Factories of Wonderful Fancy Things

A COP29 parable

The big news around here today is that the President of the COP released a 10 page document this morning about the NCQG. If you don’t speak COP (or should it be Coptic?), that spoonful of alphabet soup means, “New Collective Quantified Goal.” That’s the big one, because it’s about money.

There are two primary monetary discussions at the COPs — one that looks backwards, and one that looks forward. Two years ago at COP27 in Egypt, it was finally agreed by the parties to establish a Loss & Damage fund. That is the backward-looking fund that acknowledges that severe damage has been done to developing countries by us developed ones. Let’s see if I can develop a parable to explain.

Let’s say there is a plot of land we live on, and we have figured out a way to build a big factory that produces wonderful and fancy stuff. The wonderful fancy stuff has given us a lifestyle that is pretty nice. But in the process of making wonderful fancy stuff, there is toxic waste that is given off, and we have to get rid of it. The wonderful fancy stuff we produce has included the ability to shield our plot of land from the worst of the toxic waste for now, but the poor playground next door has no such capabilities. So, our toxic waste dumps into the playground and has rendered it unusable. On the playground’s plot of land, they might have some little factories that produce some ordinary stuff, and it gives off a little bit of toxic waste, but the land has been able to cope with it. But comparatively, we have produced way more toxic waste. Now, everyone in the neighborhood has seen that what we have done over the years has damaged that playground and made parts of it unusable. When the neighborhood homeowners association got together, they all agreed that we ought to pay the playground people for how we have damaged it. That’s Loss & Damage: compensating the victims of climate change who have not been the cause of it.

But then (to continue the parable), the rate at which we (and now other factories) are pumping out toxic waste means that things are going to get worse than the damage we’ve already caused. We also need to be thinking about the future, both for the playground next door and for ourselves. So the NCQG is the fund of money that will allow the whole neighborhood to mitigate and to adapt. Those two words get thrown around a lot in climate talks, so let’s see if I can press this parable further.

Mitigation has the goal of reducing the amount of toxic waste we produce. We really like the lifestyle that our factory of wonderful fancy things has given us, and we don’t really want to give that up. So we need to find different ways of producing the wonderful fancy things that don’t produce so much toxic waste. We need clean energy. But in our global neighborhood, people on the other plots of land have started seeing how they might build factories that give them all the wonderful fancy things too. And the easiest way to build those factories is with the old technology that produces more toxic waste. And it’s not fair to say, “Sorry, you have to just keep living on your playground without any wonderful fancy thing factories, because that would produce too much toxic waste for the rest of us.” So this new fund would help those countries develop their factories in the new clean energy way. That’s mitigation, and it costs a lot of money.

Then there is adaptation. In our parable, adaptation is figuring out how to live with the toxic waste that is already there, and with however much we keep producing. For the playground next door, that means doing things like putting the slides and merry-go-rounds up on stilts and building walkways up on stilts so the toxic waste on the ground doesn’t get on you. That’s really expensive. And the more toxic waste we allow into the neighborhood, the higher we’ll need to build them (which is correspondingly more expensive). And for us, adaptation means building a giant wall around our plot of land to keep as much of the toxic waste out, or maybe equipping everyone with gas masks because the air is so bad. All of that takes money too. And the less money we spend on mitigation, the more we’ll have to on adaptation.

But there’s another problem, which is that we can only adapt so much. If we do too little mitigation, we won’t be able to adapt enough, and that leads to the third element of what we will do in future climate change scenario: suffer. In the parable, you might say that suffering means that the people next door can no longer use the playground. And for us it might mean that we can no longer produce our fancy things in the factory. This is a bit of simplification, but points to the general formula that the more we mitigate, the less we’ll have to adapt, and the more we adapt, the less we’ll have to suffer. There is no doubt that we’ll be doing all three of these things in the future, and the question is how much of each will there be? The answer to that question is largely dependent on how much money we commit to spending.

So, back to real life: the goal of the Paris agreement is to keep the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees celsius over pre-industrial times (before we started building the factory of fancy wonderful things). A two degree average rise in temperature is going to result in suffering. Some places will suffer more of course, and again, they usually aren’t the ones responsible for causing it. The Paris agreement said we should really try to keep the temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees, because that would involve a lot less suffering. But we haven’t yet seen the will to spend the kind of money that will keep things to that level.

Before COP, the estimates that have been floated of what it would take in terms of the mitigation efforts and the subsequent adaptation needed for that two degree limit is $1.3 trillion per year for the foreseeable future. Yes, that’s trillion with a “T”. The governments of the world will never agree to that much — even though our own government somehow conjured a trillion dollars during COVID to hand out to people and organizations to keep things going. Also, it appears that the governments of the world are currently giving out $7 trillion per year in subsidies to the fossil fuels industry in the forms of tax breaks and direct subsidies. (Of course if those were all taken away, the oil companies would simply raise their prices, and so we’d pay more for gas. But maybe that wouldn’t be all bad, since it would further incentivize people to move away from oil: buy electric cars, for example.) Since governments won’t do it all, the “collective” in the NCQG means that it isn’t just coming from governments. There are all sorts of proposals for other kinds of private sector money. Most of the private sector isn’t too keen on just giving money away though. So it’s going to be tricky. And of course it’s all more complex and intertwined with everything in life than I’ve described here. That’s why there are 65,000 people over here in Baku trying to figure out what to do.

So the president put out a document this morning that made everyone angry because it gave no numbers and nothing specific. Lots of people think he’s just being cagey so that now when he comes back with something tomorrow he’ll be able to say, “see, now we’re making real progress.” We’ll see.

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New topic: I’m sorry that I probably caused many of you to lose sleep last night, wondering what is going to happen with the Report on the annual global stocktake dialogue referred to in paragraph 187 of decision 1/CMA.5, which I described in some detail in yesterday’s post. I’m pleased to report that I found the continuation of the meeting this afternoon and saw it through to the thrilling conclusion. If you’re not interested in this tedium, you can skip down to the next section break.

The Facilitators came back, thanking everyone for their contributions, wishing they had more time. They will report back to the president on the status of the discussions. This will mark the end of their technical work.

India said, “Wait, what? We don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Facilitator: We’re sending the document just as it is, with the options and the brackets.

Canada: OK, we realized that there are deep differences. We’re in an immoveable object vs. unstoppable forces situation. But could we at least include something that tells the future versions of this committee what we have done?

USA: There is a core constituency here that wants to capture the rich dialogue. Others don’t want to have that noted. The resolution of this disagreement is beyond our level. So let’s leave two options in the text, and let the higher ups decide. I’ve drafted a sample of what could be in the text that I believe to be helpful.

China: Nope. We have all listened and learned, and we each know in our hearts what we have learned. It is not necessary to tell this to others. We do not support adding any text.

Saudi Arabia agrees (though it was a different person than the woman yesterday). Ghana agrees with them too. The UK and EU agreed with the US.

India: We are a little surprised that various statements are being read into the proceedings at this point [he’s clearly referring to the USA’s proposal]. We haven’t discussed such statements and they should not be included. We all agree on paragraphs 1-6, so that is what we should send forward. There is no consensus on anything else, so it should not be included.

Facilitators said OK, we’re done. We’re taking our ball and going home [I’m slightly paraphrasing now]. We’re not forwarding any text. But we will convey transparently the status of the discussion that took place on areas of convergence and divergence.

US: OK, but can you at least send them the document that is the record of our discussion? It’s publicly available. I can in fact just send them the link if you’d like me to.

Facilitator: No, there is no text that has been agreed upon.

China: Right. No agreement, so no text.

India: If there is no text, then you should apply Rule 16, where nothing is communicated, either written or verbally.

Facilitator: We don’t get to invoke Rule 16, that is for the President to decide. We are done and have no formal outputs. It has been a pleasure to have three and a half sessions with you [fake smile]. Our meeting is over. Good bye. Good riddance.

After this, I walked up to the Australia delegate and asked why there was such opposition to even saying, “we disagreed about these issues.” She smiled and said, “because it is about NDCs”. Those are “nationally determined commitments” that each country brings to say what they pledge to do to combat climate change. Early on in the process, Saudi Arabia, India, and China said this issue is too politically driven and won’t have any part of it. So all the way along, everyone knew that there would be no agreement, but they went through all the procedures to fulfill their obligations but did nothing. Wow. What an exercise in futility.

Then when I was out in the hall, the guy from India came by and I decided to ask him the same question. He shrugged his shoulders and said the United States can’t wag their finger at us and tell us what to do. If they want a real document with teeth, then we’d be willing to sit at the table with them. But as it is, we’re not interested in their games. Sometimes they block things, so sometimes we do too.

Great. These are the people deciding how much toxic waste is going to pour into the playground and even into our factory of wonderful fancy things.

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In other news, Colin and I interviewed Dorcas from Kenya, whom I met last year at COP28 in Dubai. And we interviewed Miss Samoa, who was on the panel with me the other day. They are both dynamic young Christian women who are doing good things in the world. Their voices will be included on the podcast we’re making once we get home. The one we made last night in the company of the six-year-old Azerbaijani girl, is now out in case you’d like to hear some audio from over here (link to Apple Podcasts, link to Spotify).

Dorcas Waiko from Kenya

Litara Allen, the reigning Miss Samoa, and one of the youth delegates from Samoa.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. One more day of COP, though if they don’t get any agreement on the big issue of finance, it may spill over into Saturday. But we leave on Saturday morning no matter what. Talk tomorrow.