So, in light of the outcome, or rather the lack of outcome, of COP30, I rewatched 12 Monkeys. Not only because it stars two of my long-time favourites, Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, but above all to reassess whether Terry Gilliam’s surreal, negative utopia, which blends real-world trends with schizophrenic visions, has indeed aged as gracefully over the past thirty years as it still does in the collective memory of my generation. My answer is yes. Among the promises made about the future of the world, there are just as many wildly implausible-sounding declarations as there are sober, bitter realities, while the solution, in a certain sense, is right in front of us, and yet, for some reason, we still do not see it.
Summary assessment
‘The world is not where it should be - but: all is still not lost’ – summa summarum. Anyone who takes the time to look back at what the world’s leading news outlets (the Guardian, Bloomberg, Reuters, the BBC, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, etc.) reported as outcomes, or indeed what values they ultimately read off the scales at the end of this year’s UN climate conference held in Belém, at the edge of the Brazilian rainforest, will arrive at roughly this conclusion. Fundamentally, it is disappointing that there has still been no breakthrough in climate policy. Divisions remain deep, the world should be devoting more support to the developing world (financial resources, but above all adaptation funding), the dominance of fossil fuels should be dismantled, and the carbon market mechanisms embedded in the Paris Climate Agreement should finally be made genuinely operational.
If I choose to look at the brighter side of things, it is clear that all stakeholders now acknowledge, and no longer constantly question, that if we continue on this path, our climatic future could become apocalyptic, and that this is no longer merely a strong hypothesis. At the same time, the positive side of the balance does include certain facts that justify cautious optimism, such as the now empirically demonstrated reality that the Paris Agreement did, after all, have a tangible effect by bending the global emissions curve downward. And this remains true even though we are still moving ever further away from the ambitiously set target of one and a half degrees.
The state of national commitments
According to what can be regarded as the EU’s official summary, it is a non-negligible achievement that both the 2050 net-zero target and the 90 percent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions limit pledged for 2040 have remained in place. Moreover, immediately ahead of COP30, the Union tightened its targets in order to maintain direction and eliminate potential delays by Member States: it raised the 2035 GHG reduction target from 66.25 percent to 72.5 percent. In practical terms, this means that for the next ten-year period, the EU has announced a clear shift in speed and ambition.
Furthermore, the majority of countries attending the climate forum — which brought together 56,000 bureaucrats, activists, politicians, lobbyists, and Indigenous representatives (!!!) — did update the documents outlining their climate commitments, though unfortunately not all did so. The “half-full, half-empty” glass is illustrated by the fact that countries such as the United Kingdom, Norway, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates made additional pledges, whereas the United States did not attend COP30 at all, and Germany (along with other major economies) is still working on it (or perhaps not).
Phasing out fossil fuels
By the end of COP30, what primarily emerged at the negotiating tables on the GHG front was the recognition that the world needs to move away from coal faster than previously planned. But where are the specifics? The deadlines? The timetable calculations? Pressing questions. The EU, often seen as a front-runner, has reduced its coal use to less than half over the decade since the Paris Climate Summit, and, partly under the pressure of the Russian-Ukrainian war, it now also manages with significantly lower levels of natural gas consumption. This may serve as a positive example, and in my view the consequence of this is that – under the EU’s catalytic influence – around 80 countries at the climate forum in Brazil entered into a coalition partnership to accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels. However, as the World Economic Forum’s (WEC) own assessors underlined: at the negotiating table they ultimately failed to agree on a legally binding commitment, and the supporting countries ended up endorsing only a text that did not even explicitly mention “fossil fuels.”
Carbon market developments
When it comes to the carbon market, unfortunately, just as with the bigger picture, the glass here is only half full. I deliberately do not call it half empty, in order to remain positive. On the one hand, it is true that trade-related measures in this segment, such as the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), were brought into the official negotiation framework and became part of the scheduled agenda. On the other hand, it is deeply discouraging that, despite the repeated and emphatic emphasis on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, no concrete regulation or timetable was adopted in this regard, contrary to expectations. As a result, the grand vision, the operationalisation of the unified carbon market envisaged in the Paris Agreement, namely the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM), meaning the adoption of the final detailed rules, continues to be postponed.
What did succeed is still something - even the WEC classified it as incremental progress - namely the programme launched by Brazil outside the mainstream negotiations (the Open Coalition for Compliance Carbon Markets), which aims to develop a common carbon standard in order to improve the liquidity, predictability and transparency of carbon trading systems. Nevertheless, the final conclusion on this issue, as outlined in the summary published by the Washington-based World Resources Institute, is that instead of delivering on major promises, COP30 merely reached the point where 119 countries, which together account for three quarters of global GHG emissions, took a small step forward. Not a big one, as this does not even cover 15 percent of the climate mitigation targets pledged for 2035, but still a step nonetheless, coupled with a formal acknowledgement that this will not be enough. If this were to remain the case, the scenario would be reinforced in which the world continues to move towards 2.3 to 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming, a trajectory for which adaptation would need to begin very rapidly.
So, in just over eleven months’ time, Antalya, Turkey, will become the venue for new hopes, new confrontations and new attempts. Until COP31, the world will continue to race a little further in the direction of a negative utopia. It increasingly seems that we can now only hope for the appearance of a Bruce Willis-level figure, who, returning from an imagined future - while energetically setting about fixing the broken wheel of the world - would be justified in asking us, “Is this really reality, or just a product of my imagination?” Bruce, this is reality today, not merely the offspring of a schizophrenic imagination. There is plenty to fix, and in truth we know exactly what needs to be done; all that is required are the courageous decisions to do it together.
This article was first published on the 16th of December by Levente Tóth, CEO of mitigia, on his personal LinkedIn profile.
