COP29: The Famished Freeloaders of Baku

The Famished Freeloaders of Baku

By Tony Thomas

This fictional story is “inspired by true events”, as they like to label movies these days. The setting is COP29 last week in Baku, where the Blue Zone is exclusive to the 17,680 official reps (“Parties”) and 16,305 official hangers-on, the latter dubbed “Party Overflow”.[1] The COP official list included “overflows” such as the Victorian Trades Hall Council, the uber-loopy Psychologists for a Safe Climate, GetUp zealots, Pimlico State High Qld, “Make Polluters Pay”, and a real-life Premier (Malinauskas, SA). I noticed has-been prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is remembered fondly only by the ABC. The un-endorsed climate rabble was corralled in the Green Zone by herders from the “Extreme Hangout” event organisers.

Charming young “Isabella” was one of the 1,914 delegates from Brazil. Sporting her Blue Zone lanyard, she chatted with “Leander Ocker”, one of the 394 Australians officiated to the climate conference.

Isabella’s eyes widened as Leander told her about the cheapness of renewables, nuclear evils and how his climate minister, Chris Bowen, was making Australia a clean-energy superpower.

When he paused, Isabella tipped him a wink and announced: “Dinner. Vamos lá!” [Portuguese: Let’s go!]. Leander had a husband and three kids back in Melbourne’s South Yarra. But probably, What goes on at Baku, stays at Baku.

In line at the pavilion’s food counter, Isabella loaded her tray with chicken, vegies, a side plate of salad, and some tropical juice. That’s $US60 plus a $US10 coffee.

While Leander inspected the plastic-wrapped beefburger ($US30), Isabella winked again and peeled off to grab a vacant table. Leander paid the cashier. Dinner done, Leander never saw Isabella again. She forgot to give him her WhatsApp.

The true story behind this script is in Kenyan e-magazine Nation, which also goes to Uganda and Tanzania. I baulked at the paywall of 100 Kenyan shillings a day. But I was enticed by the headline, “COP29: As world meets to negotiate climate finance, African delegates at conference struggle to afford food.” The sub-head was “Surviving on dates”.[2] I recalled that dates are a staple food of the Bedouin, so a date-and-water diet might be viable.

When I paid my tax-deductible $A1.19 to read the piece, I found I’d misinterpreted the sub-head: it was about half-starving she-activists at Baku hooking up with Westerners to score a feed. Nation’s reporter, Leon Lidigu, cited many accounts from famished Third World delegates, including “Isabella” our Brazilian food seductress. She told him, “I’ve been low-key surviving off lunch and dinner date invites from my male global north friends who can afford it here. To be honest, it feels like they are ‘living’ around here while we merely exist.”

Calorie-scrounging was so common that one COP smarty created a WhatsApp group listing all events involving coffee urns and free biscuits and cheese. “The document has spread like wildfire,” said Isabella to Lidigu. A colleague was reported, “I’m just out here surviving by the grace of God and persevering for the love of my country and continent.” A sponsored delegate from Uganda had to phone her mother, a trader, to send food money: Mum got it from money-lenders.

Lidigu disclosed that the UN sponsor rate for Baku was $US291 per day ($A447). This looked generous but price-gouging Baku hotels grabbed the lion’s share. They hiked normal rates around eight-fold, gazumped your booking if they got a better offer and even blackmailed you on arrival with take-it-or-leave-it surcharges.[3] This pushed Third Worlders into beds in Baku suburbs, with savings eroded by Uber trips to the free COP bus-lines. “If you saw how dingy the places we are currently staying at you will be shocked,” a Kenyan negotiator said. Baku’s best hotel, the Shah Palace, quoted $US199,299 for the COP fortnight ($A305,392) or $US12,059 a night ($A18,484). I hope Minister Chris Bowen found somewhere more economical for himself and his retinue.

Meanwhile, the affluent pigged out at COP’s fancy eateries. Lidigu’s story included pics of tables littered with barely-sampled meals ready to be binned. Some First Worlders, like Miki Moieni, executive director of Youth Climate Save Canada, bitched about the organisers’ non-vegetarian and unsustainably-wrapped offerings — not that the cash-strapped delegates cared. Moieni posted on LinkedIn:

Caffeine is free flowing as are sweets – with many delegates lining up for free coffees from pavilions deemed to have the best. Being on your fifth cup of coffee is a common occurrence met with relatable giggles. With delegates hyped up on sugar, alcohol, and processed food, lack of sleep and time outside, how can we make sound decisions on the future of healthy, nutritious, sustainable food systems?

In counterpoint, a delegate from Tanzania told Nation he had been obliged to skip a session, Making Climate Finance Work for Climate Action in Agriculture and Food Security, “because I have to go to a local market that I am told is quite far, to see if I can get affordable food to eat. The cost of food at COP is just too much for me.”

A Filipino delegate, broke after barely a day at the gabfest, said she’d been surviving entirely on the side-snacks. COP rejected appeals from the Global South for free meals.

Baku’s hunger games put a new perspective on COP’s hordes. Kenya, for instance, had 288 delegates, Uganda 412 and Tanzania 353. Few, I’d say none, paid their own way: [4] it was all sponsored by First World grants, delegates’ own long-suffering national treasuries, or diverted from charities’ funds meant to conquer poverty.[5]

In what the vulgar Donald Trump has called the “shithole countries”, only well-fed elites give a fig about the climate. Burundi, for example, is the world’s second-poorest country, behind South Sudan. Burundi sent 170 freeloaders to Baku. Back home, food insecurity is twice as bad as the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and 60 per cnt of kids suffer chronic malnutrition.

In the countryside where 90 per cent of the population scratch a living, fewer than 2 per cent have electricity, which presently comes from fossil fuels (33%) and hydro (62%). The place hasn’t got many hut-top solar panels with battery back-up . Burundi’s still getting over a 12-year civil war. Inflation runs at 20-30 per cent. GDP per capita per day is about $US2.50. I doubt Burundi peasants obsess about the one degree of global warming in the past century.[6]

Just ahead of Burundi on living standards is the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which sent a handy 401 delegates to Baku.[7] DRC produces 70% of the world’s cobalt and is Africa’s largest copper producer. But decades of rapacious dictatorship have kept this national treasure-trove of minerals – required for so-called “clean-energy” — in an abyss of poverty. One president stayed in power 32 years, another for 17. In the malaria-ridden countryside barely 1 per cent have electricity access. I doubt DRC peasants fret about their CO2 emissions.

COP29 has played out like some theatre of the absurd. The African delegates wanted us First Worlders to hand them another $US2.7 trillion ($AUD 4140,000,000,000) by 2030, no questions asked. At next year’s COP30 in Brazil, this funding should at least put an end to nubile but hungry delegates having to go on lousy dates with Australians.

Now that the contrails from 50,000 departing delegates are fading, the big question is, “What did all this ‘Conference of Parties’ i.e. COP29 achieve? Well nothing in terms of the stated goal of putting the globe on track for net zero emissions. After each of the previous 28 COPs, global emissions have continued to rise at an unabated pace, thanks to China, India, Russia and Third Worlders going for broke on coal and other fossil fuels.

COPs are no longer about CO2. They’re about “developing” countries’ cash ambitions. This includes African despots getting stacks of unaccountable funding from us prosperous nations. The original plan at COP15 in Paris was for suckers like us to bankroll a Green Climate Fund (GCF), disbursed by a South Korean-based climate bureaucracy.

The Paris agreement was for the West to pay the Fund at least $US100 billion a year for Third World climate projects and boondoggles. Adding up the three tranches to date, the Fund seems to have acquired $US33 billion, including recent pledges. This sum is rather less than the $US800 billion-or-so if everyone at Paris had kept their original promises, and President-elect Trump is certainly not going to pay anything further.

Australia? Incredibly, it was Prime Minister Tony Abbott who tipped in $US185 million from us taxpayers to help kickstart the Fund. His nemesis, Malcolm Turnbull, promised at least another $1 billion – the currency type, US or Aussie dollars, is literally of no account because none of it materialised.

Labor, via mad Climate Minister Chris Bowen, has now thrown a further $A50 million of our hard-earned into the Fund. This made a little wave of virtue signalling to impress his fellow delegates at Baku, and it covers our taxpayer contributions up to 2027. We got a special, oh-so-heartwarming ‘thank you’ from the Fund.

What’s really going on is that the Fund is so hopeless[8] that countries, including Australia, are by-passing it and using other routes to waste our money. Australia actually sprayed $1.6 billion abroad from 2020-23 to fight climate change, I’m officially informed. Our total for 2020-25 will be $3 billion, according to DFAT’s website. Much of that is going to mendicant island states, whose main industry is inventing climate harms to get money from gullible donors. Contrary to endless claims by Western governments and their legacy media, these islands are not threatened by rising seas[9] nor by any increases in so-called climate-fuelled cyclones.[10]

This scandal is replicated in our big-lick but little-known wastage of money in Aussie dollars going to the World Bank. Our contributions total $A987 million for the period 2021 to 2025.[11] World Bank policy today is to allocate 45 per cent of its grants to the Third World for climate causes. Oxfam UK last month published a study claiming that, across the World Bank’s entire climate-grant portfolio from 2017-23, actual spending varied from budgeted amounts by 26 to 43 per cent above or below the claimed figure. This meant the World Bank lost track of somewhere between $US24-41 billion, nearly 40 per cent of its entire climate spending. Oxfam trashed the bank for

serious flaws of assessing and reporting climate finance based only on what a project aims to do and not on whether those planned climate finance figures were actually spent on the identified climate finance activities.

Pro rata, it looks like the World Bank has no idea what it’s done with some hundred million or so of our billion-dollar donation. I thought we had a Department of Finance to safeguard our money?

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 here