of carbon and biodiversity credits should be linked at next year’s COP climate meeting in Brazil. “At COP30 in Belém, in the Amazon, it’s time to connect the climate and biodiversity fights together.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the IETA’s estimate of mitigation cost savings. 

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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The PR companies that help them sell that message are not far behind.

Dozens of the consultants registered for the two-week conference, called COP29, come from 10 public relations agencies that work with oil giants such as Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil and Shell. The agencies include Edelman, Dentsu, FleishmanHillard and Burson, according to a DeSmog review of the official delegates list, as well as reports by the PR industry trade press.

Staff from seven of these agencies registered with delegations from countries taking part in the negotiations, including Japan, Brazil, Turkey and the United Kingdom, as well as the United Arab Emirates, which hosted the last round of the annual negotiations.

Governments often hire PR teams to create content, provide media training and handle press at high-level conferences. Most of the consultants were listed under each country’s “party overflow,” which gives them access to policymakers, politicians and business leaders outside the negotiation zone.

Since the start of 2023, these 10 agencies have collectively held at least 91 contracts to burnish the reputations of companies involved in the fossil fuel industry, according to research by DeSmog and Clean Creatives.

It is unclear whether any of the agency employees registered for COP29 have also worked on fossil fuel accounts. At big communications companies, which can employ thousands, only a small number of employees might be working on oil and gas contracts at any one time.

Nevertheless, the proximity of employees from so many fossil-friendly PR firms to the climate negotiations underscores wider concerns about the communications industry’s role in helping to defend the business models of major polluters. “Any agency with fossil fuel clients at a climate summit is a walking conflict of interest,” said Duncan Meisel, director of Clean Creatives. “Fossil fuel PR agencies show up at events like the COP in order to delay progress by claiming their clients are somehow essential and responsible companies.”

Climate advocates are calling on the advertising and PR industry to stop protecting polluting companies and oil-exporting countries from pressure to decarbonize, often by pushing risky climate solutions like carbon capture or arguing that fossil fuels are necessary for energy security.

In June, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for communications agencies to drop their fossil fuel clients, saying that oil and gas companies had been “aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men fuelling the madness.”

Three months later, Clean Creatives published a report documenting more than 1,000 fossil fuel contracts in the PR and advertising industry since the start of 2023.

The PR firms pushing for Big Oil in climate solutions 

At the Baku conference, Saudi Arabia and allied oil exporters are attempting to block an agreement made at COP28 in Dubai last year to “transition away” from fossil fuels from being included in this year’s final text, according to reporting by the news service Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

The Saudi government, which has worked to hinder UN climate talks for decades, owns the largest oil company in the world by revenue, Saudi Aramco.

New York–headquartered Burson, one of the PR agencies attending COP29 as part of Turkey’s delegation, has worked for Saudi Aramco at least as recently as 2023, according to research by Clean Creatives. Burson also has 10 other current or recent clients in the fossil fuel sector.

Burson was formed by a merger between Hill & Knowlton and BCW in July, which created the largest PR firm in the world by revenue.

When Egypt, the host of 2022’s climate summit, hired Hill & Knowlton to lead public communications for the conference, more than 400 scientists signed an open letter calling for the agency to drop its fossil fuel clients. The letter described Hill & Knowlton’s work for oil giants such as Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil – clients now retained by Burson – as “incompatible” with spearheading the PR for UN climate negotiations.

Burson is a subsidiary of U.K.-based WPP, the largest global network of PR and advertising agencies in the world by revenue. WPP’s agencies have collectively held at least 79 fossil fuel contracts since the start of 2023, according to Clean Creatives.

Twenty-two employees from the U.S.-based firm Teneo, which has been hired by the Azeri hosts to work on COP29, were registered as part of the Azeri delegation – the most of any agency in the analysis – along with one in the New Zealand delegation. The most senior registered member of Teneo’s COP29 PR team is Geoff Morrell, a former BP communications chief.

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In the run-up to COP29, Teneo conducted an extensive public relations campaign for the Azeri government that portrayed the country as a leader in climate action. The company is in line to earn $5 million for this work, according to documents the company filed with the U.S. Department of Justice under rules requiring U.S. companies to report work for foreign governments.

That task has been complicated by Azerbaijan’s plans to increase oil and gas production. A senior Azeri COP executive was secretly filmed as he appeared to use his role to set up meetings to explore possible fossil fuel deals.

Teneo has worked with at least six oil and gas producers in the past five years, including Chevron and Shell, according to research by DeSmog. The climate plans of both companies, like those of the majority of the fossil fuel industry, are incompatible with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement between nations to keep global heating “well below” 2°C (3.6°F) above the historic average, according to a May report by Oil Change International.

Azerbaijan’s delegation also includes six consultants from BTP Advisers, a communications firm that specializes in advising governments with a history of using controversial PR tactics.

In January 2023, an Australian scientist told non-profit news outlet EUobserver that he had been tricked into promoting “Azerbaijan propaganda” by BTP as the firm sought to buff the country’s image during its conflict with neighbouring Armenia. According to reporting by The European Conservative, BTP confirmed it was working for Azerbaijan but did not make any further comment on the allegations.

In May, BTP CEO Mark Pursey told AZERTAC, the Azerbaijan state news agency, that hosting COP29 in Baku would be an opportunity for the oil-and-gas-reliant nation to demonstrate its clean energy capabilities – comments that were later recycled in other state news stories.

Japan’s delegation to the Baku summit includes five representatives from Tokyo-based marketing and PR conglomerate Dentsu. In the past two years, the firm has held at least 27 contracts with 25 different companies involved in the fossil fuel industry, including ExxonMobil and BP, according to DeSmog research.

One staff member of FleishmanHillard – a global agency headquartered in the United States that is owned by holding company Omnicom – registered for the summit as part of Brazil’s national delegation, along with one employee of Brazil-based FSB Comunicação.

According to Clean Creatives, since the start of 2023 FleishmanHillard has worked for oil and gas producer Repsol, oil-field-services company SLB and fossil-fuel-reliant utility company Engie. FSB Comunicação works for Brazilian gas distributor Comgás.

Lynn Davidson, a senior director at APCO, a global lobbying firm headquartered in Washington, is registered as a U.K. delegate. APCO has worked for two oil and gas producers since early 2023, including Tullow Oil, which is headquartered in London and operates in Africa, and an Australian company named Jadestone Energy.

Davidson was previously an advisor to Alok Sharma, the president of the 2021 UN climate summit held in Glasgow, and prior to that worked at Teneo.

Another APCO director, Thomas Billinghurst, is part of the United Arab Emirates’ delegation. Billinghurst created videos and generated news coverage for senior U.A.E. climate envoys in the lead-up to the oil-rich nation’s hosting of COP28 in 2023.

Several global PR firms, including Edelman, Weber Shandwick and FTI Consulting, are also on the ground in Baku to conduct research rather than as part of country delegations, according to reporting by the trade publication PR Week.

Together, these three firms have collectively held at least 33 fossil fuel contracts in the past two years, according to Clean Creatives, for clients including oil and gas producers and lobby groups such as TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil and the Asia Natural Gas & Energy Association.

With additional reporting by Kathryn Clare

This article was first published on DeSmog. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here.

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In a curiously organic way, a COP (Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) also works like this, as a chaotic yet seamless gathering of voices, interests and perspectives.

The endless summit corridors are packed with almost 60,000 participants, each navigating their way to uncertain outcomes at predetermined destinations: a negotiating table, a roundtable discussion or a profound conversation on the future of the climate. In this global microcosm, where governments, businesses, non-governmental organizations and academics converge, the interplay of interests is never stable, yet the wheels of the system remain constantly in motion.

My watch (and feet) can attest to the sheer scale of this gathering. During my time here I have been clocking more than 25,000 steps per day, roughly half a marathon, in my efforts to keep up with the rushing, incessantly conversing human tides.

Renewable price competitiveness isn’t enough

It is easy to point fingers at the more than 1,700 representatives from the oil and gas sectors attending COP29, yet their role in the energy transition is absolutely crucial. After COP28, even giants like ExxonMobil and Shell acknowledged that their future depends on diversifying their portfolios and transitioning to more sustainable business models. The current market is not, however, designed to make clean energy as profitable as oil and gas – complex systemic issues present roadblocks to a competitive transition.

The cost of solar energy has plummeted by 88% since 2010, and onshore wind by 68%. While this has helped to foster key industries such as electric vehicles and solar panels, clean energy is still far from being self-sufficient. Its success depends on a much more complex interplay between industry, governments and infrastructure.

In Spain, for instance, renewables account for 61.5% of installed capacity, with 78,968 megawatts (MW) of production, yet the stark reality is that there are 130 GW of renewable projects waiting to be connected to an electricity grid that is not ready to handle them.

Outdated infrastructure and slow bureaucratic processes are creating a bottleneck that prevents clean energy from being monetized, undermining its profitability and slowing its uptake. The complexities don’t stop there: further progress is also sorely needed in energy storage and data management, as well as in building optimized distribution networks.

The strategic necessity of climate negotiations

There is a paradoxical element to the climate struggle. As we move toward decarbonization, some renewable projects are having a highly detrimental impact on the environment, affecting precisely one of the other major global challenges: the recovery of biodiversity.

The Maestrazgo Cluster in Castellón, Spain, which envisages the installation of more than 125 wind turbines in Natura 2000 protected areas, is a clear example of this conflict. Local resistance, often framed as a NIMBY (not in my backyard) cause, is not only an aesthetic or territorial issue; it also houses deeper concerns about the preservation of unique ecosystems that could be lost forever.

As industries grapple with being competitive, the stakes are even higher for countries themselves. China and India are heading the technological race, so falling behind could lead to economic disaster. This is the main reason why figures like ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods are encouraging Donald Trump to join the climate negotiations – not out of altruism, but as a strategic necessity.

The energy transition requires more than just investment in renewables; it also means designing a system that can combine efficient grids, streamlined processes, stable public policies, conservation efforts and the needs of local communities. Ignoring any of these elements will not only further delay the transition; it will also expose us to fresh environmental and social crises. There are no easy solutions to these complex problems.

The role of carbon-credit trading

We are still waiting for the magic “commitment number” – the figure that developed countries decide to allocate to developing nations to fund their climate transition.

Why is this so important? Because many of these countries lack the resources to implement renewable-energy projects and adapt their infrastructures to reduce climate change. However, this funding is not just a matter of charity. It is also a way to ensure that all countries, regardless of their resources, can contribute to the fight against climate change.

In this sense, Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement represents a step toward a more orderly system by setting out a global framework for carbon-credit trading, under UN oversight. It aims to prevent double counting and fraud, as well as to restore confidence in a market that fell to $723 million in 2023 after multiple scandals.

Under this system, countries will be able to trade carbon credits produced by projects anywhere in the world, generating revenue to fund their own transitions. It replaces the former Clean Development Mechanism established under the Kyoto Protocol and seeks to establish clear rules to deter fraud and double emission counting.

Channelling the chaos of COP29

COP29 offers a clear lesson: tension and complexity are inherent to the climate challenge. Much like entropy itself, the energy transition is a constantly shifting system with opposing forces that need to be balanced.

Solving this puzzle demands more than just funds and technological breakthroughs. It requires bold leadership, international cooperation and the ability to navigate a system where tensions – decarbonization versus conservation, efficiency versus climate justice – have to be carefully managed and balanced.

Energy is the driving force behind this process, not only in the physical sense, but also in the political and social realms. The question is whether we can channel COP29’s chaos into a more sustainable and orderly future. Entropy may be a challenge, but it is also an opportunity, a reminder that there is room to build something extraordinary, even within disorder.

Isabela del Alcázar is the chief purpose and sustainability officer at IE University.

This story first appeared in The Conversation; it has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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With little to no power to enforce compliance, Stiell has responsibility without authority. In two years as the UN’s executive secretary for climate change, he has pushed for action at two COP conferences in oil-producing countries (Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) while seeing the number of fossil-firm lobbyists in attendance quadruple. And he’s about to do it again at COP29 in Azerbaijan. He has learned not just to argue for change, but to paint vivid pictures of the costly dangers we now face – and the safer, more just world we could build for a fraction of that cost.

In mid-July, Stiell stood in a roofless home on Carriacou, his home island, surveying the damage from Hurricane Beryl. “I and my community are experiencing the devastation that has become all too familiar to hundreds of millions,” he said in a UN video. “Beryl is yet more painful proof: every year, fossil-fuel-driven climate costs are an economic wrecking ball hitting billions of households and small businesses.”

If no action is taken to slow climate change, a German government-backed report released in April says the costs will total US$38 trillion a year through 2050. “The same report,” Stiell noted, “says climate action will cost less than a sixth of that.”

With degrees in business and engineering, eight years with Finnish-based Nokia, and business development experience with a Silicon Valley AI start-up, Stiell moves easily between the public and private sectors. He’s also led the fight for a multibillion-dollar loss and damage fund for hard-hit developing countries, to be paid for by affluent industrial nations. With Canada and other G20 nations dragging their feet, the fund was finally established – if not yet funded – at COP28 in Dubai last December.

Now Stiell says the world has just two years left to agree on actions to achieve the Paris goals. To save COP29 this month in Baku, he’s been arm-twisting for a “quantum leap” in climate financing, including non-loan programs to help struggling nations cut emissions without drowning in debt. On the bright side, says Stiell, “Bold new national climate plans will be a jobs jackpot and economic springboard.”

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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The conference begins November 11 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a shaky petrostate that earns 92% of its export revenue from oil and gas. This is the country where the very first oil wells in the world appeared in the 1840s. This year’s conference president, Mukhtar Babayev, is the nation’s ecology and natural resources minister, and a 26-year veteran of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan. 

Moreover, the UN’s visionary commitment to develop a more just, tolerant society as part of its Paris Agreement goals also looks shaky when it works with an authoritarian family dictatorship. Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.–based non-profit, gives Azerbaijan a “freedom score” of seven out of 100 (down from nine last year, and well below the U.A.E.’s score of 18/100). An undercover investigation by Global Witness, detailed in a report released last week, exposed the interest of Azerbaijan leaders to use their COP leadership position to facilitate discussion of fossil fuel deals. The NGO secretly filmed Elnur Soltanov, the CEO of COP, discussing oil and gas deals ahead of the climate summit. 

Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev has been in power since 2003, when he succeeded his father, Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB official who ruled the country when it was a Soviet republic. The family has stayed in power by suppressing dissent, restricting press freedom and limiting civil liberties.

We have neither the time nor the patience for more scams or games of smoke and mirrors like your greenwashing fund.

– Pacific Climate Warrior Joseph Zane Sikulu

Earlier this year, Aliyev called Azerbaijan’s oil, which fuelled Russia for a century, “a gift from God” – signalling he’s not about to leave it in the ground. When Azerbaijan’s first large-scale solar power plant opened last October, Aliyev boasted of “moving towards a green agenda.” But the project offers few environmental benefits, since Azerbaijan plans to export the gas its own power plants no longer need. Worse, Azerbaijan waged war for three years against ethnic Armenians in their disputed, semi-autonomous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan’s initiative, which the European Parliament labelled ethnic cleansing, resulted in the flight of 136,000 Armenians. The region, Aliyev says, will now become a “green energy zone.”

Babayev likes to say that the country is acting as a bridge between East and West and the wealthy Global North and the Global South, seeking to raise US$1 billion from fossil fuel producers for a climate fund to help poor nations. Pacific Climate Warrior Joseph Zane Sikulu, from the low-lying islands of Tonga, calls it greenwash. “We have neither the time nor the patience for more scams or games of smoke and mirrors like your greenwashing fund.” 

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