COP30 Fades away

Is there another way?

I’ve waited another week in hopes that I may have missed something. But the final message is that Conference Of the Parties #30 was, like COP29, mostly dashed expectations. The fossil fuel interests (with something like 1600 delegates to the conference) managed to derail or smother any efforts to reduce production anytime soon. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men well typified the gist of the conference. Promises, promises but little progress. Meanwhile, the world continues to get hotter.

Issues

Here are some of the issues covered, if left unresolved.

The road map

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, pressed the conference to adopt a detailed roadmap showing how the world can arrive at net zero carbon by 2050, quitting the use of fossil fuels, step by step. He was backed by at least 80 of the 194 countries participating in the conference. The UK’s Ed Miliband stated that the elimination of fossil fuels should be the core of the conference.

The road map barely appears in the final report.

Upgraded plans

Although many countries showed that they had upgraded their plans for reducing fossil fuel use, some, like India and Saudi Arabia also failed to do so. There was even trouble selecting Turkey as the venue for COP31.

Financing

Even though most of the pollutants behind global warming were created by China and the wealthy countries, there were, as usual, bitter battles about financing efforts to ease the effects on the rest of the world; the countries that were far less responsible for the dilemma. The developing countries, who were promised $300 billion in annual support last year, were left with $120 billion annually; but not to begin until 2035. That amount was instead of the $300 billion, not in addition to it.

A factoid related to this miserliness on the part of the rich world is that, according to The Financial Times, over the past few years the top 1 percent of humanity has gathered 41 cents of every dollar of wealth generated, leaving 1 cent for the. bottom half of humanity.

Fossil fuels

Lurking beneath all of this is the determination of the fossil fuel industry to keep right on doing its thing; the consequences be damned. The fossil fuel industry and its affiliates were the major force in disrupting agreement among the parties at the conference. According to the BBC, one Saudi delegate told another, non-Saudi delegate: “We make energy policy in our capital not in yours!”

Well, maybe I’m being too hard on them. After all, they’re slowly switching from coal, the greatest polluter, to gas (via petroleum). China even plateaued their coal use recently, temporarily. Yet there is no question that fossil fuel production continues, even as alternative sources of energy proliferate.

An alternative path

While all these econo-political disputes wander off into the deepening twilight, a better solution may be creeping in. Solar, wind, geothermal and similar energy sources are steadily becoming less expensive. The energy capability of these alternative sources has more than tripled since the 1974 Paris accords and has more than doubled since 2022. In the next few months at least one in four cars sold worldwide will be electric. Roughly three sevenths of world electrical generation is now from renewable sources.

So, while the politicians and environmentalists continue to feud over how and whether to reduce fossil fuels use and who should pay for it, the cavalry, in the form of renewables, may be riding to the rescue.

Go electric!