friends of the earth
'This Is a Disaster': Bonn Climate Conference Ends Without Financing Progress
"Developed countries are not even offering crumbs from the table and are blocking all progress," lamented one campaigner.
As the clock ticks down toward this November's COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, the Bonn Climate Change Conference in Germany ended in a stalemate Thursday as nations were unable to agree on the size and scope of loss and damage financing and other issues.
This week's talks in Bonn yielded no significant progress on climate financing as the industrialized nations that are most responsible for the planetary emergency continued to try and shirk what Global South countries say is their responsibility to compensate those who suffer most but have emitted the least greenhouse gases.
"Developing countries need trillions in new public finance for adaptation, loss and damage, and for a just transition away from fossil fuels. But developed countries are not even offering crumbs from the table and are blocking all progress," said Friends of the Earth climate justice and energy campaigner Sara Shaw.
Loss and damage refers to funding meant to compensate developing nations for the destruction caused by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis the world's poor played little role in creating.
"They want developing countries to accept loans which will further fuel debt, and are pushing already discredited carbon market finance schemes, which causes grave harm in the Global South," Shaw added. "This is a disaster."
Crux of #SB60 #climate finance discussions in Bonn highlighted in my take at the recent @CANIntl press conference.
Thank you @LossandDamage for capturing it.@fossiltreaty #ClimateJustice #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/ynVV2R4g5N
— Harjeet Singh (@harjeet11) June 11, 2024
Referring to the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said Thursday that the Bonn stalemate is "undermining the momentum needed to ensure strong outcomes at COP29, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November."
"Discussions on climate finance lacked the urgency required for one of the most critical decisions to be finalized at COP29," WWF said of the Bonn conference. "A new funding goal for the period 2025 to 2035 is set to be agreed, in line with the terms of the Paris agreement."
"But developed countries have not yet given clear indication what they are considering contributing to developing countries for climate action, nor where the money will come from," the group added. "Concurrently, calls for urgently needed funding for adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage remain unfulfilled."
Greenpeace International climate politics expert Tracy Carty said in a statement Thursday that "rich developed countries talked at length about what they can't commit to and who else should pay, but failed to assure developing nations on their intent to significantly scale up financial support."
"Damning silence on what finance might be offered is stymying efforts to raise ambition and is a dereliction of duty to people battling climate-fueled storms, fires, and droughts," Carty added.
"Rich countries most responsible for this crisis must pay up for a fair fossil fuel phaseout and climate damages, without worsening unjust debts."
Developing nations have said they need around $400 billion annually for a loss and damage fund that they could tap to rebuild communities, restore crucial wildlife habitats, or relocate people displaced by the climate emergency. The United States has committed to a paltry $17.5 million for the global loss and damage fund. Developed nations have pledged approximately $661 million for loss and damage funding to date, according to the U.N. Development Program.
Laurie van der Burg, international public finance lead at Oil Change International, asserted that "the rich countries most responsible for this crisis must pay up for a fair fossil fuel phaseout and climate damages, without worsening unjust debts."
"We know they have more than enough money," van der Burg added. "It's just going to the wrong things."
Climate Groups Call for Rich to Pay More as International Meetings Begin
"We have to put the social justice element upfront," an architect of the 2015 Paris agreement said as the world's climate delegates gathered in Germany.
Advocates on Tuesday issued strong calls to action on climate finance for developing countries and an international agency released a report on the need to ramp up renewable energy production as the Bonn Climate Change Conference continued in Germany and G7 nations prepared to meet in Italy next week.
At the conference in Bonn, Friends of the Earth International pushed for more rich-country financing to pay for the rising costs of climate impacts in the Global South, while Laurence Tubiana, head of the European Climate Foundation and an architect of the 2015 Paris agreement, called for the global rich to pay their share through taxes and consumption levies.
Meanwhile, two organizations warned that countries aren't on track to meet targets they set just last year. Oil Change International (OCI) published a briefing showing that G7 nations are expanding oil and gas commitments that undermine goals set at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) meeting in Dubai, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report showing that the world's nations are not on track to meet their Dubai pledge to triple renewable energy production by 2030.
"The world is on fire because of decades of inaction by rich countries on reducing emissions, and their failure to pay the climate finance they owe to developing countries to transition to renewable energy systems for all, and to pay for rising costs for loss and damage and adaptation," Sara Shaw, Friends of the Earth International program coordinator, said in a statement. "What is on the table to date is scales of magnitude away from what it needed. This year must be a year of breakthrough on climate finance."
Climate representatives are meeting in Bonn this week and next to prepare for COP29 in November in Azerbaijan, where a key agenda item is expected to be financing for a green transition in the Global South. COP negotiations are conducted under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). At COP21 in 2015, nations signed the Paris agreement, a treaty that sought to limit global warming to less than 2°C above preindustrial levels.
Tubiana, an architect of that deal, said Tuesday that tackling climate change requires centering global justice in order to avoid conflict and gain public acceptance of climate measures.
"We have to put the social justice element upfront," Tubiana, a French economist and diplomat, toldThe Guardian.
Tubiana said that raising the funds required for low-income nations will require holding both rich nations and people to account, via taxes and consumption levies, given that inequities exist not just between nations but also within them.
"This inequality is true not only between developed countries and developing ones, but within each country—the 1% of rich Chinese, or the 1% of very rich Indians, or the U.S. citizen—they have a lifestyle which is very, very similar, in terms of overconsumption," she said.
The world's richest and most powerful nations are not taking responsibility for climate action as they should, the new OCI briefing argues.
"Some G7 countries are massively expanding fossil fuel production at home, while others are investing in more fossil fuel infrastructure abroad," the briefing states. "Both are catastrophic failures of leadership."
OCI cites the United States, Italy, and Japan as particularly bad climate actors. The U.S. is the largest oil and gas producer in the world and has plans for massive expansions of the industry, despite President Joe Biden's climate promises, the briefing notes. Italy has announced plans to double natural gas production. And both the U.S. and Japan have financed billions of dollars worth of oil and gas production in other countries just since the end of 2022, the document states, citing earlier OCI findings.
.@G7 countries 🇨🇦 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 could be responsible for nearly half of the CO2 pollution from new oil & gas projects planned between 2023 and 2050 - equivalent to the lifetime emissions of nearly 600 coal plants.
📑 https://t.co/ujhMLMVNtr pic.twitter.com/8IB1sxLuHj
— Oil Change International (@PriceofOil) June 4, 2024
The IEA also spelled out unfulfilled commitments, while detailing progress that has been made on the energy transition. The agency looked at the domestic policies and targets of 150 countries to see how far along they were toward reaching the international target of tripling renewable power generation by 2030. It found that once added together, the nations' domestic plans would get them about 70% of the way toward the 11,000 gigawatts of additional capacity required to meet the goal.
"There is a gap, but the gap is bridgeable," Heymi Bahar, a senior energy analyst at the IEA and co-author of the report, toldThe Guardian.
Governments have not in most cases written these domestic plans into their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. The IEA report says that countries need to "bring their NDCs in line with their current domestic ambitions" and scale those ambitions up further still, to get from 70% to 100%. Moreover, they must follow through with their promises and achieve the targets they've set.
"This report makes clear that the tripling target is ambitious but achievable—though only if governments quickly turn promises into plans of action," Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director, said in a statement.
The world added about 560 gigawatts of renewable capacity in 2023, a record increase, more than half of which came from China, according to the IEA. About half of planned capacity increases are in solar, with a quarter from wind power, the IEA report states.
'Time to Go for the Jugular': Climate Movement Has New Plan to Destroy Big Oil
"We have an opportunity for 18 months to organize, to take out the oil and gas industry," said one environmental leader during a Sanders Institute event in Vermont.
"Now is the time to go for the jugular. Now is the time to kill the fossil fuel industry, because we don't have another chance at survival after this."
That's what Jamie Minden, senior director of global organizing for the youth-led group Zero Hour, told the audience Saturday during The Sanders Institute Gathering, in Burlington, Vermont. The three-day event featured panel discussions on various topics and a few screenings, including the trailer for The Welcome Table, Josh Fox's forthcoming documentary about climate refugees.
"In order to win, we need to go on the offensive," said Minden, "because defense has not been working."
Playing offense against the incredibly powerful and well-funded fossil fuel industry requires growing the movement and seizing political opportunities to implement lifesaving policies, according to experts and organizers who participated in a series of panels focused on the climate crisis.
One of those opportunities that campaigners are already gearing up for is the January 2025 expiration of tax cuts signed into law in December 2017 by then-President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the November election.
Speaking alongside Minden on the livestreamed panel, Friends of the Earth (FOE) president Erich Pica described the looming fight as a "Tax Super Bowl" that will take place shortly before the next president is sworn in. The climate movement is organizing aggressively to show just how much U.S. consumers and taxpayers are being ripped off by the greed of the fossil fuel giants that enjoy massive federal subsidies and enormous tax breaks despite the "eye-popping" profits they post year after year.
. @Erichpica: The Tax Super Bowl [will be] in January 2025. All the Trump Tax Cuts that were passed in 2017, particularly the ones that impact individuals, are up for reauthorization...We have an opportunity for 18 months to organize to take out the oil and gas industry. pic.twitter.com/VbaeHzuTIi
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
"We know that there will be a tax bill that, if it is not passed, will end up increasing taxes on all individual Americans. And so we have an opportunity for 18 months to organize, to take out the oil and gas industry," Pica said.
Trump in April made a reported quid pro quo offer to fossil fuel executives: Pour just $1 billion into his current campaign, and he will repeal climate policies implemented under Democratic President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection.
Pica pointed out that Big Oil—which has benefited from federal tax breaks since the Revenue Act of 1913—could profit handsomely by taking Trump up on his offer, if the Republican returns to the White House. In an analysis published last month, FOE Action found that the industry fueling the climate emergency could see an estimated $110 billion in tax breaks alone if Republicans get their way.
Throughout the weekend, multiple panelists highlighted the End Polluter Welfare Act recently reintroduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—whose wife Jane O'Meara Sanders and son Dave Driscoll co-founded the Sanders Institute. The legislation aims to close tax loopholes and end corporate handouts to the fossil fuel industry, and the sponsors estimate it would save American taxpayers up to $170 billion over a decade.
. @JosephGeev: Our democracy is on the line. But so too is the fate of our planet…Donald Trump is pitching a deal to big oil executives to give me a billion dollars in campaign contributions and I'm gonna make sure the US government keeps the fossil fuel industry in operation. pic.twitter.com/5N6NJ2Asud
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
The bill's reintroduction last month was "an important step," said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, an organization that grew out of the senator's 2016 presidential campaign. "The thing is, we need a movement and a strategic opportunity to be able to get that policy over the finish line."
Some panelists argued that the moment is now, but the movement must expand beyond what Rev. Lennox Yearwood, president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, said is, "at this time, a siloed, segregated, progressive climate movement."
Americans are not only "dying because of the climate crisis" but also paying fossil fuel companies "to kill us," Yearwood told the audience. "Their business plan literally means a death sentence for our communities."
"The issue on taxation," he explained, "allows us to once again broaden our movement, allows us to go to Republicans, go to Democrats, to go to Independents, and go across this country... and say simply: 'Your tax dollars are going to go to those who are rich and are killing our communities. Do you want that?'"
. @RevYearwood: The fossil fuel industry is evil. I mean evil. We have never as humans dealt with anything as global, as destructive, and as suicidal as this industry. pic.twitter.com/45LDPm6psg
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
Another way to grow the movement is to include communities—especially those historically represented in politics by Big Oil beneficiaries—in the global green transition.
On the Gathering's opening night, which was also livestreamed, Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous, also a Sanders Institute fellow, spoke about recently visiting a plant where workers make solar panels in the district of far-right Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a major Trump ally.
While touring the Hanwha Qcells solar facility in Dalton, Jealous asked about a wall of drawings and paintings. He learned that they were created for Earth Day last year by children of the employees, who were asked to portray "how they see their parents working at this factory."
"In maybe the most, arguably the most conservative congressional district in America," workers' children "portrayed their parents as heroes saving the planet," he said. "The kids in that district get that we need solar panels, get that we got to work together to save this planet. There's reason to be hopeful."
. @BenJealous: The seeds to overcoming the division in America lies in the factories we are building for renewables, for batteries, for semiconductors. pic.twitter.com/yxNQv4GlJo
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
The plant's South Korean company has been able to grow because of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that congressional Democrats passed and Biden signed in 2022. While members of the climate movement have long framed the law as a flawed but still historic package in terms of tackling the planetary emergency, with the general election mere months away, speakers at the Gathering stressed the need to showcase such progress to voters nationwide.
"We really do have to take those moments when something happens and claim it. And partly that means in this election being willing to say how important that IRA was," said panelist and Sanders Institute fellow Bill McKibben, who founded Third Act, which organizes elders for climate advocacy.
"Was it perfect? Not even close… but it was in some other sense, remarkable," he continued. "We've got to actually talk about that enough that people understand it. And truthfully, we don't… Certainly, the Democratic Party does not a good job of talking about those things in those ways."
Also pointing to the Georgia solar plant, McKibben added that "one of the things that's really brilliant about the IRA is that the bulk of the money is going to red state America to do this work, which is not something that we're used to anymore in our country... people being willing to do anything other than support their own supporters. And it's a remarkable possibility for a kind of political healing going forward."
McKibben: At the exact same moment that the planet is physically starting to disintegrate in precisely the way scientists 30 years ago told us it would, as if kind of scripted by Hollywood, we're also seeing the sudden spike in the only antidote we have at scale to deal with this pic.twitter.com/FaUQv6BdTk
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
No matter the outcomes of the upcoming U.S. congressional and presidential elections, climate campaigners are committed to the fight against fossil fuels. As Pica put it, "I think we have to wage the fight regardless."
"The oil and gas industry has been operating with impunity for over a hundred years," the FOE leader said. "They're crushing our politics, they're polluting the climate, and they're getting away with it."
"We discovered during the Inflation Reduction Act fight, when there was a real effort to repeal the oil and gas subsidies, that they expended a lot of political capital to keep those subsidies in place," he noted. "The fact that we can wage a campaign that forces the oil and gas industry to expend political capital to maintain their largesse from the federal government, regardless of if we win or we lose, is a winning strategy for us."
"'Cause that means they're not trying to repeal the stuff in the Inflation Reduction Act. That means that they're not trying to work on reducing… their corporate taxes," he explained. Like Minden, Pica wants the climate movement to make the fossil fuel industry finally play defense.
The End Polluter Welfare Act "is the organizing vehicle," Pica said. "We've gotta get support behind it. We've gotta get members of Congress on it. We've gotta get community activists out there in the streets."
Jamie Minden: I am 21 years old and I've never lived a year of my life without experiencing extreme climate disaster first hand…We have an entire generation of young people growing up this way. This is not only our future. This is our present. @ThisIsZeroHour pic.twitter.com/ULZYFRya0Z
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
The organizers battling Big Oil underscored the urgency, emphasizing that not only are the Trump tax cuts set to expire soon, but also communities across the country and around the world are already enduring the effects of a hotter planet—including rising sea levels, more destructive storms, extreme temperatures, devastating floods, and raging wildfires.
"A hundred years from now really matters. But also what's going on today and in the next five years really matters," said Minden. "I think within the next five years… our world's gonna be pretty unrecognizable in many ways."
The 21-year-old climate campaigner told the Gathering's audience—full of academics, advocates, policymakers, and more—that "whether you're here working in healthcare or income inequality or labor, the reality is that this issue is about to become a part of your work, if it's not already."
"I know we all have our own fights. I know everyone here is working on things that are really, really important. But if we don't all go out on this fight, if we don't all go out on climate, we're gonna get taken out," she warned. "It's a matter of survival."