Next Climate Summit Will Face the Tug Between Oil and the Amazon
Activists complain that the last three COP hosts were oil-and-gas dependent. South America’s biggest producer hosts the 2025 session.
Oil pump jacks and drilling rigs along the Caspian Sea in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/BloombergWelcome to our guide to the energy and commodities markets powering the global economy. Today, Senior Executive Editor Will Kennedy assesses whether next year’s conference in Brazil can overcome the nation’s booming oil production.
The traveling COP jamboree is done for another year, ending in the last-ditch deal that’s become traditional at the annual UN climate conference.
While energy was front and center at last year’s summit in Dubai, the talks in Azerbaijan were dominated by the issue of climate finance for the developing world. After a chaotic final day, a promise to provide $300 billion a year to poorer nations, compared with $100 billion today, was enough to keep everyone on board.
But underneath, the issue of fossil fuels — and the world’s failure to move away from them fast enough to meet net zero goals — was everywhere.
Many climate stalwarts complained that the last three COP hosts — Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan — were oil-and-gas dependent economies.