“The WSJ Editorial Board writes, a global climate conference opened this week in Baku, Azerbaijan. We hope the skies aren’t too clouded by the exhaust from all of the private jets flying in.”
Our Take, With Doug Sheridan
The WSJ Editorial Board writes, a global climate conference opened this week in Baku, Azerbaijan. We hope the skies aren’t too clouded by the exhaust from all of the private jets flying in.
Called COP29 Azerbaijan, the summit is supposed to be an opportunity to take stock of current efforts to curtail climate change and agree to new measures. Previous editions brought the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 2015 and an attempt to mobilize trillions of dollars of capital for the energy transition at COP26 in Scotland in 2021. This year delegates hope to create a new global emissions-trading system.
If their host doesn’t scuttle the summit first, that is. Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, told delegates fossil fuels are a “gift of God,” and he criticized the “double standards, a habit to lecture other countries and political hypocrisy” of developed countries on climate matters. The “Western fake news media” got a special mention in his speech.
The head of the Azerbaijan organizing committee used his position to pitch investors on oil and gas drilling in the fossil-fuel-rich country. The surprise is embarrassments like this didn’t happen last year when COP28 was held in that noted opponent of oil drilling—the UAE. We’d say the global climate brigades were playing with fire hosting the conference in these places, but they don’t believe in burning things.
The real joke of these summits is that so many people take them seriously. Whatever one thinks of the arguments surrounding climate change, there won’t be a material reduction in global carbon emissions until China, India and other developing countries—such as, say, Azerbaijan—agree to sacrifice their economic growth on the altar of Western green fixations. This isn’t happening in practice, and Aliyev’s comments suggest leaders of those countries feel less pressure to pretend.
That hasn’t stopped thousands of delegates from wasting enormous quantities of aviation fuel jetting to Baku, where they hope to sign an emissions agreement the world’s largest economies will ignore. Climate activists and staffers at the likes of the United Nations and The World Bank, hundreds of whom are enjoying junkets to the Caspian Sea, often get a bad rap for having tin ears, but this is next level.
Back in reality, political support for net zero is collapsing. Trump is set to reverse his predecessor’s green subsidies and hostile regulatory acts against fossil fuels. He withdrew from the Paris Agreement once and is likely to do so again.
Meanwhile, Germany’s governing coalition imploded last week because Berlin can no longer afford its net-zero transition. Other European countries are likely to abandon their climate targets as the costs become clear to voters. China builds coal power plants apace even as its leaders mouth climate pieties.
It makes you wonder if COP29 may be the last time anyone tries to organize a spectacle like this. The world should be so lucky.