Does Trump signal the end of climate change extravaganzas?

NEWS FLASH: John Robson, of the Climate Discussion Nexus, reports from Baku about COP29.

The 29th UN climate conference convened in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 11 under something of a cloud. Or rather a pile-up of incoming storm fronts. There were a lot of reasons for delegates to arrive pre-discouraged. And then came the Trump of Doom. Or a peculiar orange formation mistaken for same.

I haven’t actually heard a whole lot of detailed references to the outcome of the American election, which not only put someone openly contemptuous of climate alarmism into the White House but also gave his party control of both houses of Congress. But it’s not as though people didn’t notice. Thus American marquee New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells, who I believe is absent physically but is certainly present ideologically, just wrote bitterly:

“Trump’s election may look like a black dawn to climate activists. And indeed it is: When the timelines of climate action are so short, and the paths to climate stability so narrow and difficult, any setback is a disaster.”

That he then whistled a happy “global renewables boom” tune that couldn’t change the mood. Not least because his own publication’s “Climate Forward” promptly emailed about “Trump’s potential threat to weather data”.

Canada’s “The Hub” chimed in with a typical Canadian perspective, aka something nobody outside Canada cares about at all: “There’s no reason for Trump to put the brakes on Canada’s low-carbon economic growth”. Nor indeed any reason for anyone to care, given our trivial contribution to supposedly planet-roasting “carbon pollution” despite our outsized contribution to sanctimony on the subject.

The strange thing is that Wallace-Wells did have a point, accidentally. It is true that Trump cannot stop America’s renewables boom, or for that matter Canada’s low-carbon economic growth, because neither is happening anyway. And more broadly, Trump can’t derail the COP agenda because it’s already off the bridge and smouldering in broken chunks in the river below.

Petrostate hospitality

As delegates here must be dimly aware, this conference is problematic in many ways. Including being hosted, for the second straight year, by a petrostate. Azerbaijan cannot really be called democratic, except by regime propagandists and I’m not sure how much they bother. (In case you all aren’t from around there, it’s an hereditary dictatorship whose late president Heydar Aliyev, who died in 2003, had been the local Soviet party boss from 1969 to 1983. He rose to that position via a KGB career that saw him reach the Politburo, before falling out with Gorbachev, being “retired”, then becoming president of Azerbaijan in a military coup in 1993. That it is ruled by the New Azerbaijan Party should not mislead you. But I digress.

The key point is that Azerbaijan is a poor country with a messy history and a lot of problems and one big hope: the energy industry. It accounts for about a third of the entire economy and 90 percent of exports, and they can’t just chuck it into the Caspian Sea and go back to living on salt.

In fact, speaking of the Caspian Sea, it’s in terrible condition ecologically. And as with things like having enough food, potable water, sewers, the ability to defend the nation’s borders in a rough neighbourhood, the idea of cleaning up the Caspian relies on generating a lot more wealth than they currently have. And while the government does hope to foster the tourist industry, an aspiration dealt a harsh blow by COVID, the truth is that Azerbaijan is hard to get to and there aren’t a lot of obvious reasons to come here on vacation.

They do have half the world’s active mud volcanoes, which is kind of cool. And also the Gobustan Petroglyphswhich were also. We went and saw both. But it’s no substitute for being the world’s 21st largest oil exporter, into a pipeline through Georgia and Turkey (I told you it was a tough neighbourhood) into Europe.

Azerbaijan is not alone, of course, in being dependent on hydrocarbon energy. Essentially the whole world is. But where many nations are dependent primarily as consumers, no small matter, some are also dependent as producers. And as the current president Ilhan Aliyev pointedly informed delegates, his government wasn’t about to ditch their key industry.

I could get off on a tangent about the challenges of “modernization”, which is actually and crucially Westernization, in a place with Azerbaijan’s history including forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union from 1920 to 1991 after previous forcible incorporation into the Russian Empire and a lot of other seedy ventures before that. They promptly introduced a modified Latin alphabet and phased out the Cyrillic one, though the replacement has 32 letters, about half of which are not pronounced the way we would.

Oh, and the roads are littered with Ladas, sometimes literally, though also in Baku at least you also see a lot of modern cars made everywhere but here. Likewise the name for car, “Avto”, was made in… Russia. Not a good sign.

There. I did get off on a tangent. But not entirely or I would have edited it out. It’s pertinent because the challenges facing anyone trying to create a decent life for the inhabitants of Azerbaijan are enormous (and arguably include its current government). But they would certainly get worse, even catastrophically so, if the economic lifeline were cut. Which brings me back to Donald Trump who, I’m told, is surprisingly popular here among people who have any idea who he is.

A key reason why the second election of Trump is so big delegates can’t cope with it is this. It’s not just that Orange Man Bad, or anti-Americanism, is one of the forms of hatred not merely permitted but encouraged in our modern, tolerant, diverse, equitably bitter world. It’s that the return of Trump, warts and all, is part of a much larger reaction that threatens the COP agenda and much more besides.

For all his flaws, he represents an overdue and necessary backlash of ordinary people against presumptuous elites who despise them and their lives and would casually wreck them, from COVID lockdowns to Net Zero. And whatever else comes along. And the COP delegates here, I think, dimly sense that it’s a powerful force. Only dimly, because they live in an intellectual as well as sociological bubble.

Copping it sweet

Despite the lack of mental diversity or real debate here, another undercurrent of gloom is that, as the name suggests, it’s the 29th such conference. And for the first seven, or even 15, it was possible to believe they really were going to produce a dramatic, rapid, workable solution to the crisis they claim is so immense and urgent that the great and good must gather every year, and often in between, to solve it for the wretched and ungrateful proles on expense accounts funded by same.

But somewhere around COP27 it dawned on a lot of them that they could not remake the world economy to run on wind, solar, unicorns or empty promises. So they switched to this notion that what the Soviets used to call the First World (and the smart set happily went along it), was going to give not billions but trillions of dollars to the “Third World” every year to deal with the effects of bad weather we allegedly caused by driving cars in 1972 or something.

What exactly the 50,000 or so people who have descended on Baku in the largest tourist incursion in its history make of all these considerations is unclear. I do not think 100 of them left the “Galactic metropolis” bubble of airport, taxi, hotel, taxi, conference centre, taxi, hotel, taxi and airport to see the country. It is in one sense a cosmopolitan gathering, with delegates from Scotland to Burkina Faso to Timor Leste to Kazakhstan to Indonesia.

In fact, I met one who was from Indonesia but was on the Kazakh delegation. In some sense it’s all one big if not at the moment especially happy family. And a friend back home asked me how the food was here and I responded that inside the conference centre it was quite good but exactly what you’d find anywhere in the galactic metropolis; it could as easily have been a sandwich and coffee bar in, say, Paris airport, complete with gluten-free apple cookies. They are here to save the world but not to see it or talk to it.

I do not think most of them, despite their pretensions, really know or care what life is like for the average Azerbaijani nor, crucially, what it would be like if their aspirations to “move away from fossil fuels” in short order were realized. For their information, and yours, there are just over 10 million people in this country, about a quarter of them in the greater Baku area, if that’s the right term, and Baku is basically the only metropolis. The rest live very differently, and close to the edge, though many in Baku are in straightened circumstances too.

Abandoning any realistic prospect of getting to “Net Zero” or meeting “Paris targets” or “1.5C” or any of that other insider jargon must nevertheless surely have had a depressing impact, even if many of them pretend it might still happen or at least don’t challenge the ubiquitous slogans on the walls here about it. But gathering year after year to try to extract lavish but insincere promises from First World politicians skilled at same can’t improve the mood much. And now there’s Donald Trump not just saying the whole thing is silly, but saying it on behalf of a massive constituency in America and beyond.

It’s too big and too awful to be discussed except in hushed tones or knowing asides. But yes, he has trumped their ace of conferences. And they know it.

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AUTHOR

John Robson

John Robson is the Executive Director of the Climate Discussion Nexus, a documentary filmmaker, a columnist with the National Post, the Epoch Times and Loonie Politics. He holds a PhD in American history from the University of Texas at Austin.

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