ChaOsP29: Climate Talks Start to Fracture as Countries Clash and Go Home

Things are going great. The first week of the U.N. climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, have already featured a haranguing speech from the host country’s president calling his country’s fossil fuel reserves a gift of the gods, and now various countries are getting fed up and offended enough that they are taking their ball and going home.

First, France: Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev decided now was a good time to criticize Emmanuel Macron’s government for the admittedly pretty ugly crackdown on protests in the French territory of New Caledonia earlier this year. France’s environment minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher called his speech “unworthy of a COP presidency,” according to the Financial Times; the country has withdrawn its top negotiators from Baku, though it does still have some contingent there and will continue to negotiate from Paris.

Next, Argentina: “It’s true. We have instructions from the ministry of foreign affairs to no longer participate.” That’s Ana Lamas, the country’s most senior representative on climate, to The Guardian. The far-right government of Javier Milei has decided the 80 negotiators his country sent should just pack up and leave — this one is a bit less surprising, though, considering that Milei has literally called climate change a “socialist lie.” He had promised to follow Donald Trump’s lead and pull Argentina from the Paris Agreement, though he later backtracked on that; still, South America’s third-most populous country simply abandoning ship at the climate talks is not a good sign for multilateral agreement in Baku.

And all this comes after other countries at the least expressed doubt and disdain for the ongoing international dithering and at worst, in Papua New Guinea’s case, decided to sit COP29 out entirely.

Meanwhile, reporters are wandering the halls to try and find the finance titans that probably need to be in the room in order for the world to mobilize $1 trillion a year for poor countries to adapt and build out clean energy economies. “Right now, it’s a stretch,” one vice-something of something — the big dogs didn’t show, you see — told Bloomberg News. The real price tag is, of course, higher than $1 trillion, with activist groups setting the quixotic bar at $5 trillion.

We’re still only in week one here, and the real negotiation momentum generally only kicks up through the first weekend. Hopefully enough countries are still hanging around by then to talk things through.