Even as I am going, I am reminded of the coming. I am at Baku airport, the capital of Azerbaijan, leaving for the UK. But the coming, in my mind, is The Second Coming, where the poet WB Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
This morning, if things are not falling apart at the COP Global Climate Summit, they are certainly looking very shaky. The centre, the UN body steering this gigantic forum, in order for humanity to save itself from itself, now has real problems, the like of which we have not seen for many years at these annual events.
So what is falling apart? Well, for starters, the usual key leaders, particularly some of the biggest polluters of the lot, namely China and India, never sent their leaders here, as they mostly do not. Unhelpful but business as usual.
Moreover, Joe Biden, from the lame duck US administration, didn’t come. Worse perhaps, because it is more unusual, the French, the Germans, the EU President, the Canadians and the Brazilians also did not send their heads of state here.
And then things got underway and went from shaky to something far worse. In Azerbaijan, everything from roads to buildings to airports is named after the country’s endlessly re-elected autocratic leader. He turned up to open this conference with what we may politely term an unusual diplomatic approach.
He savaged the international media for daring to criticise his regime. He took issue with his country – which is 90% dependent upon oil and gas – being described as a petrostate.
Azerbaijan is as petrostate as petrostate come. But that was only the beginning. He then chose to insult France for – of all things – allegedly brutally repressing demonstrators in its New Caledonia territory. Yesterday, France responded by, in effect, boycotting the entire process, a major loss from the country which steered the landmark Paris Accord on climate in 2015.
It didn’t end there. Then the Argentinian delegation was suddenly called back home for no apparent reason. We know its populist president is sympathetic to the incoming climate crisis-denying President Trump, but that is all we know.
So there is your fractured diplomatic background against which the UN has somehow to bring together unanimous agreement on that most difficult of subjects: money.
The number one purpose of this conference is to forge a deal whereby rich nations will pay trillions of dollars every year to safeguard poorer nations who have suffered most from wealthy countries’ carbon emissions and historic global pollution.
One tiny ray of hope is that there is a draft deal circulating, but this is still very early days in a two week negotiation. Already the poorer nations have rejected out of hand the initial offer from their wealthy colleagues.
Albania’s sometimes flamboyant Prime Minister, Edi Rama, got up and said he had torn up his prepared three-minute speech. He described instead how the heads of state VIP area here shows presidents and prime ministers speaking, but apparently the sound is turned off.
He told delegates this symbolised so much about the stark reality of what is going on here. The head honchos come. They speak, but it is just words. Nobody seems to be hearing, nobody seems to be acting upon what they demand.
It remains a grim fact that last year’s big conference agreement was to transition away from oil and gas. It has taken a generation even to get the cause of climate crisis onto the agenda. That may seem incredible, but it is true, and since then, what has happened? Almost nothing.
Most countries, it is fair to say, have either done very little at all to transition away from oil and gas, or in many cases, oil and gas-rich nations are actually going in the other direction and expanding their operations.
One notable exception is the UK, which has pledged to stop new oil and gas exploration licences. According to the International Energy Agency, this is the minimum requirement if we are going to reverse the process of inexorable and catastrophic climate change.
Britain’s prime minister also delivered a startling target here to reduce greenhouse gases by 81%, on 1990 levels, by 2035 – universally welcomed by campaigners and activists. It has reverberated through this conference. It has given the sense that all is not lost. It has shown that it is possible for countries to set highly ambitious targets.
Of course, it is only that – a target. It is all about action and delivery, and on that, the British proposal will be judged not on what was said here, but what is done.
Yet it has given every other country something to aim at and aim high. And pretty much every other country is represented here, even if their heads of state aren’t coming. Even the Taliban from Afghanistan, more or less unrecognised in the diplomatic world, are controversially here with observer status.
So the British approach gives the sense that something has been achieved here, although all that was achieved was simply the announcement. Of course, the hard talking goes on around that financial agreement and will absolutely go down to the wire and possibly beyond it.
Now, if all this is seeming a little grim, there is a major silver lining. It was announced here this week that businesses are chasing more than $10 trillion of green global investments around the world. That figure has doubled in the last five years. It is clear business is seizing opportunities, delivering, even as the COP negotiations wind agonisingly on.
It feels, indeed, like a twin track process, with the world of politicians and diplomats trying to play catch-up in a world where global capitalism senses that money, jobs, profit and The Future lie in the world of green transition.
