After what’s almost certain to be the hottest year on record, world leaders have again failed to consider any serious action on climate change. Another greenwashing climate summit was held in petrostate Azerbaijan in November, in the wake of climate denier Donald Trump’s re-election in the US.
Trump has pledged to boost oil and gas drilling and tear up climate laws. His first administration rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations and withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
Trump’s nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency is his ally Lee Zeldin, who he promises will “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions” in a clear suggestion that more attacks on environmental protections are on the table.
His nominee for the Department of Energy is Chris Wright, an oil company executive who denies the impacts of climate change.
But the Democrats’ agenda was also far from green. Kamala Harris supported fracking, bragging that as Vice President she “cast the tie-breaking vote to open up more fracking leases”. Oil production in the US has reached its highest ever level under Joe Biden’s presidency.
As Harris and Trump were fighting to prove their worth to the fossil fuel industry, hundreds of thousands in the southeast states were severely impacted by a devastating hurricane season.
COP29
In the weeks after the US election, COP29 was held in Azerbaijan, a fossil fuel state, following last year’s conference in another oil state, the United Arab Emirates. Azerbaijan’s leader Ilham Aliyev proclaimed at the conference that fossil fuels are a “gift of god”.
In 2022, 47.8 per cent of Azerbaijan’s GDP and 92.5 per cent of its export revenue came from oil and gas, making it one of the most fossil-fuel dependent economies in the world. Azerbaijan is also one of Israel’s largest crude oil suppliers, having increased exports to Israel significantly this year to fuel its genocide in Gaza.
Much of the conference was focused on climate finance, with the establishment of a new “global climate finance goal” of $US300 billion annually by 2035 to help developing countries transition to renewables. But the deal itself admitted that $US1.3 trillion a year was needed.
The Least Developed Countries Group, representing over 1.1 billion people, has described the outcome as a betrayal, saying the conference ended, “Without an ambitious climate finance goal, without concrete plans to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees and without the comprehensive support desperately needed for adaptation and loss and damage.”
Australia’s Labor government went into the conference hoping to finalise its bid to host COP31 in Australia in 2026, but the decision has been delayed until June after Turkey refused to drop its bid.
Australia pledged an insulting $50 million to the global fund to deal with losses and damage from climate change. State and federal governments handed out $14.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2023-24—a 31 per cent increase.
Labor’s ambition to host what has been termed a “Pacific COP” here in 2026 is an attempt to greenwash its climate crimes while shoring up Australian influence in the Pacific.
While standing alongside Pacific island leaders at COP29, Australia was accused by the Special Envoy for Climate Change of Vanuatu of “not acting in good faith” and Tuvalu’s Minister for Climate Change has said that while a Pacific COP would be an “exciting opportunity” it must be accompanied by “a commitment to end new fossil fuels”.
Instead new gas projects are still going ahead all across the country.
In Western Australia, the state Labor government looks set to extend the life of Woodside’s North West Shelf Project in the Burrup Peninsula for 50 years. It passed amendments to its environmental regulator that remove its ability to regulate emissions from projects like Woodside’s.
In the NT, the new Country Liberal government is proposing to hand sweeping powers to the Chief Minister and a new government bureaucrat so that gas fracking projects in the Beetaloo Basin and elsewhere can be approved without environmental assessment.
One positive is that Infrastructure Australia, which needs to approve the $1.9 billion in public money for the Middle Arm development in Darwin, has knocked back the business case. This means more delays for the project, which aims to facilitate the extraction of gas from the Beetaloo Basin.
The grim prospects for official climate action are a reminder of the need to keep fighting to stop new fossil fuel projects and build the kind of movement that could force governments to fund a just transition to 100 per cent renewable energy.
By Angus Dermody
