Starmer and Miliband have just rolled up at the biggest circus in town

Cop has become an expensive farce that does more harm than good for the cause it was designed to help

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It turns out that it wasn’t a practical joke after all. The Cop29 summit really is being held in Azerbaijan, a country where fossil fuels account for 90pc of exports.
Next up, perhaps they could hold it in Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, site of the largest oil field in the world, or in Taean in South Korea, the site of the world’s largest coal-fired power plant.
After all, this is an organisation that long seems to have abandoned any sense of shame, and which has been growing more and more overblown with every year that passes. World leaders such as our own Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and his chief green commissar, Ed Miliband, still dutifully show up, and announce some new targets.
But the blunt truth is this: the Cop circus has turned into an expensive farce – and it is time it was cancelled before it does any more damage to the global economy.
It is not often that I agree with Greta Thunberg, but when she describes the choice of Baku for the latest Cop climate summit as “a chance to greenwash their crimes and human rights abuses” the campaigner was, for once, getting it completely right.
Given that there are perfectly good conference centres in Germany, Canada, Sweden, or indeed the UK, it is a completely inexplicable decision.
Many of the world’s most important leaders decided to skip this one, including Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, but with depressing inevitably Starmer and Miliband made the 3,000-mile trip, with promises to make the UK a “global leader” in the fight against climate change.
They even had a new target to announce, promising to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions by a more ambitious 81pc compared to 1990 level by 2035. They will probably be back next year promising 80pc.
The trouble is, the Cop circus has turned into an embarrassment to everyone concerned. Year after year, politicians, lobbyists and activists fly into an expensive resort, and spend a few days announcing fresh carbon targets and delivering pious, hollow speeches about climate change that always sound like they were written by AI.
In reality, it is time to cancel the whole charade – for three reasons.
First, it has turned into a blatant form of greenwashing. Only last week, the executive in charge of Azerbaijan’s Cop29 delegation, Elnur Soltanov, was caught on camera discussing “investment opportunities” in the state oil and gas company with a man posing as a potential investor.
“We have lots of gas fields to be developed,” he told him cheerfully. Likewise, the last two summits have been held in Egypt and the UAE, not countries you would automatically choose for their commitment to leading the world on renewable energy.
In reality, the summit at best has often turned into a way for the oil and gas companies to pay some lip service to fighting climate change, and at worst it has become a place for hustling energy deals in the bars of some swanky hotels.
We can all argue about whether the climate emergency is threatening the imminent extinction of the planet, or whether it has become slightly overblown. But surely we can all agree that nobody needs a big trade show for the oil industry masquerading as a climate summit.
Next, it encourages pointless grandstanding. It is a relief for taxpayers in Germany, France and the US that their leaders are skipping the event this year: if they had shown up, they would have no doubt felt they had to announce some target or other that would add 50 quid to everyone’s fuel bill.
An annual summit, with saturation coverage by the global media, encourages hyper-meddling, with leaders pressured into making pointless announcements, as Sir Keir and Green Ed did for the UK on Tuesday.
If we were serious about international co-operation to mitigate climate change, it would be far better for officials and scientists to meet quietly over Zoom over several months and work out what needed to be done, how practical it was, and how much it would cost. High-profile virtue-signalling doesn’t help anyone.
Finally, what the climate issue really needs right now is some sober analysis. Over the last decade some countries have made a lot of progress, and others less so, while some technologies have proved very effective, and others have been expensive failures.
We know a lot more about the drawbacks of electric vehicles, for example, now that there are lots of them on the road, and we know how reluctant most people are to buy heat pumps even when huge subsidies are thrown at them.
Against that, we know a lot more about mini-nuclear reactors and about battery storage than we did even a couple of years ago. We need to spend a lot more time on cost-benefit studies, figuring out what carbon-reduction strategies are working and which aren’t, and how emissions can be reduced at reasonable cost, and without inflicting unnecessary damage to the industrial base, loading too many taxes on households, or driving up government deficits to unsustainable levels.
The Cop summits are not interested in that. They are too busy providing a platform for empty targets and stale rhetoric.
The harsh truth is this: the annual Cop circus is doing nothing for the climate. It has turned into an annual charade that promotes an endless series of wasteful initiatives, and which, tainted by the whiff of corruption, by now does more harm than good to the cause it was originally designed to help.
Before Cop30 rolls around – in Brazil, only the sixth-largest emitter of carbon in the world – it would be better for everyone if the whole thing was cancelled.
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