The Failure of the United Nation’s Annual COP Meetings

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC was formed in 1994 as a venue for member nations to negotiate and reach agreements on climate change policies and actions. It holds annual meetings of the Conference of Partners (COP) to review progress towards limiting climate change.  The first meeting was held in Berlin in March 1995 and the 27^th meeting was held in Dubai in November 2023.  Since these meetings began, annual CO2 emissions have not decreased. Instead, they have increased by 60%, rising from 24.5 to 37.5 billion metric tons per year.

What can account for such a colossal failure? The common answer is that oil, gas, and coal companies are to blame.  After all, they are the ones who dig, drill, pump, refine, distribute, and profit from the sale of fossil fuels. True enough, but they wouldn’t be doing this if their products were not being purchased.  The illicit drug market in the U.S. may serve as a rough analogy.  Who do we blame for drug trafficking, the sellers or the buyers?  There would be no market if there were no buyers.

This isn’t meant to transfer blame from the sellers to the buyers but rather to highlight the larger problem: modern economies can’t exist without consuming large amounts of energy.  And as the global population grows, the amount of energy required to sustain it keeps growing.  When COP meetings started, the global population was 5.6 billion.  Today it is over 8 billion.  That’s a 43% increase in less than three decades.

Except for a few NGOs, this isn’t something governments are addressing. China implemented a one-child policy in 1980 which had many counterproductive consequences.  It ended in 2016. Furthermore, cultural, economic, and logistical issues inhibit the effectiveness of family planning in developing countries where fertility rates remain high. Population growth is an unmanageable variable.  Although the global fertility rate spontaneously declined from 5.3 in 1963 to 2.3 in 2021, the base is now so large that absolute growth is still substantial.  In 2023 the global population grew by 70 million – more than the population of France.

Another reason for the failure is that energy means economic and military power.  In a competitive world, governments will not willingly sacrifice these interests. Abundant, affordable energy is the lifeblood of any country, and that is why, far from discouraging the use of fossil fuels, government subsidies to fossil fuel companies are growing and are now more than $7 trillion annually.

Because nothing can be done about population growth or our energy dependence, the world shifted its attention to replacing fossil fuels with clean energy. That way we could solve the emissions problem without giving up energy consumption – we could have our cake and eat it too.  We already had nuclear and hydropower but with nuclear unpopular and hydro pretty well exploited, we focused our attention on wind and solar.  After two decades of promotion, subsidies, development, and growth, wind and solar supply only a feeble 3% of the global energy demand. The industry will continue to grow, but the idea that it will ever replace fossil fuels is unrealistic.

Nor does nuclear power look promising. The world’s 436 nuclear reactors produce 4% of the world’s energy. We would need 9,000 reactors to replace fossil fuels – a task as impossible as covering the planet in wind turbines and solar farms.  Meanwhile, nuclear fusion is still an unproven technology.  The ITER experiment may eventually provide proof of concept, but not before its conclusion in 2035.  If it does prove feasible, decades more would be required to bring even a handful of reactors online.

This is neither an optimistic nor a pessimistic assessment. It is a realistic assessment. Clean energy sources cannot replace fossil fuels, and governments, businesses, and individuals will not stop using them until they are forced to do so by the consequences of climate change and ecological devastation.