COP30 fell short on fossil fuels and financing goals, but a new dialogue on climate and trade holds promise to put a price on CO2.
The COP30 climate talks launched two weeks ago amid high expectations for progress in Belém, Brazil. After 10 years of the Paris Climate Agreement, new national commitments to cut greenhouse gases were due and momentum was building for an international plan to phase out the world’s use of fossil fuels.
Further, the COP30 setting at the mouth of the Amazon River stressed the importance of forests and nature conservation in the climate fight, and Brazil was set to unveil a new way to fund forest protections. But early signs of progress at the talks seemed to bog down in the tropical heat. By the time negotiators took up the idea of a “road map” to phase out fossil fuels, a fire in the venue forced a temporary evacuation and offered fitting symbolism for a COP going down in flames. On Saturday, the talks closed with mixed results at best: financing for forests grew but not to the hoped-for levels; national plans still came short of the Paris target; and the COP30 final document did not call for new action to end fossil fuels. “My own judgment is that the outcomes were a combination of disappointing, problematic and potentially important,” Harvard economist and veteran COP observer Robert Stavins told Newsweek. Stavins directs both the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the school’s Project on Climate Agreements and he has attended close to 20 of the annual United Nations climate gatherings. Stavins said that with the Trump administration abandoning the Paris Agreement and ignoring COP30 , the realistic expectations for a strong outcome were low. However, he said, COP30 produced a “potentially important” development on global trade and climate, a relatively new topic in the COP process. The European Union has tied trade to climate action with the adoption of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism , a means of pricing the greenhouse gas emissions involved in the manufacturing of many products the E.U. imports. In effect, CBAM is a CO2 tariff on carbon-intensive products like aluminum, cement and steel. In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Stavins said a dialogue on trade launched at COP30 could serve to overcome some objections to the CBAM and encourage other countries to take a similar approach to pricing carbon pollution. Newsweek: Tell me about what you found “potentially important” coming out of COP30. Robert Stavins: They established what is called a trade and climate dialogue. Obviously, the relationship between international trade and climate change is extremely important and one can view it in lots of ways. Some countries are very hostile towards the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism in the European Union and feel that it’s a way of keeping developing countries mired in poverty through what is essentially environmental protectionism. The Europeans obviously view it as both necessary for establishing a level playing field but also as a way of inducing other countries to take on domestic carbon pricing mechanisms in order to escape the tariff when they export those specific bulk products: iron and steel and cement, aluminum, a few others, into the European Union. What’s striking is that they agreed to start a 2-year work program on how international trade can support equitable climate action. Well, once they start a program, then they have to meet and talk about it, they have to put things on paper, so this one actually does have a bit of meat. There was interest expressed from the Brazilian presidency going into the COP in the notion of something broader than the CBAM: A number of countries putting in place carbon pricing domestic mechanisms—whether it’s a carbon tax or auctioned allowances under cap and trade—keeping the revenue and then putting in place essentially trade barriers like the CBAM on non-participating countries. In other words, expanding the CBAM into something like a carbon pricing club. That reminds me that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the environment committee, was the sole federal U.S. representative there in Belém and this was one of his top talking points. He called the CBAM “a lifeboat” for climate safety, and I’m wondering if you agree with that assessment. I think it is. I originally saw it as an understandable reaction, trying to make European industry happy, so that they wouldn’t be at a competitive disadvantage. But I was very skeptical of the possibility of it actually inducing other countries to put in place carbon pricing mechanisms. But I was wrong, because in fact other countries are in that process. Turkey has been completely upfront about the fact that they’re developing a carbon price mechanism for the explicit purpose of not having to pay the CBAM. And I can tell you that I think it’s five other countries that are also developing plans...
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