Update 11/25/24: Catholic climate leaders were critical of the outcome of COP29 in Baku, charging that the financial commitment of $300 billion each year until 2035 from wealthy industrial powers was insufficient to the need in the developing world. Cidse, an international Catholic network for development and solidarity, released a statement on Nov. 25, charging that “wealthy countries failed to demonstrate the necessary ambition and transformative action.”
Cidse Secretary General Josianne Gauthier said: “If rich countries don’t pay up for their fair share of climate finance, the consequences will be devastating for vulnerable communities already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. It will only increase the cost to people and the planet. This is not about generosity, it is about justice and a deep moral responsibility to future generations.”
Liz Cronin, climate change policy lead for the U.K.’s Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, said: “This was meant to be the ‘Finance COP’ where developed countries finally stepped up to meet their historic financial responsibilities. Instead, the Global North had to be squeezed to cough up a paltry $300 billion a year, and only by 2035—nowhere near what’s needed. And all of this can come as loans, to already debt-distressed countries who simply cannot afford to be paying yet more interest.”
A bill is coming due for a “loss and damage” fund meant to help poor nations respond to extreme weather and climate impacts from global warming. But are the wealthy industrialized states that have caused the problem finally ready to pay the estimated $1.3 trillion tab that nations in the developing world are demanding? Or should we be calling the ongoing climate meetup in Azerbaijan “COP-out 29”?
It does not exactly instill confidence in the credibility of the entire U.N. effort to coordinate a global response to climate change when the framework’s host nation is itself a petro state that has been enthusiastically clamping down on human rights while planning to ramp up its domestic oil and gas production.
Dan Misleh is the executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, a sustainable energy consultancy and advocacy group striving to breathe some practical life into church teaching on care of creation, especially related to climate change.
“It doesn’t look good when major oil-producing states are hosting these COPs,” Mr. Misleh says, noting that last year’s round, COP28, was convened in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
“That being said,” he adds, “it does seem that every time [U.N. delegates meet at the COP gatherings] a little bit of progress is made.”
This year’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP29 for short, is indeed attempting to press ahead on formalizing a funding mechanism to confirm commitments made at last year’s round. At COP28 in Dubai, delegates from the world’s wealthiest states agreed to establish an international fund to address the “loss and damage” experienced by the world’s least affluent states because of extreme weather events and changing weather patterns propelled by global warming.
“I hope that [by the end of COP29] they become a little bit more ambitious than $100 billion a year,” Mr. Misleh said, referring to a goal originally set during COP21. He believes a figure closer to the $1.3 trillion a year sought by delegates from poor states comes closer to addressing the true need.
With an annual budget of $6.75 trillion in 2024, the United States, he suggests, is capable of making a stronger commitment to the loss and damage mechanism. Given the scale of that U.S. annual spending, “$100 billion is a rounding error.”
And at least this week, the United States appeared ready to join other advanced economies in a real effort to share the burden and confront the problem. “Do we secure prosperity for our countries or do we condemn our most vulnerable to unimaginable climate disasters?” United States chief climate envoy John Podesta asked delegates at COP29 on Nov. 13. “Vulnerable communities do not just need ambition. They need action.”
Strong words—but will they ever lead to the action Mr. Podesta speaks of? Looming on the geopolitical horizon this week is a significant threat to the multinational campaign on climate change that emerged far from Baku, when Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States.
“The election in the United States has certainly cast a pall over the proceedings,” Mr. Misleh says. “The Biden administration, obviously, is represented [at Baku], but what happens next year?”
Mr. Trump’s antipathy toward U.S. commitments related to climate change—even to discussions of global warming as a science-based reality—were frequently repeated this summer and fall on the campaign trail. During his first round as president, Mr. Trump famously withdrew from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change adopted at the conclusion of COP21 in Paris in December 2015.
That agreement’s overarching goal was to achieve net-zero emissions and hold global temperature increase to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels by 2050. The United States rejoined the Paris agreement on President Joseph Biden’s first day in office, but it seems unlikely that new commitments by the Biden administration to help pay for mitigation and adaptation efforts in the developing world will be honored by the Trump administration. And it is just as unlikely that under Mr. Trump the United States will honor its domestic commitments on reducing carbon emissions and transitioning to a future economy based on sustainable energy sources.
As the conference began, the COP29 delegates were greeted with some sobering reports about how poorly the international community is living up to prior commitments, both on ponying up for loss and damage and in reducing fossil fuel burning, and how quickly some of the worst predictions about the impact of climate change are being realized. 2023 was the hottest year in the history of global temperature tracking, and 2024 is on a path to eclipse it.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reports that it is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the first year to be more than 1.5°C hotter than in the preindustrial era. Bear in mind that is the long-term average temperature hike COP29 delegates hope to beat back by mid-century.
To avoid a global surge in climate chaos, the world community must reduce average greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 45 percent below 2019 levels by 2030. Is a sense of urgency on climate change finally sinking in?
In an email to America, Reba Elliot, a senior director for strategy and special projects at the Laudato Si’ Movement, writes that the U.N. framework “is still the best mechanism for pursuing the Paris Agreement.” She just wishes that more COP participants were willing “to embrace the moral leadership that Catholics have demonstrated.”
She reports that as COP29 got started nearly 30 Christian institutions announced commitments to divest from fossil fuels. According to Ms. Elliot, 5,000 Catholic institutions have committed to developing more sustainable practices through the Vatican’s Laudato Si’ Action Platform. “Catholics are showing what values look like in action, and that’s something that COP leaders would be well served to follow.”
Speaking to COP29 delegates on Nov. 12, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the time had come to deliver on commitments made at previous meetings. “The sound you hear is the ticking clock,” he said. “We are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And time is not on our side.”
He called 2024 a “master class in climate destruction.”
“Families running for their lives before the next hurricane strikes; biodiversity destroyed in sweltering seas; workers and pilgrims collapsing in insufferable heat; floods tearing through communities, and tearing down infrastructure; children going to bed hungry as droughts ravage crops,” Mr. Guterres said.
“All these disasters, and more, are being supercharged by human-made climate change. And no country is spared…This is a story of avoidable injustice. The rich cause the problem, the poor pay the highest price.”
In a joint statement released on Nov. 8, representatives from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services urged COP29 participants to adopt a preferential option for the world’s vulnerable when it comes to addressing climate change. “The poor and vulnerable suffer the brunt of intensifying disasters, which is why adopting effective adaptation investment strategies is a matter of justice,” the U.S. church leaders said. “While resources and proven technologies to withstand many natural and man-made disasters already exist, sadly these are often a privilege for the wealthy.”
Faced with dismal new data on an overheating planet and after a summer of unprecedented extreme weather events, the U.S. public shrugged its collective shoulders and voted for the guy who does not believe global warming and climate change are real. The Trump campaign earned the support of about 60 percent of the U.S. Catholic community in the November contest.
Presumably many of his supporters join Mr. Trump in his skepticism and desire to “drill baby drill,” though it is hard to understand what Mr. Trump finds lacking in current U.S. energy policy. The United States already leads the world in oil and natural gas production.
“We seem to be living in a post-fact world,” Mr. Misleh says. Scientists around the world “are warning us that we’re heading off a cliff and it doesn’t seem to matter.”
“Like everything these days, it seems that the country is split right down the middle on these questions,” Mr. Misleh said. That throws into even greater doubt the proposal, what Pope Francis has called a “grave social debt,” that wealthier nations like the United States that have caused the problem have the obligation to assist low-income states suffering the worst because of climate change even as their contribution to greenhouse gasses over time have been comparably negligible.
The idea that “we have been the primary contributor to global warming, historically… therefore we have the greatest responsibility to respond,” Mr. Misleh says, “doesn’t seem to be getting through to at least a segment of the population.”
But he has found some recent insight on the problem courtesy of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical “Dilexit Nos.”
“That encyclical,” he says, “focuses on: What is the heart? What is the heart of Jesus? And how does that form our own hearts—this part of us that you could call our soul, our conscience, our deep listening, our deep identifying about who we are and what our purpose is.” His conclusion: “There’s just not enough heartwork happening”—not among individuals and surely not among the members of the incoming Trump team.
“It seems to me that this administration is heartless, to be honest,” Mr. Misleh said. “It sounds like they want to reinstate the [federal] death penalty. The abortion question itself is sort of up in the air at this point. [They want] to separate families by deporting millions of illegal immigrants. That’s not something that our Gospel preaches, and it’s certainly not something that a still heart would allow.”
But he remains at least cautiously confident that the Catholic Climate Covenant and other faith-based advocates can reach the U.S. Catholic public. Polls have shown that significant majorities of Catholics consider climate change a serious threat. And Mr. Misleh points out that the various extreme weather events in recent years have literally brought home the reality of climate change.
“Everybody is now beginning to experience the impacts of climate change. It’s not like it’s some distant threat, it’s imminent.”
Mr. Misleh is hopeful that the cooperative international effort to contain the worst effects of rising global temperature will continue regardless of the chief occupant of the White House. He adds that market forces, not political policymakers, are beginning to direct progress toward sustainable energy production and reduced reliance on fossil fuels.
“There are a lot of people who are more than happy to reduce their energy costs through solar, through wind, through other renewables for energy efficiency,” he says. “I think the market’s going to drive this a lot, but it also happens to coincide with the call to care for God’s creation.”
Whatever practical outcomes emerge from COP29, which continues through Nov. 22, and whatever position the Trump administration in the end adopts, “what we’re going to do is just continue to talk about ‘Laudato Si’,’’ talk about the need to care for God’s creation, talk about [climate change’s] impact on poor communities at home and abroad,” Mr. Misleh says.
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