James Padilioni, Jr. – Swarthmore at COP29

COP29: There is Yet Hope

By: Prof. James Padilioni, Jr.

“Africa is NOT the Global South! Africa is the center of the world!” So exclaimed an attendee at the Yasunize Movement demonstration I observed at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Yasuní is a national park located in the Ecuadorean Amazon which UNESCO has declared a world biosphere reserve in recognition that Yasuní features the highest biodiversity of any singular ecosystem on our planet. In August 2023, the Ecuadorian people voted to halt all future oil drilling within the borders of Yasuní National Park, representing a threshold moment for a true transition away from a fossil fuel economy that does not involve the abstract mathematical manipulation of instruments via a carbon market. As such, “to Yasunize” has emerged as a new rallying cry for an environmental geopolitics that questions economic growth and dependence on oil as the only markers of development. Thus, it was evocative for this demonstration at COP29 to signal not only a new paradigm for just transition, but to reorient our global compass and our directional imagination of civilization away from the North-South stratification that constantly places the Global South in a position of extraction and need relative the political economic imperialism of the Global North, specifically North Atlantic modernity in its Euro-American latitudinal influence. In this new cartography of climate action, neither Africa nor Ecuador are the “Global South” relative to an overdeveloped Global North; these locations, and the stalwart climate activists that call them home, are the center of the world, leading us into whatever semblance of a sustainable future we may yet bequeath posterity — if we are so lucky.

Yasunize the World Demonstration @ COP29

I open this year’s reflections on COP29 for the Swarthmore @ COP blog with this anecdote because it signals the indomitable energy of resolution that many negotiators and delegates from the so-called Global South have taken upon themselves, especially in light of the impending second administration of Donald Trump. Our week 1 delegation left Swarthmore just 4 days after Election Day, traveling to Baku, Azerbaijan in a swirl of affect that threatened to derail the intentions of COP29 before it even began. Here, it may be useful to refresh our memory of “the long national nightmare” that was Trump 1.0: less than 18 months after the historic adoption of the Paris Agreement of 2015, President Trump pulled the United States from complying with our Nationally Determined Contributions both in our attempts to scale-down our fossil fuel dependence as well as our pledges to provide financing and cash payments to those developing nations of the Global South who need variously to adapt, mitigate, and/or respond to the losses and damages of climate change and extreme weather events. During the first Trump administration, the common sense sentiment began to emerge that it was necessary for the US, as the world’s largest and most-developed economy, to “reclaim the global lead” on climate action, with the lack of such leadership representing a stumbling block to the climate governance regime enacted by the UNFCCC. (The folks who honestly spout such rhetoric are usually blind to the American exceptionalism of their argument, and the patronizing, Marshall Plan-style way it addresses the globe, but I digress). The United States remained out of compliance with the Paris Agreement until President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in climate resiliency in US history. President Biden, thus, made a triumphal return to COP27 in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, where he gave a speech from the plenary hall to thunderous applause. Now, just 2 years later, and with only 12-15% of the IRA’s funding appropriations actually paid out, the United States is, once again, on the brink of puling out of the Paris Agreement, and perhaps from leaving the UNFCCC regime entirely.

(I am old enough to have been a perspicacious 7th grader who observed President Clinton sign the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first binding multinational agreement on climate emerging from the UNFCCC. I am also old enough to have been a 10th grader who remembers the newly-elected President George W. Bush refuse to cooperate with Kyoto, and I recall the 95-0 senate vote against its ratification. The UNFCCC has watched the United States, like a geopolitical pendulum, swing both ways many times before, flaunting the climactic reality and thumbing its nose at the world.)

Environmental and Energy Study Institute Press Conference Panel featuring American politicians/policy makers

Thus, one might speculate the mood at COP29 would be grim, pessimistic, forlorn even. But instead, the energy here is one of urgent confidence, as the rest of the 198 Parties to the Conference are resolved to fill the void left by the withdrawal of Trump’s America from the global world. Indeed, one might even detect a whiff of “good riddance” on the part of the Parties who remain, steadfast in their conviction that we are the last generation of humans who can effectively hold planetary warming to an average increase of 1.5 degrees celsius (perhaps 2.0 would be a more realistic, yet less ideal benchmark).

To this end, the delegates and observers — including Swarthmore’s week 1 students — have engaged the conference in eager pursuit of keeping the intended goals of COP29, namely, settling the business of the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), a plan first agreed upon in 2015 to set a new goal building upon the floor of $100 B USD. Beginning in 2021, an ad hoc work program was established to facilitate technical discussions around the NCQG and to take stock of progress made in 2022 and 2023. The plan for this year is to tabulate these needs and set the NCQG — with or without the United States, this work must continue.

But what, exactly, is to become of the United States? I observed a press conference panel hosted by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute featuring Serena McIlwain, the Secretary of Environment for the state of Maryland, Wade Crowfoot from the California Natural Resources Agency, and Melissa Logan, mayor of Blytheville, AR, located along the banks of the mighty Mississippi River. These three American politicians and policymakers — two Black women and one indigenous man — instigated renewed hope as they confidently and boldly projected a plan of action at the state and local municipal levels to mobilize “boots on the ground” in support of maintaining America’s NDCs, despite the Trump Administration’s impending dereliction of duty. In particular, Mayor Logan passionately promoted the Mississippi River Cities and Town Initiative which includes a bipartisan collaboration between over 150 mayors whose towns and cities line the Mississippi River, one of the world’s most critical lifelines, a waterway whose transited goods supply 1/12 of the globe’s population with their necessary provisions. The work of sustainability will continue because it must!

Across the next two weeks, two groups of Swarthmore students will observe the proceedings of COP29, networking with likeminded advocates and documenting the progress of the NCQG. This blog will feature several of their reflections and form a digital guide for the broader Swarthmore community to follow. Additionally, our students will takeover the Swarthmore Instagram page, and we are planning a spring 2025 on-campus panel to help contextualize the stakes of COP29 for our local campus and borough community. Be sure to follow along!

The Shifting Sands of COP28

By Prof. James Padilioni, Jr.

Como arena entre los dedos. For some reason, there are certain phrases that strike me as more evocative in my heritage language of Spanish than their translation into English, my dominant tongue. One of these – como arena entre los dedos / like sand between the fingers – describes the futility of exerting more and more energy trying to accomplish something that is fundamentally structured in an antagonistic or unproductive way.

For the last week I have attended side events, plenary sessions, and policy negotiations at COP28, and despite the goodwill for building sustainable futures carried to Dubai Expo City by many of the over 80,000 registered attendees, all I keep hearing in my head is the endless refrain that so much of the intentions uttered here will amount to nothing more than a Sisyphean effort to grab hold of the earth como arena entre los dedos. Though I strive to model for my students that “my default position is wonder [in the face of the beauty, magic, miracles, and patterns of the world], I am not without critique, disappointment, frustration, and even depression when I contemplate humanity.”

Prof. Padilioni with Swarthmore-Pomona delegation (and friends!) at COP28

Since the 2015 adoption of the Paris Agreement, much fanfare has been made around the target of slashing emissions by half their current rate prior to 2030 in order for humans to have a chance at limiting global average temperature warming to only 1.5°C beyond pre-industrial levels (with a 2.0 degree average warming placed as the upper threshold of acceptability.) However, report after report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organization, and other climate science researchers over the course of 2023 in advance of COP28 has continued to sound the alarm that, with our current carbon emission rates, Earth is likely (66%) to exceed the 1.5°C benchmark prior to 2030, despite the now-eight-year global campaign to mitigate this outcome. Additionally, since the 2015 adoption of the Paris Agreement, it has also been known that COP28 would form the first global stocktake, defined by the UNFCCC as “a process for countries and stakeholders to see where they’re collectively making progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement – and where they’re not.” As an accounting and inventorying measure, the global stocktake was intended to enable the world to “identify the gaps, and work together to chart a better course forward to accelerate climate action.”

But I am pained to report the global stocktake is, perhaps, the grandest staging of political theater humankind has ever had the opportunity to witness. For eight years now, various carbon markets and other trading schema have emerged to help facilitate a country’s net reduction in fossil fuel emissions so they can meet their obligations according to their nationally determined contributions (NDCs). But, at best, this stocktake is a ruse that, como arena entre los dedos was never intended as a true or accurate accounting measure, as country NDCs and their concomitant stocktake do not account for carbon emissions generated by militarism and warfare. Here, I find myself once again turning to sand as a proverbial figure for human futility: how utterly absurd it is to speak of reducing carbon emissions while simultaneously sticking one’s head in the sand as it relates to the ecological cost of warfare writ large. One cannot claim to care about the environment on one hand, while ignoring a primary vector of environmental degradation on the other. To ignore military fossil fuels on paper, while espousing “net-zero” carbon arrangements via financial and credit instruments is the height of absurdity. The reality of our warming atmospheric condition abides, regardless whether we factor military greenhouse gases into our bookkeeping measures or not.

Graphic advertising the Peoples Plenary for Climate Justice at COP28

From the Steppes of Eastern Europe to the Levant of the Eastern Mediterranean, and down through the Sudd wetlands of the Upper Nile to the Jebel Marra and beyond, the ecological destruction of warfare is on full display as we “doom scroll” through our social media feeds. As The New York Times has made clear, it should be obvious to any half-aware person that “Wars destroy habitats, kill wildlife, generate pollution and remake ecosystems entirely, with consequences that ripple through the decades.” But that which is seemingly-obvious is often elusive to collective human efforts, and thus, while the UNFCCC climate regime seeks to reign in excessive carbon emissions, warfare and genocide form the durable, though apocalyptic, signs of our times. Since February 2022, the Russian-Ukrainian War has expended over 150 million tons of carbon, or “more than the annual emission of a highly developed country like Belgium” according to Viktoria Kireyeva, Ukraine’s deputy minister of environmental protection and natural resources, who addressed this matter at the COP28 side event, “Climate damage of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the knowledge gap on conflict and military emissions COP28.” Likewise, in just the first month of Israel’s besiegement of Gaza, over 25,000 tons of munitions rained down upon the coastal strip the size of Philadelphia, with a carbon expenditure equalling the “annual energy use of approximately 2,300 homes, or the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from approximately 4,600 passenger vehicles.” And even in so-called peace time, the world’s militaries, with their aircraft, tanks, and weapons, and via their drills, exercises and other daily operations, are estimated to account for 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, this is only an estimate because the Paris Agreement contains no operationalized mechanism to provide a true accounting of militarism’s carbon budget.

Grandmother Mary Lyons, Anishinaabe-Ojibwe Elder, opens the People’s Plenary

But this is not the whole story. Or at least, I refuse to accept that this be the whole story, for I am convinced that hope is the precondition of all social movements for justice. A young activist addressing the crowd gathered for the COP28 People’s Plenary evoked yet another metaphorical figure of sand and soil that also resonates with me more evocatively in Spanish than English, on account of the fact I first learned of this popular Mexican dicho while visiting the revolutionary murals of San Diego’s famous Chicano Park in Barrio Logan. Despite the seemingly-nonstop onslaught of bad news, we must never let ourselves feel beat down, but, rather, remember this truth: they tried to bury us, but they forgot that we are seeds / intentaron de enterrarnos, pero no sabían que somos semillas. While the shifting sands of time and the fog of war obscure our utopian visions for desirable sustainable futures, may we never forget our collective power to sprout, set roots, and flourish.

#AfricaCOP27: The Whole World is Watching

By Prof. James Padilioni, Jr.

The proceedings at this year’s COP27 are now well underway. Delegates from every corner of the globe have converged at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to participate in critical negotiations, discussions, and networking opportunities — all in the name of securing full implementation of the climate goals adopted in the Paris Agreement of 2015 and the recommitments made in last year’s Glasgow Climate Pact. However, according to the UN, “since COP26 in Glasgow, only 29 out of 194 countries came forward with tightened national plans” to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by 45% prior to 2030, in order to hold global temperature warming to 1.5 degrees celsius and eventually achieve “net-zero” emissions by 2050.

Adding yet more urgency to these negotiations is this year’s theme, #AfricaCOP27, a rallying cry for African nations — and Black-majority Caribbean nations — to take the ethical lead on climate action through the development of sustainable green technologies. While many African nations contain the creativity, social cooperation, and political will to implement sustainable development, they do not have the capital necessary to catalyze the process. Of course, this situation is not a mere coincidence of history, but rather its consequence, as centuries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade followed by European colonization of the African continent intentionally extracted wealth and natural resources from African societies, leaving them economically impoverished. What’s more, these same processes of extraction and exploitation created the very Industrial Revolution itself, the prime generator of both Global Northern wealth and the excessive fossil fuel emissions underlying the conditions of climate chaos we face today.

photo of the Niger Pavilion — The Niger Pavilion at COP27

At the opening plenary session on Monday, Senegalese President and current Chairman of the African Union, Macky Sall, declared it was time for Africa to “make history (faire histoire),” as opposed to being the “victim” of the history made for Africa by Europe and the United States. Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley powerfully followed Sall’s charge, as she called for the dismantling of the Bretton Woods monetary system structure that created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and blasted rich nations for maintaining debt financing obligations vis-à-vis nations of the Global South. Motley also excoriated private capital, asking, “how do companies make $200 billion dollars in profits in the last three months and not expect to contribute at least 10 cents in every dollar of profit to a loss and damage fund? This is what our people expect.”

While the centering of Black leadership and frontline communities is an important and long-overdue corrective to global political economy, this alone will not guarantee a successful conference. Will the negotiations at COP27 bring forth a new framework for climate reparations, ushering in a future of flourishing for Africa and the entire planet? With global temperatures continuing to rise and 2030 fast approaching, the stakes of such questioning could never be higher. Stay tuned to this blog for updates from our student delegates as they track these dynamics over the next two weeks.