This week, diplomats and heads of state from nearly 200 countries gathered in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for COP29, the climate summit held by the United Nations.
At the annual summit, now in its 29th year, world leaders come together to discuss global climate initiatives, goals and action plans. This year’s conference, which is scheduled to conclude next week, is focused on finance.
Brad Plumer, a New York Times reporter who has been covering climate change and energy technologies for more than a decade, arrived in Baku on Sunday. “Being here, you can talk to representatives from countries around the world and learn what they’re dealing with back home,” Mr. Plumer said in a phone interview Friday morning. “Whether it’s natural disasters or the economic realities of trying to shift away from fossil fuels, many countries are very blunt about the challenges they face.”
Mr. Plumer shared what it’s like to report from the summit in a year that’s shaping up to be the hottest in recorded history. This interview has been condensed and edited.
What does an average day look like for you at COP29?
A lot of the job is trying to meet with different countries and delegations. NGOs and businesses are constantly holding press conferences. It’s a lot of running from place to place. And it’s a large venue. There are about 60,000 people here, so it’s frantic. It can feel easier to talk to different people and governments than it might be on a normal day, when everyone’s not all gathered together. But that’s not always the case: Many countries are guarded and won’t talk to the press.
This is the sixth COP summit you’ve attended. How does this one feel different, given Donald J. Trump’s re-election and the likelihood that he will dismantle various environmental protections?
The first COP I ever covered was in 2017, the first year Trump was in office. He had already announced that the United States was pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. This year’s conference feels pretty similar. You have U.S. officials and blue-state governors telling other countries, “Please don’t give up.” There are going to be private actors who are still committed to climate change efforts, even if the federal government may retreat from efforts to tackle global warming.
I also went to the first COP after Biden was elected, in 2021. That one had people making much bigger promises to cut emissions. There was a lot more energy and optimism. More world leaders showed up. So there is sort of this ebb and flow.
At the same time, realities on the ground shift. After the coronavirus pandemic, there was a real sense that oil companies were going to shift their business models and the world was going to transition much more quickly to clean energy.
I think some of that optimism has been dampened, not just by politics but by world events. Energy demand has been growing rapidly around the world, and renewable energy technologies, like wind and solar power, haven’t expanded fast enough to fill that gap, so emissions continue to rise. There has been a realization that climate change is a much harder problem to tackle than some optimists thought four years ago.
At last year’s climate summit, countries promised to move away from coal, oil and natural gas. But research revealed this week shows that countries are burning more fossil fuels than ever before. What discussion is being held around this narrative?
Different climate talks often focus on different aspects of the problem. This year, the big discussion underway is about money.
To back up a bit: When world leaders got together in 2015 and signed the Paris climate agreement, it had a couple different aspects. First, every country promised to do something to restrain their emissions. The second aspect, which was crucial to getting a deal, was that wealthier countries that had historically contributed the most to climate change would provide financial aid and other support to developing countries to help them cut their emissions and adapt to climate change that’s now unavoidable. There was an initial goal that wealthier countries would give poorer countries about $100 billion per year to start.
At COP this year, they’re talking about ramping that up significantly: what the new financial target should be, who should pay it, where it should go. It’s always been a contentious subject.
Given that you’ve been covering climate change for so long, do you feel hopeful about the future, or do you have a sense of futility?
Climate change has become a really big issue in global politics. Many governments, at the very least, are thinking about it. Some take it more seriously than others. As a result, there have been real efforts to address it, whether it’s countries trying to overhaul their energy and transportation systems or improving their resilience to natural disasters. Today, about one in five new cars sold around the world is electric. A decade ago, it was basically none. We’ve seen some really dramatic changes.
At the same time, some of the goals that have been laid out at these talks, like trying to completely zero out fossil fuel emissions by 2050, are incredibly ambitious and would require very fast and very drastic changes to the global economy. There’s a constant tension between how much is changing and how big the problem is that people are trying to solve.
Dealing with climate change is an enormous undertaking, and countries aren’t ever going to solve the entire problem in a single meeting. It takes years and years.
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