For the third successive year, the Conference of the Parties who are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was held in a major oil-producing nation. This time it was in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, which relies on fossil fuels for 90% of its exports.
Last year it was in the United Arab Emirates, in Dubai, and in 2022 it was hosted by Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
According to The Guardian, the smell of oil permeates Baku, while refinery flares light the night sky and small nodding donkey oil wells are busy at work across the city.
In case you’ve lost count, this year we were up to COP number 29. About 50,000 bureaucrats, campaigners and investors went to the 11-day official summit, largely to strike an updated and more realistic annual climate finance deal to supersede the $US100 billion-a-year fund which has been available to developing nations since 2020 to help them decarbonise their economies.
In the end, after shenanigans, undercover stings on government fossil-fuel deals, threatened walkouts and the overbearing presence of oil and gas company executives, COP29 members somehow managed to achieve a finance deal which, on the face of it, triples the amount in that fund, though fails to account for inflation.
However, struck in the last minutes of the conference on Sunday morning, the pledge of $US300b annually for these countries has been described as a "travesty of justice" and "abysmally poor".
The COP conferences are looking increasingly creaky these days, not as fit-for-purpose as they once were. They are frequently criticised for their very hard-fought gains, often in the dying hours of the meeting, and for what they are not actually achieving.
But as cumbersome as they appear, and as speedily as they appear to come round yet again, a vast amount of good work and relationship building does go on at them, even if that never makes the headlines. The question is, how else could a demanding subject like this, of vital importance to the future of our world, be better dealt with?
Perhaps one possibility might be to move away from annual conferences. This might make two- or three-yearly meetings more crucial and possibly more productive, although international momentum for change might be lost through a seeming lack of urgency.
At the moment, there is also a lot of cynicism about how COP events appear to be catch-up occasions for oil company bosses, about the influence they exert over proceedings, and why oil-producing nations have been recent hosts.
There is also concern COP has become overwhelmingly a northern hemisphere meeting, though there have been four held in the southern hemisphere. Australia has high hopes of co-hosting the 2026 meeting with Pacific Island countries, though Turkey currently stands in its way.
This COP will be remembered for the last-gasp agreement on the finance deal, which developing nations are outraged about. They had been seeking $US1.3 trillion a year to assist them in adapting and mitigating against climate change, which, for those already living uncomfortably close to sea level, is urgent and essential.
There were accusations from some that the agreement of the $US300b pledge was stage managed. Among them was Panama’s representative Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, who said: "The gavel was hit way too fast. Developed nations always throw text at us at the last minute."
For that reason, there are many delegates now leaving Azerbaijan who view the outcome as more a victory for developed rather than developing nations.
Neither was there progress on firming up last year’s UAE statement, to transition away from fossil fuels. Countries considered attempts to firm up on this were too weak and rejected them.
Unfortunately, any optimism for next year’s COP30 in Belem, Brazil, is already tempered by the knowledge it is being hosted by yet another huge oil producer.
