The main focus of this newsletter is, of course, COP29, which is still staggering on in Baku, Azerbaijan though we have staggered home. We had a good deal to say in real time and posted it in short videos, and we’ll have more to say in coming weeks. But the big thing on our minds currently is that the conference was a bust going in. It was a bust because despite covering the walls with dogmatic slogans about 1.5C they had actually given up on stopping greenhouse gas emissions several COPs ago, though the participants pretended otherwise. Instead they’re now focused on making rich countries promise to give poor countries oodles of cash to help them deal with non-existent surges in man-made bad weather through ineffective bureaucracies. Though focused isn’t exactly the right word. The whole process has decayed into endless meetings about creating mechanisms for coordinating standards on initiatives to work together to send strong signals about their intention to discuss mechanisms. And then, Climate Home News complained by email on Thursday, “Azerbaijan puts climate fund on ice”. Apparently they didn’t see it coming.

We did. But before we could manage to predict it boldly, it landed with a thud while we were here so we just get to say “Would have told you so.” And did, because at CDN we have long stressed the remarkable, even brazen impracticality of climate alarmists. They will be back for COP30 in Brazil and so on and so forth, bureaucratic organizations having a way of gathering something resembling momentum though it’s really inertia, partly because all those involved are so weighted down with money. But in a very real way it is all over, in that their rhetoric soars but their ambitions are nose-down in the dust with both wings off and the engine block cracked.

A major purpose for CDN in going to this COP conference, the first we have ever attended, was to get a flavour of what people were really doing here. It hasn’t been easy because a surprising amount of the key activity, using that term loosely, is in closed sessions. But having gone to Baku we now quote from the Climate Home News article to which that email pointed, accessed via the Internet in the conference centre which sits as an alien object in Baku rather like a spaceship from the home planet of homo conferensis (including this article being “supported by ICLIMATE, PEACE & TRANSBOUNDARY RESILIENCE PAVILION | COP29”) which sure sounds like it came from outer space:

“On COP29’s ‘finance day’, the Azerbaijan presidency was expected to unveil one of its flagship – and most controversial – initiatives: a new climate fund with money voluntarily put in by fossil fuel-producing countries and companies. But the Climate Finance Action Fund (CFAF) all but disappeared from the agenda. When Climate Home asked Azerbaijan’s lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev about it, he said cryptically that the COP hosts have established a working group to ‘work out a concept that would be workable and acceptable’ for donor countries. He added that it is ‘a very complex process to establish a new fund’ but that they have seen ‘a great interest’ by the potential contributors.”

And it is extraordinary the extent to which the participants, numbed by nearly three decades of this sort of thing, have come to think such verbiage accurately describes real things that matter.

Or consider this gem, which we assure you is quoted verbatim from the transcript we got from the Internet because the actual press conference was closed to such proles as we:

“We have worked intensively over the last days and hours to ensure that we can adopt the agenda on the first day. We have many significant priorities that the world is counting on us to deliver and we could not afford delay. We are delighted to say that we passed this first test and we got to work. Colleagues, yesterday we already secured critical progress on one of our key priorities – Article 6. Last month we hosted a meeting of the supervisory body for Article 6.4 in Baku. At that meeting, standards were proposed for how international carbon crediting projects will work. We built support for these standards at Pre-COP and worked intensively to lay the foundations for early endorsement. Yesterday, Parties reached consensus on the standards for Article 6.4 and a dynamic mechanism to update them. This is a critical step towards concluding Article 6 negotiations.”

You get the idea… and you can have it. First, they hadn’t even locked down the agenda before the conference started. Second, they all think everyone knows what “Article 6” is because everyone they know does. Third, the massive achievement of a pre-meeting meeting of the “supervisory body for Article 6.4” enabled them to reach no agreement, but to pave the way for agreement in the meeting on the standards and the “dynamic” mechanism so that the post-meeting might conclude the negotiations. And then they can have more meetings on implementation.

The people involved have lavish salaries and expense accounts and flit from venue to venue air-kissing. (And “A high-resolution photo of the press conference panel is available for download here. Please credit the image accordingly with “UN Climate Change / Kamran Enceladus”.) But it comes at the cost of mistaking what they are doing for achievement.