We are off to Baku, Azerbaijan to cover COP29. For three decades now UNFCCC members and a vast horde of hangers-on have been gathering once a year in some posh resort to promise to do something about greenhouse gas emissions, this time for sure. The talks will go into overtime, exhausted delegates will agree to something instantly forgettable and the press will say they succeeded, even that it was “historic”. Later they will report that actually nothing happened so we need to do it again. But this year we’re going to insert ourselves into the cycle, by attending the conference, hearing the speeches, looking at the exhibits and talking to people, and we’ll try to give you a realistic appraisal of what’s really going on, what the people there actually think they might accomplish, and why they think after nearly 30 years of this process the next one is bound to do the trick. And if you like the sound of our voyage of discovery to the shores of the lovely Caspian Sea, please contribute here and you’ll be entitled to join in a special briefing once we get back.

Some people commented last year that it was a bit odd to hold such an anti-carbon conference in Abu Dhabi, even if its “Expo City” was a special place that aimed to illustrate the principle of sustainability. And not only because of the massive carbon footprint of the estimated 100,000 people attending. Primarily because Abu Dhabi is part of the United Arab Emirates which, in turn, are estimated to have the world’s 7^th-largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world and in the last half-century have rocketed essentially from nomadic herding to one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world based on, well, oil exports.

Vigorous diversification efforts notwithstanding, oil and gas contribute an estimated 26% of the UAE’s economy, and the UAE remains the 6^th-highest oil exporter in the world (after Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the U.S. and Canada). Meanwhile Azerbaijan, host of COP29, sits in 21^st place among exporters, and is even more heavily dependent on energy for its prosperity, having only escaped from the Soviet Union in 1991 while the UAE has been pursuing fairly sensible economic policy for the better part of half a century. Roughly 1/3 of Azerbaijan’s GDP comes from energy, and over 90% of its exports. And we don’t mean windmills.

Now the optimist would say great, if a country with that kind of background and profile can commit credibly to Net Zero by 2050 and move decisively toward it, anyone can. And we will be interested in what its government has to say at the conference, chaired by its minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. But we will also be interested in the gap between aspiration and practical planning, by the host and everyone else who attends, especially since when the first COP was held, and no, nobody remembers where or when but in fact it was Berlin in 1995, the glittering New Economy of Net Zero was more than half a century away and we were young, footloose and fancy free. But now it’s barely a quarter-century away and, as we noted last week, emissions have gone up not down in the years since.

If you’re keeping track, there were two famous COP conferences, so famous that insiders just call them by their location. One was “Kyoto” where everyone suddenly signed on amid lofty expectations and nebulous intentions, which was in… oh dear… what’s this? 1997? Well over a quarter of a century ago? It was just COP3? Barely a toddler. And back then it all seemed as easy as ABC.

The other was “Paris”, as recently as 2015, strangely now itself almost a decade ago. It was all grown up, COP21. But the pseudo-pledges nations sort of made there have, as the UN Environment Programme just loudly complained, produced no progress at all last year and nothing like enough over the nine years since 2015. Indeed, as we’ve mentioned more than once, if every nation did meet its Paris pseudo-pledges the computer models say it would change global temperature by about 1/10 of a degree by 2100, which hardly seems worth getting excited about, let alone spending money on.

We’re also going to be interested in whether COP29 is, in the corridors outside the sessions, essentially an energy industry trade show. Stranger things have happened. And what’s on the menu, and which activist groups show up, and what they want delegates to focus on, and whether delegates even pay lip service to whatever it is, and whether the speeches are frank about real-world problems or just drone on about political will on behalf of governments firmly in the grip, judging by past experience, of political won’t.

All in all it promises to be a fascinating experience and we will keep you posted.