Climate conferences are dying. How to save the world now?

BAKU, Azerbaijan — As the red-eye flight from London made its final descent into Baku, the sunrise lit up the eastern sky, turning the Caspian Sea into a blaze of orange. Most of the passengers were heading to COP29, a two-week climate conference featuring almost 200 nations held in oil-rich Azerbaijan.
The mood on the plane was grim, and more than one of those on board must have been wondering: Are these United Nations climate summits doomed?
Donald Trump had won the U.S. presidency just a few days before, bringing a wave of promises to eviscerate America’s climate efforts and yank the country from these very talks.
Looking at the sunrise, one passenger murmured: “Maybe there is hope after all.” The light twinkled off Baku’s skyscrapers — and the oil wells and giant refinery towers that had helped pay for them.
Optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence is one of the things that keeps delegates returning to these conferences, year after year. That, and the lack of any real alternative. For the past three decades, these annual meetings have been humanity’s main tool to avoid the nightmare of a planet heated by 2 degrees Celsius or more.
And so the conferences go on.
But this year’s summit tested people’s hope like few of the 28 before it. As negotiators dutifully marched ahead, Trump was stacking his Cabinet with climate skeptics and fossil fuel exalters. In Baku, Azerbaijan’s strongman ruler Ilham Aliyev was doing his own fossil fuel proselytizing — from the COP29 podium, no less. Meanwhile, COP veterans bickered and fumed over an open letter from their own allies declaring the annual summits were, essentially, no longer working. 
“We are in difficult times,” said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, the former Peruvian minister who presided over the 2014 climate conference in Lima. “Some viruses are attacking the process and we need to create a vaccine.”
On Sunday morning, the summit ended in farce and recriminations. Well over a day after the scheduled end, with food sales cut off and supplies exhausted, bitter diplomats struck a deal to send $300 billion per year by 2035 to help poor countries fight climate change. 
The sum was considered so insufficient by some recipients that when the chair of the talks brought down the gavel, an Indian delegate was frantically running to the stage in a vain attempt to collapse the talks entirely. Delhi’s furious negotiator, Chandni Raina, cursed the entire outcome as an “optical illusion.”
For many who’ve engaged in these talks, COP29 was the inevitable winding down of years of unwieldy negotiations that are detached from the real world — a world where the true power players are Xi Jinping’s subsidies, innovating billionaires and America’s burning desire to beat China.
“Why would I go to Baku? That process is over,” said Jim Connaughton, who ran U.S. President George W. Bush’s White House Council on Environmental Quality. “It’s impossible to put together a truly proactive international agenda, hashing it out among 160-plus countries.”
Defenders of the U.N. talks — which everyone involved refers to as “The Process” — point to the advances that have occurred. The most notable is the Paris Agreement, the 2015 pact that committed nearly every nation on Earth to lowering its pollution. After that, clean energy technology exploded and climate policy went mainstream. The world is in a far, far better place, they argue, than it would have been without international negotiations on climate change.  
“The COP is an incredibly imperfect process,” said Ed Miliband, the U.K.’s Energy Secretary, standing outside the hall around 4 a.m. on Sunday as the conference venue emptied. He lamented the failure of the conference to break the petrostates’ resistance. “But when I was doing this job 15 years ago, 0 percent of the world was committed to net zero. Now, 90 percent of global GDP is committed to net zero. … It’s impossible to pretend that this isn’t also connected to this multilateral process.”
Declaring them dead is premature. This year, for example, the talks committed to shifting hundreds of billions of dollars annually in public funds to developing countries. Attendance is ballooning. And Baku did end in a deal, in defiance of Trump’s election.
But it’s hard to mount a case that the international approach has been a resounding success. Since the first global climate treaty, known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was signed in 1992, annual greenhouse gas emissions are actually up 44 percent and the world is on track to warm more than 2.5 degrees Celsius — a future scientists consider disastrous. Around the world, climate change is already supercharging extreme weather events, such as the roaring floods in Spain that killed more than 200 people days before COP29 began.
“I’ll be honest — it’s grim,” said Simon Steill, the head of the U.N. climate body that runs the talks, in a speech on Wednesday. 
Arguably, self-destruction was baked into “The Process” from the start.
When countries were erecting modern climate diplomacy in 1991, Saudi Arabian negotiators insisted that, unlike most U.N. discussions, climate decisions must require consensus, rather than, say, a two-thirds majority.  
Advising the Saudis and other Gulf states was Don Pearlman, a Reagan-era energy official and lobbyist for major American fossil fuel companies, whom the German magazine Der Spiegel dubbed the “High Priest of the Carbon Club” at the time. 
He was advising the push to give every country a veto. And ever since, the Saudis and others have used it to obfuscate on issues large and small. Just days ago, they teamed with other conservative autocracies to block talks about gender inequality and climate change. That played out at COP29 as large emerging economies derailed attempts to seriously discuss cutting greenhouse emissions, insisting that rich countries first pony up the money to do so. Impotence and frustration with the Saudi delegation boiled over into shouting in the final 24 hours.
In fairness, consensus does add weight to every COP decision. But it has also undeniably slowed things down. There are many who want to ditch it. But doing so would, of course, require consensus.
“It was a very big mistake in the COP system,” said Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and top U.N. human rights official. “If one country can block, you have the lowest common denominator.”
Frustration with the U.N. talks is felt most keenly by those who need them the most. 
One morning at a café in the COP29 media center, I met Pa’olelei Luteru, Samoa’s permanent representative to the United Nations. He was ill at ease. A fight between Western countries and China was holding up negotiations on financial aid for countries like his, which stands to lose its coral reefs and coastlines to rising, hot and acidic seas. 
For Luteru, it was a story he had seen play out year after year, and one that left him feeling responsible for his country being ignored. When Luteru left his island in the 1970s to study in Australia and New Zealand, village elders asked him what he hoped to achieve. He made a promise to return and help.
For years, he studied, earning a PhD. He worked in global development. He became a diplomat — all in service of that goal. But every time he returned home, the elders, each year closer to his own age, asked the same question: What are you hoping to achieve?
Each time he urged them: “Be patient. Three years later. I go back. Still nothing.” 
Luteru drew a deep breath, then continued. “I want my community to see that we are not just going to this meeting and having the talk shops and, you know, blah, blah, blah. That at some point we are really addressing some of the challenges that they face in their everyday life.” 
Azerbaijan is a fitting location for this mounting exasperation to combust. 
For centuries, the country has been nicknamed the “land of fire,” perhaps thanks to the leaking methane that burns for years as it seeps from the earth — or maybe the eternal flames of its early Zoroastrian temples.
At sunset on Tuesday, I visited a different kind of shrine. South of Baku, on a piece of flat parkland that had been reclaimed from the sea, stood a three-storey-tall replica of an old-style oil derrick. It had been reconstructed from thick wooden beams, painted in black. It marked the place where the world’s first mechanically drilled oil well was sunk in 1846, about 30 meters off the shore of the village of Bibi-Heybat. 
It was a low-key monument for a major turning point in human history. The real monument was stretched away to the north: Modern Baku itself. The Caspian, smooth as a mirror, reflected the city’s ornate skyscrapers — a towering testament to the industry servicing half of Azerbaijan’s annual GDP, almost all its exports, and the authoritarian father-son Aliyev dynasty that has ruled the country since 1993.
The oil wells that sprung up along the Caspian — and then in Pennsylvania, Myanmar, Romania and across the world — have launched wars, changed the course of nations and unleashed untold heat, prosperity and light into the world. This is the weight of history and incumbency the U.N. climate process was set up to shrug off.
That’s because the most lasting cenotaph to oil was drifting overhead. Since those first wells were sunk, burned oil has added around 628 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Much of that is still up there, gently boiling the planet.
After 30 years of negotiating, most countries basically agree on what needs to be done: stop global warming well before it hits 2 degrees and ideally hold it to 1.5 degrees. That was laid down in the 27-page Paris Agreement and fleshed out in hundreds of subsequent legal agreements since. 
There is little more to negotiate. Now it just needs to be done.
So the question some delegates in Baku were wrestling with is how to turn all those millions of words, painstakingly agreed, into heat pumps, drought-resilient farms, electric cars, nuclear power plants, typhoon early warning systems and the trillions of dollars needed to pay for it all.
During COP29’s first week, around 30 true believers gathered in a side room to discuss that exact question. Alex Scott, an Australian freelance climate diplomacy strategist, had asked them there — former COP presidents such as Pulgar Vidal, lawyers, think tankers and business executives.
Two problems were on the agenda. One, keeping the U.N. process relevant. The other, what to do when a string of successive COP hosts — the U.K., Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Brazil next, then possibly Australia — are, at best, conflicted. 
“They’re all fossil fuel exporting countries,” said Scott, who was rolling around the room in a wheelchair after breaking her leg in an accident. “They’re also taking on the role of temporary custodian of the Paris Agreement and making sure that that delivers. How do you square that?”
That debate burst into public view just days later when influential climate policy specialists — former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres among them — released a letter imploring the U.N. to completely overhaul “The Process.” 
One prominent demand: COP hosts should sign a fossil fuel phase-out pledge and curb the thousands of oil and gas lobbyists who roam the corridors each year.
The release caused a major spat inside the conference. Many negotiators were irked at headlines declaring their work “not fit for purpose” right in the middle of tense negotiations. “It’s a perfect example of how the forces against us win,” said one exasperated delegate, who was granted anonymity to criticize their own camp. 
The furious response prompted the group to issue a red-faced clarification, saying it had been misinterpreted. The process was valuable, after all, they said.
For some, the discussion about fossil fuel influence is a distraction. Exclusion, they argue, would only feed the image of the U.N. conferences as a green talk shop. 
That “would be a big mistake,” said Pulgar Vidal. The climate talks are designed to include the entire world, he stressed, otherwise, their decisions would be seen as “arbitrary” and easily dismissed.
Instead, those in Vidal’s camp want to use COP in new ways. 
There’s a major push, led in part by billionaire and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, to expand the COP sideshow. That means a bigger role for local mayors and governors, yes, but also for investors and corporate leaders. It also likely means more flashy parties and business dinners where deals can be made. 
That could apply to countries, too, given they already come to COP not just for the diplomacy, but for the side deals. Colombia, for instance, recently proposed a $40 billion investment plan to quit fossil fuels and was in Baku wooing potential investors. 
If there is a future role for negotiating, it could be redirected toward more specific tasks. There’s the World Bank, which is considering whether (and how) to release hundreds of billions for climate projects. Or the moribund World Trade Organization, which could help make supply chains more climate-friendly.
“This is just one piece in a much bigger landscape,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at the E3G think tank. 
Perhaps the U.N. isn’t even the right place to look. What’s really driving the green economy is the private capital circling the globe or the economic power of single-minded regimes.
Look at “the genius of Elon Musk and the determination of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Laszlo Varro, a Shell vice president and energy economist, in a social media post during the conference. Not “the empty virtue signaling of the green left.” 
It’s these great capitalist and geopolitical interests, the argument goes, that offer the best hope of driving down emissions. 
Chinese dominance of key future energy technologies pushed a threatened U.S. to respond with its own green subsidy bonanza, President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, as well as trade barriers to grow its own clean industries. Europe is now following suit on tariffs and handing more cash to climate-friendly industries. Everyone wants to keep up. 
The irony, then, of Musk, one of the great electric vehicle innovators, joining Trump’s administration. He will be part of a government likely to cede more ground to the Chinese electric car industry, which Tesla helped foster. In Baku, many of the taxis were electric and built largely by Tesla’s major competitor, Chinese giant BYD.
Aviva Investors, which manages £226 billion in assets, said U.N. outcomes don’t play into investment decisions. “In many cases, the market is actively discounting the likelihood of items committed to multilaterally being followed through,” it wrote in a submission before the conference.  
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. The firm suggested the U.N. demand regular, detailed information from countries about new policies, regulations and public investments in the clean economy. Then, it concluded, the market would take notice.
The problem is this reporting requirement already exists under the Paris Agreement — the submissions are just too generic for investors to care. And that’s if countries submit them at all. This year, only 23 countries have filed their reports, and the deadline is Dec. 31. 
Talks took place in Baku aiming to make these submissions more detailed. But they were resisted, as usual, by a group of countries that included Saudi Arabia, China and India.
These dynamics are wiltingly familiar to those who have been here since the beginning. One of them is Meyer, an American policy expert with a baritone voice who has worked for or with almost every climate NGO you can name. He estimates he has spent more than three years of his life at climate negotiations.
“You could say I’m a serial masochist, I guess. Or repeating the same thing and hoping for a different result. But that’s my particular affliction,” he said. (Next to blind hope, the COP crowd has a drollness that both acknowledges and makes light of civilization’s impending doom.)
We spoke while Meyer was waiting outside a meeting of national delegation heads, grabbing key players as they walked out, gathering information and dispensing advice.
Meyer agreed the COP system needed major reform and said the key moment will come next year, when the roadshow moves to Belém, a port city in the Brazilian Amazon. Before then, the Paris Agreement requires all nations to set new targets for cutting emissions over the next decade. Those are likely to be fairly shocking reading, with countries broadly expected to set timid goals that would send the world soaring past its 1.5 degree-goal — and likely past 2 degrees.
That makes the huge question for 2025: What can the world agree, collectively, to do about it? (If anything.)
By then, Trump will likely have announced he will decamp from the Paris deal. But that process will take a year, so his negotiators could still turn up and raise hell or align themselves with the Saudis to defend the oil and gas industry, which poured money into Trump’s campaign. The tyranny of consensus might again stand against anything close to radical change.
Even so, there is little doubt the COPs will continue to draw the hopeful and determined together every year. And, yes, the fossil fuel industry, too. But expecting Belém alone — or Adelaide, or Delhi, or wherever the talks may be held in the future — to solve one of humanity’s most urgent problems is asking to be let down.
“The UNFCCC is like a mirror that we hold up each year to ourselves to say, how well are we doing?” said Meyer. “And if the image we see in the mirror is ugly, it doesn’t do a lot of good to blame the mirror. The fault is not in the stars, dear Brutus, it’s in us.”
Zack Colman contributed reporting from Washington D.C.. Suzanne Lynch contributed reporting from Baku.