Crypto News: COP29: Where's Wall Street?

Good evening from Baku. The atmosphere has become a bit fraught at COP29. Azerbaijan and France are having a noisy fight about colonial sins, Argentinians have packed their bags and headed home and the finance deal everyone needs to agree seems a long way off. Read on for more and catch up with all of our COP29 coverage for free on Bloomberg.com.

By Natasha White

It's finance day here in Baku, and I've stepped away from the negotiation halls to track down Wall Street. It's a trickier task than the last COP in Dubai where the C-suite, including BlackRock's Larry Fink and HSBC's then chief Noel Quinn, were out in force.

It's been made no easier by the harshly lit, low-ceiling maze of meeting rooms where the closest you get to nature is some bird sounds played through speakers in the corridors.

Less chirpy are the private capital providers, the banks and investors, who are here at COP29. A new, possibly $1 trillion climate finance goal hinges on their contribution, but none of them are party to the talks.

"Right now, it's a stretch," Jay Collins, vice chairman of banking and public sector at Citigroup, said on the possibility of landing on an agreement of that scale. "It's going to require extraordinary efforts."

Collins pointed to the huge advances that multilateral development banks have made when it comes to using their finite capital more efficiently. They've also introduced tools to help mobilize private funds, like the World Bank Group's new one-stop-shop guarantee marketplace.

But when it comes to delivering the kind of sums required, "we're failing pretty miserably," he said.

That's not the only constraint. Even if financiers were ready or able to write a trillion dollars' worth of checks, there aren't enough investment-ready projects out there to spend it all. The enabling environment isn't there yet, Collins said.

The final element that Collins sees as key is having financial regulators in the room. Banks and insurance companies face very stringent capital rules, particularly in emerging markets and for large scale infrastructure projects like renewable energy. But existing regulatory frameworks are inhibiting the flow of money from the developed to the developing world, he says. "Having a financial prudence mindset in these dialogues" is critical, Collins said.

For COP first-timers like Bahare Haghshenas, global head of sustainable transformation at EQT, the world's third largest private equity firm, her initial takeaway of the UN process resembles frustration. You would think, she says, that getting everyone who's anyone in the world of climate together under one roof, would inspire more immediate action.

"There's so many people here and we have everything we need," she said. "Every corner of the world is represented, and everyone from the UN and civil society organizations to politicians, policy makers and businesses. So why can't we accelerate quicker?"

This is the number of pages in the current draft of the COP29 finance deal. It's final form will likely need to get down to two.

"How can I do this in a way that is going to meet that [climate finance] need fairly and also isn't going to get me voted out of office?"

Joe Thwaites

Senior advocate for international climate finance with the Natural Resources Defense Council

Thwaites sums up the balancing act for developed countries at these negotiations. Even if they want to provide more funding to poorer nations, cash-strapped governments need to justify the spending to their constituents at home.

John Kerry warned China will win if President-elect Donald Trump pulls the US out of the Paris Agreement. It "would cede leadership to China, the very thing that he says we don't want to do," the former US Secretary of State and climate envoy said in a Bloomberg TV interview on the sidelines of the Barclays Asia Forum in Singapore on Thursday. "He would diminish the ability of the world to be able to respond to this existential crisis."

Washington is taking charge of climate action — just not Washington, DC. Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington state, has come to COP with some good news: US states, cities and businesses can make up for the federal government's lack of commitment to fighting global warming. "We don't want the world to get down in the dumps about Donald Trump's ascendancy," he said in a pep talk to delegates on the sidelines of COP on Thursday. "We need to pick ourselves up, be aggressive and ambitious, and realize that action is the best antidote to despair."

The world needs to become more efficient. With huge fanfare at COP28 in Dubai, nations embraced a commitment to double the global rate of annual energy efficiency improvements to more than 4% by 2030. A year later, new data and analysis shows little has been done to meet the target. Instead, so much of the focus is on rallying low- and zero-carbon power supply — not finding ways to cut the world's hunger for it, according to Mission Efficiency, a coalition of governments, NGOs and think tanks. The global community achieved only 2% efficiency gain in 2023, and even less improvement is expected this year, the group said.

BloombergNEF has put a price tag on the emerging market energy transition. It released a new report on Thursday saying low- and middle-income economies, excluding China, will need $2.6 trillion a year for everything from solar and wind power to electric vehicles.

We're waiting to see the core climate finance negotiating text get whittled down from its current mammoth 33 pages. Negotiators on Thursday agreed to focus on working through three issues seen as relatively less controversial — transparency, access and "disenablers" to finance — at a technical level, before ministers get involved next week. "We are very worried because there was literally more than a year in producing this text and it was quite long," said Jake Werksman, the EU's lead negotiator. The latest version is more than 15 times the potential final length that could be necessary "in order to capture everything that we need to send the signal we need," he said. —Jennifer A. Dlouhy

The one where all the corporate brands showed up. Domino's, Costa Coffee, Paul. We're seeing a lot of big name food and drink vendors at this year's COP venue, which was unexpected. Also, what's Central Perk doing here? The Friends' 30th anniversary promotional campaign may be getting a little out of hand, if you ask me. At a Friends-themed café in the Blue Zone you can buy a special blend based on your character profile. I'd like to think I'm a Rachel, although my friends probably see me as a Phoebe. In my heart, though, I know I'm a Monica. —Siobhan Wagner

Photographer: Siobhan Wagner/Bloomberg

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 Thursday.