Crypto News: COP29: Storm warning

Good evening from Baku. Almost a week has gone by and we don't want to say it's been chaos — there's a much higher bar for that label these days — but watching one country's delegation head for the exit and another nation's climate minister refuse to show up next week isn't a great look. Meanwhile, the deal on the table is still due for many nights of heavy edits. Read on for more, and catch up with all of our COP29 coverage for free on Bloomberg.com.

By Will Kennedy

If there was a Beaufort scale for diplomatic negotiations, it might range from 1) Productive through 12) Close to Breakdown, perhaps with 7) Tough and 9) Fraught along the way.

Although COPs are never easy going, we're still not quite half way through, so we're probably somewhere around 3) Businesslike – even with Argentina's go-home and the fight between host Azerbaijan and France.

But there's no doubt negotiators have a long week ahead if they're going to land the finance deal needed to mark Baku a success.

Our colleagues at Carbon Brief, who do a magnificent job of tracking the minutiae of the negotiations, just put out a pretty striking measure of just how much there is left to do. COP29 has more than 100 items on the agenda, and there's still no text for half of them.

There is a text for the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) — the awkwardly named target for climate finance that's the most important thing to be settled — but the last public version contained 187 brackets and stood at 33 pages. The final text probably doesn't need to be more than two.

The new target will almost certainly need to be multiples of the current annual goal of $100 billion that ends next year, but Europe and other donors won't stomach anywhere near the $1 trillion demanded by poorer nations coming from public funds alone.

Talking to experienced COP diplomats here this week, there's concern that the difficulty of any negotiation about money, the inexperience of the Azerbaijani presidency and difficult geopolitical backdrop may combine to make a deal elusive.

Any route to success almost certainly runs through China. Western countries carrying most of the burden today, want China — the world's biggest emitter — to pay its way.

In his speech at the Leaders' Summit earlier this week, Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang gave a more expansive definition of China's climate finance than he's previously put forward, a sign, perhaps, that Beijing is willing to have its spending acknowledged in the final deal.

In any case, China's diplomatic weight will be crucial in persuading the G77 coalition of developing nations to accept any deal.

Baku's second week will be difficult, but a full-blown diplomatic storm can still be avoided.

1,773

The number of fossil fuel advocates registered to attend COP29, according to an analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition. The accounting includes representatives of oil and gas companies as well as business groups -- some of whom work on low- and zero-emission energy initiatives, too.

"There are some voices in Russia calling for the withdrawal from the Paris accord. This is wrong. There is no way back."

Boris Titov

President Vladimir Putin's special representative for international cooperation in sustainability

Russia backs the Paris climate agreement, the Kremlin's envoy said, adding he hoped President-elect Donald Trump will also keep the US in the landmark agreement.

There was a long line to see former US Vice President Al Gore speak at an event for Climate TRACE, a greenhouse gas monitoring group, in the Blue Zone this morning. Our reporter Jennifer A. Dlouhy said one queued-up banker told her it was "the hottest ticket in town." While Gore is certainly a big deal on the climate scene, the comment probably more reflects the lack of star power in Baku. Only two G7 leaders showed up this week. Past COPs have also drawn Hollywood A-listers like Leonardo DiCaprio or celebrity activists like Greta Thunberg. Climate talks now seem to be better at attracting fossil fuel lobbyists, according to Gore. Oil companies are better at capturing politicians than emissions, he said, "and they're good at capturing COPs also."

Azerbaijan said it'll build its first offshore wind farm. The country's state energy company Socar signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia's ACWA Power and the United Arab Emirates' Masdar for the development of a 3.5-gigawatt project in the Caspian Sea. The agreement was signed on the sidelines of COP29.

South Africa thinks China could take a lead on climate. The country may have an opportunity now with the US set to tamp down its climate commitments following the election of Donald Trump as president, Dion George, South Africa's environment minister, said in a Bloomberg TV interview.

The COP process has been put on notice. Some of the most trusted names in the world of climate said the current structure cannot "deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity." Ban Ki-moon and Christiana Figueres, who formerly held the jobs of UN secretary general and UNFCCC executive secretary, respectively, were among the signatories of a letter urging for " a fundamental overhaul of the COP."

The G7 'wins' the first Fossil of the Day prize at COP29. First introduced at climate talks in 1999, the ironic daily award at COPs goes to countries "judged to have done their best to block progress in the negotiations."

Sure, there are reasons to be pessimistic about reaching a deal — or at least one that is both ambitious and credible. But COP veterans remind us things always look bad midway through the negotiations. And anxiety is en vogue at the COPs. Jake Schmidt, the Natural Resources Defense Council's senior strategic director for international climate, said even as the end drew near in Paris in 2015, and despite having key details already locked up, he was apprehensive about a deal. It's a reminder of another COP truism: Nothing is agreed until everything's agreed. Even with the risks that the US, and potentially Argentina, could leave the Paris Agreement, a deal from this COP would be a good sign for the multilateral diplomatic system. Remember that China, the world's biggest emitter, remains committed. Also, Brazil's Lula, whose country will play host to COP next year, is urging Trump to not walk away from the climate fight.

Next week we will need to see specific deal numbers. There's the top line figure — which needs to be in the trillions of dollars and will include contributions from multilateral development banks and the private sector, in addition to what countries are willing to cough up from their own coffers. But it will be that latter source of cash developing countries are most interested in hearing about. Right now the unofficial betting market in the blue zone thinks that number could land somewhere around $300 billion. Yet in reality, vulnerable nations would likely leave Baku feeling shortchanged even if that figure got up to $400 billion, given the scale of what's needed.

Alas, no rest for us tomorrow. Saturday is a work day here at COP, so we'll bring you more of what we're hearing on the ground then.

Reporter Akshat Rathi sits down with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, who made his second-ever appearance at the United Nations climate conference. Woods made the case for why incoming US president Donald Trump shouldn't exit the Paris Agreement, and should uphold the country's monumental climate legislation passed under the Biden administration. It's quite the tone shift for a company that has a well-documented history of sowing doubt about the dangers of global warming. Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every

To help you picture what a COP conference looks like, think of it as half trade show, half EPCOT. Just like a trade show you have stalls, conference halls and meeting rooms. But similar to a Disney theme park, country pavilions can look like a cartoon version of the nations they represent. We think the UK could have taken it further with a Doctor Who TARDIS and a double decker bus.