The UN climate summit ended in bitterness and accusations of betrayal. Now fears are growing for its future

(CNN) — This year’s UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan kicked off with a fulsome celebration of fossil fuels, praised by the country’s president Ilham Aliyev as a “gift of God.” It ended with a climate finance deal developing countries called an insult, a joke and a betrayal.

The question at COP29 was how much wealthy countries, most responsible for the climate crisis, owe poor countries facing the worst impacts. The answer: $300 billion a year by 2035. Rich countries said it was the best they could do. Poorer countries called it “abysmal,” falling far below the $1.3 trillion economists say they need to cope with a crisis they have not caused.

In the wake of a chaotic, bitter summit and heavily criticized final deal, some experts are asking whether the whole COP process is now so lacking in ambition as to be almost worthless.

“The dismal outcomes of COP29 … have raised serious concerns about the integrity of the global climate negotiation process,” said Harjeet Singh, of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative.

Amid geopolitical upheaval, including the election of a climate denier in the US, Baku might be remembered as the beginning of the end of multilateral climate action.

Fossil fuel interests unleashed

COP climate summits are always painstaking and fraught. But they have had major successes, most notably the 2015 Paris climate agreement, under which countries committed to keeping global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably to 1.5.

And yet, nearly a decade later, the world is on track for the hottest year on record and levels of planet-heating pollution are projected to reach an all-time high.

“We are sleepwalking into a dystopian future,” said Payam Akhavan, an attorney for the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law.

“The COP process has thus far failed, because it depends on the good faith of the major polluters, and instead of doing what is necessary for our common survival, they are literally adding fuel to the flames,” he told CNN.

In many ways, COP29 was set up to fail from the start: Russia ensured the summit was held in a fossil fuel-reliant nation by using its United Nations veto to prevent any European Union country from hosting.

So it fell to Azerbaijan, a petrostate with little experience leading high level climate talks, to wrangle negotiations on money, the thorniest of climate issues.

It was a conference of chaos. Many wealthy country leaders failed to show up, Argentina pulled out its negotiators, and some developing country groups grew so frustrated in the final throes of talks, they walked out.

COPs have been held in petrostates before. But fossil fuel interests appeared truly unleashed in Baku — potentially emboldened by the imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, a man who has vowed to “drill, baby, drill” and pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement.

More than 1,700 fossil fuel industry players and lobbyists registered to attend the summit, heavily outnumbering most country delegations.

And Saudi Arabia, a constant thorn in the side of those pushing ambitious climate action, said the quiet bit out loud at this summit, publicly and explicitly rejecting any mention of fossil fuels in the final agreement.

Climate groups compared the final deal to a band-aid on a bullet wound, and developing countries reacted with fury.

“This is not just a failure; it is a betrayal,” the Least Developed Countries Group on Climate Change said in a statement, adding that the “outright dismissal” of developing countries’ needs “erodes the fragile trust that underpins these negotiations and mocks the spirit of global solidarity.”

The least-bad option

For all its flaws, most climate advocates and scientists acknowledge the UN climate process remains the best mechanism the world currently has for global climate action.

“It’s the only forum where nearly every country has a seat at the table,” said Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, an international lawyer representing the small island country of Vanuatu in climate litigation. “The real question,” she told CNN, “is whether the momentum can be reclaimed, and the integrity of the process restored.”

Attention now turns to COP30 in Brazil next year. Billed as the most important climate summit since Paris, it’s here countries will set out their climate plans for the next 10 years. Ambition will be a uphill battle.

To succeed, the whole system needs reorienting, Singh said, “to serve the interests of the most vulnerable, rather than those of fossil fuel lobbyists and polluters.”

This is likely to be tough as the geopolitical terrain changes, and right-wing politicians who embrace fossil fuels and deride climate action see electoral success.

There is still some hope, Akhavan said. “Even if in the short-term there might be a regression because of populists and petro-states, there is ultimately no choice but to return to a ‘bigger and better’ COP 2.0.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “By lamenting on the broken process, we just add to the stalling and delay,” she told CNN. “We need to save the institutions we have. If we throw them in the gutter, Trump, Putin and Co. have won already.”

CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this report.

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