N. Peter Kramer’s Weekly Column
"This is the COP of truth. We cannot ignore the science: almost 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels", a Columbian representative shouted after the summit had been knocked off by the president and the applause had resounded. In the final declaration the words ‘fossil fuels’ did not appear.
It was supposed to be a historic UN climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém, thirty years after the first and ten years after the successful Paris summit, a new step in limiting greenhouse gas emissions would be taken. In Dubai, two years ago, the 194 countries had agreed to start the transition ‘away from fossil fuels’. No less than 42.000 participants flew (!) to the Brazilian summit: ministers, parliamentarians, politicians, civil servants, journalists, environmentalists and other lobbyists. A part of the endangered tropical rainforest had to be cut down for space for the crowd. But ‘fossil fuels’ became taboo words during the climate summit.
Two years after Dubai, the world has fundamentally changed. The US was not there, oil-producing countries hardly got any serious pressure to phase out fossil fuels. China and India also hardly felt the need to force the debate. They were more interested in financing the fight against global warming. All eyes were therefor mainly on the European Union. Would the EU insist that ending fossil fuels was mentioned in the final declaration or back down to save the COP30? Eventually the Union agreed with a text without ‘fossil fuels’ and with the threefold increase of the financial climate support for the poor countries: annually 300 billion dollar. But, attention! From 2035 on and not from 2030 on as originally agreed.
Back in Brussels, in an interview, European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra expressed some doubts about the usefulness of climate summits like in Belém. Anyhow, a pity that loss of a part endangered tropical rainforest.
