Over the past two weeks, the Baku Olympic Stadium in Azerbaijan has served as a temporary Thunderdome for the United Nations’ COP29 climate conference. Some 20,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries gathered for small confabs by the concession stands, while all-hands meetings were staged on a football pitch tricked out with wooden floors and waterproof tents.
Outside the stadium, battery-powered cars and buses emblazoned with the COP29 logo ferried delegates through city streets largely free from traffic. Recycling bins abounded, and some hotels swapped plastic key cards for cardboard, citing sustainability.
But little was as it seemed on the surface — and not just because the Baku Olympic Stadium has never hosted the Olympics.
More than a third of Azerbaijan’s gross domestic product comes from fossil fuels, and about 90% of its exports are linked to oil and gas. Ahead of COP29, President Ilham Aliyev — whose family has ruled the country for more than 30 years — stripped Baku of any signs of inequity: removing beggars, street vendors and “slave markets” where men search for informal jobs. To ensure light traffic, schools, universities and government offices were closed. To minimize protest, climate activism was heavily restricted.
In Azerbaijan itself, climate change is giving rise to increased flooding and extreme heat. But Baku remains littered with pumpjacks for oil, colored red and green to match the nation’s flag. A few miles from the Olympic Stadium, a plaque commemorates the “world’s first industrially drilled oil well,” from 1846. Nearby, a newer well produces a ton of oil every 24 hours.
Inside the COP29 venue, 50,000 people milled about pavilions touting net zero, while a smaller cohort engaged in negotiations to define and accelerate the fight against rising temperatures. But here, too, reality lurked. The slow pace of climate progress — and lost hope for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — have added to growing existential doubt that international climate cooperation is able to work fast enough to meet the moment.
Dubbed the “finance COP,” this year’s conference aimed to settle on what’s known as a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) — essentially, how much rich countries must pay poor countries to deploy clean energy and build more resilient infrastructure. The current commitment of $100 billion per year was hit for the first time in 2022. But the needs of developing countries, as calculated by a U.N.-backed group of experts, is at least $1.3 trillion annually.
The conference went into overtime Friday with a draft agreement that would have rich countries providing $250 billion annually by 2035, a more than doubling of the existing commitment. But 2035 is a decade away, and the shortfall would force nations suffering the impacts of the developed world’s emissions to take out loans to combat them. Those nations’ delegates repeatedly emphasized that climate finance is carbon debt payment, not a handout.
“There is no deal to come out of Baku that will not leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth,” said Avinash Persaud, special advisor on climate at the Inter-American Development Bank.
The conference highlighted other recurring impasses. Saudi Arabia resisted attempts to restate or clarify a pledge to “transition away” from fossil fuels, which narrowly made it into the final agreement at COP28. India resurfaced a demand for most funding to come as grants instead of loans, and island nations insisted on splitting monies equally between projects that cut emissions (think: solar farms) and those that advance adaptation (think: sea walls). COP-style decision-making is not unlike 200 people expressing different opinions about which restaurant to go to for dinner.
Then there’s the U.S. As the world’s largest economy and its largest cumulative emitter, the country might have been expected to put up the biggest sum for green solutions. But the re-election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to drop out of the Paris Agreement and boost domestic oil and gas production, upended that prospect. Trump can’t kill climate finance contributions entirely, but any NCQG is at risk without the might of the U.S. private sector.
Trump’s first win in 2016 was announced during COP22 in Morocco, catching negotiators off guard. This time ministers were ready, and came armed with talking points about how to navigate the next four years. Few doubt climate progress will slow without U.S. initiative, but delegates say it at least won’t come to a halt.
No one who’s participated in a COP would argue the process is perfect. Just getting fossil fuels into an agreement took almost three decades, during which time global emissions fell only during years of financial crisis or pandemic. But 2024’s record-breaking heat laid bare how developing countries are bearing the brunt of the crisis.
When a negotiator from Bolivia was asked on stage whether he’d be happy with an NCQG of $200 billion — double the current amount — he asked “Is that a joke?” His fellow panelists, also from developing countries, gave him a round of applause.