Close to 200 nations of the world convened this week in the Baku Stadium, in the capital city of Azerbaijan for the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Trinity College’s Lucia Green-Weiskel is participating in this year’s conference virtually credentialed through a Chinese NGO. Green-Weiskel, visiting assistant professor in political science, was a project manager and later a special advisor at the U.S.-China Clean Tech Center and the Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, a climate change and energy policy research center based in Beijing, China. She is the co-creator and manager of the Energy and Climate Registry, a greenhouse gas management tool and reporting platform for corporations in China.
Green-Weiskel explains what is at stake this year.
What is the focus the meeting?
The purpose of this 11-day high-stakes, high-level meeting is to see if an increasingly divided, troubled, and inward-looking world can come together to draft and commit to an agreement that will help save humanity from the devastating impacts of climate change.
The conference will focus on climate finance, building the global fund that will help support countries impacted by climate disasters. Countries will also report updates on the Nationally Determined Contributions, which is each country’s best effort to reduce their emissions. Each country must update the the determined contributions before February under the terms reached in the Paris Agreement of 2015.
What is the history of these international forums?
The U.N. climate talks were established in 1992 with the founding of the UNFCCC at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This event convened heads of state and other diplomats, scientists, students, and activists from 179 countries who together reached an agreement reflecting the values that the world must address collectively the growing concern about the impact to the environment of human-generated greenhouse gases. Parties to that convention agreed to meet on an annual basis to work within the framework of international law and under the guidance of climate experts and multilateral institutions to produce a solution to the climate crisis.
The convention’s history has been mixed with some major successes including the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015, which identified a ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise. However, the years between were marked by political stalemate, frustrated observers and delegates, and dashed hopes for global cooperation.
The U.S. role has been mixed, too. One of the most ambitious agreements to come out of the U.N. process, the Kyoto Protocol, was not signed by the U.S. Later, the U.S. re-joined the talks under the Obama administration, but the deal itself was a much watered-down version of its pervious iterations. The product of that round of talks ended in the Paris Agreement of 2015, heralded as a success because it finally brought the U.S. onboard with the rest of the world, but also lacking the legally binding provisions included in earlier drafts.
What will you be watching?
At the center of the debate is the complicated question of how to assign responsibility for the emissions. In an economically integrated world and an atmosphere that doesn’t see political boundaries, this is not a straightforward task.
The tension between the world’s two largest emitters, the U.S. and China, illustrate this well. U.S. emissions are down in recent years, but the cumulative impact of U.S. emissions over the last century, particularly during its industrial revolution when regulations and environmental standards hadn’t yet come into existence, is significant. China, a poor and developing county over the past century, has historically contributed very little to the global emissions total.
However, in the last twenty years following the exponential growth of the Chinese economy, its emissions have skyrocketed, overtaking that of the U.S. To complicate things further, there are “per capita emissions,” which is comparatively lower in China because of its giant population. And finally, there is production- vs. consumption-based emissions. A significant percentage of emissions from China can be sourced to products that are sold to American consumers. This raises the question: if the United States moves its most polluting industries, chemicals and refining, iron, steel, and cement, and then imports those materials as products later on, is it fair –or just–to ask China to pay the carbon bill or is there a more equitable solution?
This accounting tension manifests in China’s perennial assertion that the U.S. take the lead on carbon emission reduction. This position is echoed widely by the developing world. Because the U.S. produced the most emissions during a less carbon-constrained period of human history and was able to catapult into a position of global economic and political supremacy as a result, the U.S. should carry the lion’s share of the climate responsibility. The U.S., under pressure from a Congress reluctant to commit the U.S. to international regulations that may impeded economic growth and a domestic political environment that is sometimes outwardly hostile or incredulous about the climate problem, wants China to pay.
How could the new U.S. president impact these talks?
This tension will only become more pronounced under a Trump 2025 administration. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and sent a delegation of representatives from the fossil fuel industry to the U.N. conferences. He has called climate change a “hoax” and pledged to double down on U.S. commitment to the fossil fuel industry.
