COP29 Was An Utter S**t Show

Honestly, we couldn't have done any worse.

Photo by Matthew TenBruggencate on Unsplash

The world is falling apart around us, with climate change disasters becoming ever more frequent, damaging, and obvious, and critical ecosystems crumbling before our eyes. It’s now only the clinically brainless or those buried deep in the pockets of big oil that claim we are innocent parties in the fatal degradation of the planet or that said degradation simply isn’t happening. The evidence that we have caused this and that the consequences will be nothing short of a catastrophe the likes of which humanity has never seen before is so overwhelmingly unanimous that it drowns out these money-hungry lies. Not only that, but all the evidence suggests that we only have a few years left to implement wide-reaching reforms to prevent and mitigate the horrors waiting for us just over the horizon. So, you’d think that the world’s largest climate summit, COP29, would be a flurry of international collaboration with significant leaps in the right direction, right? No. It was a ridiculous and petty fiasco. It seems humanity is deadset on running out the clock on its own self-made doomsday.

Technically, there were some “highlights” from this year’s COP. For example, there was an agreement to reform the carbon market, where carbon credits are sold so companies can outsource and buy their way to net zero. However, this hasn’t gone anywhere near far enough to close the gaping loopholes and ethical issues with this scheme.

Meanwhile, there were some colossal losses, both for climate progress and the general dignity of the globe. Let me explain.

For over a decade, we have known that those who had the least hand in causing the climate crisis, i.e., developing countries, will be hurt the most by it. They tend to be in geographical locations that will experience the most extreme weather disasters caused by climate change. Their economies and infrastructure are also ill-equipped to mitigate, defend, or repair themselves from these disasters, which will not only lead to a genuinely horrific loss of life and suffering but also stifle the country from developing. On top of all of this, while renewables are by far the cheapest form of energy we have, they are expensive to deploy, so as these developing countries are forced towards net zero, it will drain their already sparse pocketbooks, making their development even more arduous.