Damjan Krnjević Mišković, a former senior UN and Serbian official, is Professor of Practice at Azerbaijan’s ADA University, where he also serves as Director of Policy Research, Analysis, and Publications at its in-house think tank, the Institute for Development and Diplomacy.
Tell me a bit about your experience with COPs [Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change]. What are the outcomes you’ve seen from the process thus far?
I began working at the UN as a Senior Special Advisor to the President of the General Assembly in August 2012. I recall my boss’ farewell speech a little over a year later. He spoke about the lack of understanding of the enormity of the task ahead of us—of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)— of which, effectually, no country is on track to fulfill by the 2030 deadline. It includes climate action as one of the 17 agreed goals. He described it as the “most challenging endeavour in multilateral history.” And when you think about it, that’s really true: the countries of the world have never tried to do anything this ambitious in human history. It’s unprecedented. And, frankly, it’s just plain idealistic.
That’s my overall takeaway of the COP process, too: it’s part of the most complex undertaking we have ever tried to do as an international community in terms of scale scope ambition, and so on. And the trajectory hasn’t been linear. God only knows if these oftentimes performative and declaratory and somewhat binding declarations that are all part of the COP process will help change things sufficiently—whether the sovereign states of the world will meet the goals its leaders at the time had set for themselves, for their countries, for the generations to come. For me, the criterion of success should be understood as getting in the general vicinity of the COP goals. It’s about getting in the ballpark.
Measuring success or failure through the strict achievement of these incredibly ambitious, unbelievably complex, ridiculously expensive goals is not the way to judge the process.
What do you expect to come out of COP29? What will the negotiations focus on?
Climate finance will be the central issue. Not just because the needle basically wasn’t moved on the issue at COP28. But because the previous UNFCCC agreements all say the terms of the New Collective Quantified Goal [NCQG] on climate finance need to be figured out “prior to 2025.” So that needs to happen in Baku, in Azerbaijan, in November 2024.
Now, to simplify a little bit, the climate finance negotiations have four basic elements:
Amount – The NCQG will be somewhere between $100 billion and $1 trillion per year – a report from a few years ago, whose lead author was Lord Nicholas Stern, put the figure at about $2 trillion per year, just for the developing world, minus China. The floor is $100 billion, and that’s not nearly enough for the developing world—the majority of the world’s sovereign states— to be able to shift away from a hydrocarbon-based economy. So unless there’s a whole lot more money thrown into the pot—the phrase I’m hearing being used by the Azerbaijani team is “determining how we build the energy system of the future while ensuring the energy transition is just and orderly”— the structural integrity of the entire COP edifice might very well get called into question.
Timescale – Does all this new money that the developed world is reticent about sending along to the developing world start being spent in 2025, or in 2030? Is this additional amount committed for 5 years, and then will more be needed in 2030? These and other questions need to be determined.
Quality and structure – How is the distribution of the new money operationalized? Is it through loans or grants or some combination thereof? How are the IFIs [international financial institutions], philanthropists, and private investment involved? What is the reporting mechanism? What’s the conditionality, and is this going to be acceptable? All this is climate finance architecture reform—you know, how to unlock climate finance so that it’s more affordable and more accessible. And I think that integral to this is the question of how much funding is to be allocated to climate adaptation versus climate mitigation? The developing world has tended to want more for adaptation, where currently somewhere between only about 1% to less that 20% is being spent—it depends on how adaptation is categorized in the various methodologies.
New donor base – This is a euphemism for China, among other things. Remember now, the baseline for all these negotiations is 1990. China was in a very different position then. It’s no longer a developing country, according to the Western view. And so, the West says that the Chinese need to be a contributor to NCQG funds. China disagrees, saying it shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden for legacy pollution. So, who pays, and how much, and under what sort of conditionality and transparency, and so on? But at the end of the day, it comes down to this: who transfers wealth to whom?
So, at COP29 in Baku, the fundamental issue of climate finance will dominate, but there will be other issues: land degradation, food security, agriculture, and so on. Azerbaijan, and subsequently Brazil [the country that will assume the Presidency of COP30], have made it clear that they intend to reduce the number of initiatives and potential deliverables to a more reasonable number. In Azerbaijan’s case, it looks like it will be a dozen or so—so global focus can be directed to the most important issues. At COP28 it was 27 issues so that many different constituencies could declare a victory. But I think the way Azerbaijan sees it, a more concentrated focus is needed.
There will also be fewer attendees. COP28 in Dubai had about 100,000 people. It was too much. In Azerbaijan, there will be tens of thousands fewer participants, not only due to objective logistical constraints like the number of available hotel rooms but also as a conceptual matter. It’s harder to concentrate the minds of the actual decision-makers—the representatives of states— with too many special interests running around. Too much inclusivity can be a distraction; it can be counterproductive. And the number of people attending COP30, which will be held in the small Brazilian town of Belém, will be even smaller.
What is the role of natural gas, at COP and in the energy transition? Do you see it as a bridge fuel?
Someone said at CERAWeek [an energy conference in Houston] this year something like “we’re all oil and gas countries. Some produce, some consume, but no one does neither.” Changing that, getting to literally zero fossil fuels, is fantastical.
There’s been some division between rich and poor countries on the matter of the role of natural gas, with poorer ones obviously focusing on ensuring affordable, reliable energy. You need a lot of reliable and affordable energy to achieve development. But it’s not as simple as rich versus poor on the matter. Some of the world’s richest countries are very serious gas producers. It also raises the question of energy security, and it’s obvious that the climate policy and the foreign policy folks in various countries don’t talk to each other enough.
The COP28 declaration talked about “transitioning away from” fossil fuels rather than phasing them out completely. That was deliberate—the more radical formulation was rejected. So, this is the context within which we should ask whether natural gas is merely or exclusively a bridge fuel. Well, I think not. Part of my reasoning goes back to the distinction between adaptation and mitigation. If the science, the technology, and the politics all point to a greater emphasis on adaptation, and if we can make natural gas a low or zero-carbon energy source, then it will be—or it should be—an integral part of what’s coming. And that, in turn, will affect the answer to the bridge fuel question.
What we know for sure is that there’s a political commitment forged in Paris in 2015 at COP21 to try to restrict global warming to 1.5-2.0 degrees Celsius, and that this is supposed to be done by reducing CO2 emissions. The conclusion derived from the apparent scientific consensus that was said to exist at that moment in time was that to achieve this result, you have to eliminate hydrocarbons.
But what if technology can take that binary choice off the table? What if a greater emphasis on innovation points you in a direction that’s cheaper, faster, safer, and more just—and doesn’t need to get rid of gas? What do you do? Do you follow that science—that evidence? Do you let science take us in the direction of that possibility? Some climate activists would probably go nuts because they believe the sun and the wind are somehow more noble sources of energy, and that gas is inherently evil and must not be part of the energy mix of the future.
But one needs to be realistic: why not remain open to the possibility that gas can be a baseload power source well into the future? We know that natural gas is increasing in use for baseload generation because it’s widely available, low in cost, can quickly reach full generating capacity, and is a cleaner-burning fuel.
And with greater funding and investment in adaptative technologies, gas could become even cleaner. We don’t know what will be the reliable alternative that will enable our societies of tomorrow to operate materially at today’s operating levels. Projections based on hope don’t seem like the most prudent option. The alternative is for the developed world to throw either insufficient or fantastical amounts of money at the problem and, again, hope for the best: basically, to pay the developing world a sufficient amount in the decade or two to come to transition fully away from hydrocarbons, with the expectation that a viable, reliable, and cheap alternative will manifest itself.
I think that’s just not politically feasible. And, at the end of the day, that means that the minority—the developed countries—those who have benefited the most from current arrangements, are saying to the majority—to the developing world: “We want you to sacrifice your development potential for the sake of saving the planet.” This really comes down to saying “We don’t really want you to catch up. We don’t want to fund you sufficiently at our expense, even though we’re much more responsible than you are.” That’s essentially the point that Guyana’s president was making on that BBC HARD TALK clip that went viral at the beginning of April.
This whole debate comes down to something like this: either the developed countries strategically increase the amounts they pledge and commit to delivering along an agreed timeline to the developing states—and remember, this includes many hydrocarbon-producing states—or a serious revision of the net-zero timeline should be put on the table, which includes having a non-ideological discussion about shifting lots of resources to adaptation.
Look, it’s like how the World Bank research department’s former lead economist Branko Milanovic recently put it: “It is logically impossible to (a) hold moral high ground; (b) to do nothing in response to past responsibilities; and (c) to claim to be in favor of global poverty reduction.”
Let’s say COP29 is successful beyond anyone’s hopes in implementing a climate change management plan. What are the implications of that? What does it mean in Canada politically and economically?
Get ready for Ottawa to dole out billions to the developing world and get ready for higher taxes, massive loss of revenues from oil and gas over time, and lower transfer payments between provinces.
Canada is a developed country; it’s a G7 country. Canada will thus need to be an integral part of the climate finance solution, which means that Ottawa will have to throw a bunch of money into the pot to implement what Canadian politicians have been in favour of rhetorically.
Is it better for Canada—as a sovereign state—to retain its oil and gas revenues and energy? Or is it better to sacrifice for the good of the planet? This is obviously an incredibly complex question, but simply to pretend that you can’t ask it—or to pretend that there won’t be painful trade-offs that could make average Canadians poorer—is evidently not a responsible way to run a country.
Given the enormity of the task—of these international negotiations, the energy transition, the impacts of climate change—how do you maintain hope?
I was born in Serbia, and the Serbs have a saying: “There are optimists and pessimists. The pessimists say, ‘it can’t get worse.’ The optimists say, ‘oh yes it can.’”
I think that this kind of fatalism can be genuinely healthy because it brings you back to reality. No country should base its policies on hope and dreams and a vision of perfectibility—of establishing Heaven on Earth or the End of History or whatever. You must take seriously the hard part of governing. You need policies that have back-ups, and you need research and development trajectories that have a realistic chance of succeeding, which means that you must do a lot of di erent things at the same time. Don’t put all your chips on one number on the roulette table. That’s irresponsible. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Our parents taught us those pretty basic lessons when we were children. Some of us seem to forget them as we grow older—or somehow don’t think they apply to statecraft.
Sometimes in these sorts of negotiations, there are no winners at all. But also, sometimes, no one needs to lose. By focusing so much on getting rid of hydrocarbons, you’re creating losers. But who wins with that? There’s not enough awareness about the obvious political, social, and economic implications of this—not least in Canada. Doesn’t it make sense to really investigate what is the least painful way of doing this?
I’d like to think that the time will soon come when the unnecessarily rigid, ideological presuppositions that inform quite a bit of thinking in the context of COP will be abandoned in favour of a more
open-minded, more commonsensical approach. Otherwise, the process could end in abject failure, kill whatever confidence remains in multilateralism, further the divide between the haves and have nots, and do more harm than good to the planet.