Imagine negotiating a high-stakes deal, one that would decide the fate of climate-stressed communities globally, but in the next room, another group is cutting one that would undo that.
That is the predicament that anti-fossil fuel activists have been facing at the UN’s annual climate conference.
Last year, as COP29 neared its final stretch in Baku, Azerbaijan, tempers flared. Developed nations had failed to commit to an ambitious climate finance package of USD 1.3 trillion per year, prompting delegates and climate activists from developing countries to storm into a pressroom in anger.
The climate negotiations had been hijacked right from the start by fossil fuel lobbyists to push ‘their own agenda.’
‘Do they come to look for solutions or for more clients? Things are already bad, for us but they still want to cash in,’ says Guillaume Kalonji Kayembe, an advocate of the Just Transition and founder of the Rise Movement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
As COP30 draws closer, a raft of critical climate issues is expected to be discussed in Belém, Brazil, including transitioning away from fossil fuels and scaling up climate finance for developing nations. However, developing nations also want stricter reforms that can keep out the fossil fuel lobbyists from the climate negotiations.
The past three COPs have been hosted by petrostates. This year’s COP will be hosted in Brazil, a country that does not heavily rely on oil due to its diversified economy.
Bad for our business
Mr Harjeet Singh, the Global Engagement Director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, states that the presence of fossil lobbyists at the COP is bad for business.
Mr Ali Adow, the founder of the Nairobi-based think tank, Power Shift Africa, describes the COPs as an ’embarrassment’ where ‘open talks have become a place for backroom deals’ for the fossil fuel lobbyists.
‘Would you invite big tobacco companies to lead discussions in a conference that is looking at fighting lung cancer? The COP is for the climate-affected and those that believe in science and take it seriously. Fossil fuel lobbyists distract us from reaching our climate goal.yet the elephant in the room is fossil fuel and a massive scale-out of renewables,’ he says.
Some fossil fuel lobbyists have clapped back. Mohammed Amid Naderian, who has been working for the Gas Exporting Coalition Forum (GECF), a coalition of 21 gas-exporting and consuming countries, as the Department Head of Economics and Forecasting, has attended several climate summits.
‘One of my roles at COP29, was strengthening collaboration with developing nations. The West has no right to dictate what Africa should do with fossil fuel because it developed because of fossil fuel,’ he says.
His colleague, Abubakar Jibrin Abbas, the GECF Senior Energy Forecast Analyst, notes that Africa still needs fossil fuel because ‘it is still the least emitter of carbon globally and this can still be absorbed by its dense forests.’
But such explanations are merely ‘rhetoric meant to create impressions that all is well,’ says Mr Dickens Kemigisha, the Executive Director of the Kampala-based African Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO).
‘COPs have been reduced to mere gatherings. We need an international tribunal put in place to handle this matter. All they (fossil fuel lobbyists) do is peddle eye-watering false climate solutions,’ he says.
Is carbon trading a permit for polluting?
Carbon trading is expected to be contentious at the COP30. Belem, a sweltering city of 2.4 million people located just some 130 kilometers away from the Amazon rainforest – the largest global carbon sink that has been under threat due to logging and mining – was strategically chosen by the Brazilian government for the COP30.
At COP29, significant amendments were made to Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, encouraging countries to buy and sell emission reductions from carbon capture storage projects to meet their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
This, plus the first-ever global carbon tax, climate analysts say, only focuses on shipping emissions and ignores financing climate-hit countries. They argue that the amendments have loopholes that can still be exploited by fossil fuel industries and lobbyists to continue polluting more under the guise of investing in carbon sinks to compensate for their emissions.