The lacklustre commitments made by countries at this year's UN climate conference in Baku make it clear that the world is still not taking the climate threat seriously enough, writes Bloomberg Opinion’s Mark Gongloff.
They also vowed to put together a decade-long “road map” for hitting the US$1.3 trillion in annual financing that poorer countries had demanded. And they established a global carbon credits market and paid vague homage to a pledge made last year to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels.Even the US$1.3 trillion developing nations wanted would have fallen far short of the US$2.
Together, the poorest pay about US$70 billion per year in debt servicing costs to richer countries, including the backers of multilateral development banks such as the World Bank, according to the Brookings Institution. The World Bank has failed to account for the real climate impact of between US$24 billion and US$41 billion of its financing over the past seven years, according to Oxfam. The bank registers projects at the time of approval rather than at the time of completion, meaning many works of dubious climate benefit – think gelato shops and coal plants – go on the books as “climate finance”.Haggling over such relatively petty sums while the world burns is short-sighted and self-defeating.
Major polluters such as the US, China and the European Commission didn’t bother to send leaders to Baku. COP30, in Brazil, will take place during the first year of the second term of once-and-future president Donald Trump, a climate change denier who plans to pull the US out of the Paris accords . And as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague David Fickling has written, the commitments made in these talks still produce benchmarks that governments take seriously.
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