‘Cop is performative – it’s for doing oil deals, not solving the climate crisis’

As the president of Cop29’s host country Azerbaijan lauds fossil fuels, experts say the climate summit is ‘no longer fit for purpose’

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We are less than halfway through Cop29, the world’s foremost climate conference, but Prof Johan Rockström is not hopeful for a positive outcome. “No longer fit for purpose” is how he and a number of other leading experts have described the talks, being held this year in Azerbaijan.
Rockström and a number of co-signatories including Ban-Ki Moon, former UN Secretary General, Christiana Figueres, the ex-UN climate chief and Mary Robinson, Ireland’s former president, have written to the UN demanding that the current behemoth – which has for the past two editions been held in petrostates – be fundamentally overhauled.
Along with decades of glacial progress, Rockström, a leading climate scientist and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has been concerned by comments from this year’s hosts, which appear to make a mockery of Cop’s purpose. This week, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev told gathered world leaders that natural gas was a “gift from God”, hitting out at critics of his country’s oil and gas industries. (Moments later Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general, took to the stage to insist that promoting the use of fossil fuels was “absurd”.)
And in the days before the summit began, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and the conference’s chief executive, was caught on film agreeing to use the 197 country-wide negotiations to facilitate oil deals.
Rockström, 58, is definitive in his criticism of the Azerbaijani officials. Aliyev’s words, he says, amounted to “a completely contradictory and obstructive statement … [one] unacceptable from a Cop presidency.”
That stance, along with the energy minister’s dealmaking plans, “of course leads to the suspicion that the Cop meetings are [being] misused as almost legitimising inaction, like we go to Cop meetings giving the impression we’re acting to solve the climate crisis, but in reality, we spend time doing oil deals”.
It is hardly the intended goal of the summit, which began in Berlin in 1995. This year, the conference is being held in a new 13-storey tower in Baku’s Central Boulevard, in a neighbourhood formerly known as Black City. The Azerbaijani capital is famed as being ‘the world’s first oil town’, where the industry was born in the 1840s. Oil and gas now account for half of the country’s exports, further raising questions as to why it is leading this year’s climate talks.
The same issues arose last year at Cop28, helmed by the United Arab Emirates. One of the world’s top 10 oil-producing nations, in the weeks leading up to the summit, leaked briefing documents revealed that the hosts planned to discuss fossil fuel deals with 15 nations. The man chosen to preside over the conference, meanwhile, was also the chief executive of the national oil company.
Given coal, oil and gas are the biggest contributors to the climate crisis, and that Cop host’s role is to act without bias or self-interest, the last 12 months have provided perhaps the biggest blot yet on what has become more of a performative jolly for global leaders than a driver of necessary change. “Not only are they not delivering as they should,” Rockström says of the summits, but with 85,000 attendees last year in Dubai, and 65,000 in Azerbaijan, crucial climate talks have been turned “into an exhibition area”.
As well as qualms over host nations’ track records, many attendees at today’s mega-meetings seem at odds with Cop’s aims, too. Three per cent of those at Cop28 were fossil fuel-linked lobbyists, according to analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition, while more than 1,700 have been granted access to this year’s meeting, outnumbering the number of delegates sent by most countries.
Activists have long pressed the UN to ban representatives of polluting industries from climate meetings, with a new rule introduced by officials last year that registrants must disclose their affiliations.
But Rockström is against going further, and cutting oil-producing countries from climate talks too. “We need to reach them,” he says. “It’s not as if we must shut the door to all the oil, coal and gas nations hosting Cops, but we need an engaged presidency. And that’s fundamental.”
Still, the biggest concern for Rockström and his co-signatories is how far behind its promises Cop has fallen. Cop21 in 2015 saw its most significant pledge when the Paris Agreement was drawn up, with almost all of the world agreeing for the first time to slash greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent temperatures rising more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. (That benchmark was agreed following evidence that the impact of climate change would become far more extreme, the nearer the world becomes to a 2C rise.)
At present, 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record – and staying within the 1.5C threshold requires reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by some 7.5 per cent annually, Rockström says. But efforts have been stymied by the “the vast majority at the Cop meetings… [who are] not willing to engage in a transformative agenda, which is exactly what science says is absolutely necessary.”
The reason for that, says Rockström, is that “no progress” has been made despite three decades of talk. “If we had started 29 Cop meetings ago, we could have gone linear, we could have gone incremental, and we would have solved the problem. But now, 29 Cop  meetings later with no progress, the journey has become so steep, we’re now on an exponential.”
He is frustrated by the lack of urgency being shown, and the seemingly endless chin scratching and protracted negotiations afoot at Cops while irreversible change to the planet is being done. Blame can’t only be laid at the feet of petrostate hosts, he says; “in reality, there are many other countries that also still are satisfied with a situation where we make only incremental or limited progress.” Feet have been dragged to such a degree that Rockström says “a radical pace” of movement is the only option. “That’s what we’ve come to. Many countries go to the Cop meetings… believing that this is something we can go on negotiating on forever, and we cannot do that, we don’t have time for that anymore,” he says. “We need to have a Cop meeting that is aligned with the pace of change required.”
Rockström remains positive – at least, in principle – about what Cop can do for climate change. “This is a global problem, so we need global collaboration,” he says of these “absolutely necessary” talks. He notes that the 1.5C goal stipulated in the Paris Agreement was legally binding, while other important vows, including the loss and damage fund (which compensates developing countries for the effects of climate change) at Cop27, the methane pledge made the year prior to cut global emissions by at least 30 per cent come 2030, and the Declaration on Forests and Land Use, where 140 countries promised to reverse deforestation and land degradation within the same timeframe, have been taken.
As well as pledges, Rockström wants consequences for those who fall short. “It should cause a lot of shame, but also money to fail to meet your mitigation or your emission test requirements.” And, for Cop to no longer be a football stadium-sized orgy for politicians and lobbyists on a jaunt, and reduced (in what he admits might be “extreme” streamlining) to 200-odd people in Bonn, where intersessionals between conferences are currently held. There has also been talk of screening host nations, to avoid the sour taste in the mouth left since last year.
Reform is the only way to bypass that, he adds, with further failure to do so the “recipe for a weak Cop”. Can anything be achieved this year? Rockström’s positivity appears to fade. “I have very low expectations.”
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