CCOP2024: Three Letters on the Eve of Departure to COP29 in Baku
(illustration by Erhan Yalvaç)
by Lowell Bliss, Director of Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership, WCIU
I am in the departure lounge of the Istanbul airport waiting for a delayed Azerbaijani Airlines flight that will take me to the COP29 climate summit in Baku. Once there, I will be joined by two teams of 20 people for each week of the COP, participants and co-leaders who will enter the COP29 negotiations as officially accredited observers. We are the Christian Climate Observers Program, or as we say this year: CCOP2024 at COP29 in Baku. As a co-director of CCOP, each year it has become my habit to send out a “Letter on the Eve-of-Departure” that helps CCOPers reconnect to the big picture, reminding them of why they are going to a COP and how to approach the unique prospects of that year’s climate summit. Here in November of 2024, that one letter morphed into three as we scrambled on the morning of November 6 to deal with the election of a “climate unfriendly” government in the United States. The first letter is about emotional regulation. The second letter is about how the election makes it even more imperative that we faithfully engage COP29. The third letter is about what is unchanged about COP29, and includes three invitations of how to engage it. If you are interested in CCOP2024 at COP29 in Baku, please visit us at www.ccopclimate.org. You can subscribe to our CCOP2024 Daily Newsletters from COP29—written by our participants and students—featuring stories, news, and prayer requests.
First Letter: Sent out to CCOPers on Wednesday, 6 November
Dear beloved CCOPers,
I know that we are not all Americans, but Trump’s victory and the Republican (likely) control of both houses of the US Congress falls particularly hard on our American CCOPers and leaders, and has dreadful implications for climate action around the world. It does change much for how we all approach COP29.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this is so hard.
I had a young intern with me when we went to COP21 in Paris in 2015. Her name was Sammi. She was a biology major at Kansas State University. Samuel, Brian, and Chris remember not only the heady joy of Base Camp in Paris but also how wonderful Sammi was, how hard she worked, how engaged she was with everything happening around the Paris Agreement. Twelve months later, in November of 2016, the day after Trump won his first election, she and her now-husband Lane came over to our house—we were still living in Kansas at the time. She and Lane sat on our couch with Robynn and I, and we all wept. Through her tears, Sammi said, “I just wish we could go back to Paris.”
I am 4.5 hours away from leaving my house and heading toward the airport on my way to Baku. I’m still going because. . . “I am still in,” which is a phrase whose significance we will fully explain, especially to our American CCOPers. I’ll be checking in with our leadership team shortly and we’ll send you a letter soon.
But for now. . . let’s remember what Robynn taught us in Webinar #4.
1. Take three deep cleansing breaths.
2. Ground yourself in your body, in the present moment and in reality:
What are five things you can see with your eyes?
What are four things you can hear with your ears?
What are three things you can touch with your skin?
What are two things you can smell with your nose?
What is one thing you can taste with your tongue?
3. Can you name your emotions today when they come?
4. Can you put your hand over where you feel it in your body and speak kindly to yourself: “This is a perfectly natural emotional response to what has just happened.”
5. Can you remind yourself that you are not alone. You can invite Jesus to come sit with you in this space. You can remind yourself that we have each other and that—even if you can’t find a group of like-minded people locally—we will soon all be together in Baku to help process this.
6. Don’t forget the Breath Prayer that Robynn taught us: (I’m attaching the whole chapter). From Christine Valters Painter, Breath Prayer: an Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred, (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021), 175-177.
Breathe in: I breathe in creation’s goodness,
Breathe out: I breathe out love.
Breathe in: I am called to my part
Breathe out: in the grand unfolding.
We’ll talk soon.
You are very dear to God,
Lowell
Second Letter: Sent out to CCOPers on Thursday, 7 November
Dear CCOP2024 participants and leaders,
I have been working on a letter for you that began like this: “There comes a moment every year in the CCOP program where the badges, beds, buses, and breakfasts have all been arranged. We can take a moment before boarding our airplanes, catch our breaths and remind ourselves of the big picture. We can speak to each other about WHY we are going to the COP. We can stop and listen to the Holy Spirit and ask, ‘What is required of us at this moment, at COP29, in the year 2024?’ Every year, for my part, I try to write up an Eve-of-Departure Letter to a new group of CCOPers…”
But then, this morning’s news of the election outcomes in the United States rendered my letter inadequate. I’ll nonetheless salvage a portion of it and send it to you as a second letter, since I think there are some helpful insights in how to approach COP29. Meanwhile, there are four main things that I want to say to you as you board your own planes to Baku.
Donald Trump won the US presidential election, by a lot. The Republicans reclaimed control of the US senate and may retain control of the House of Representatives (this is still undecided). I know that the United States of America is only one of the 195 signatories to the Paris Agreement. I know that many of our CCOPers are not American. Nonetheless—as the largest historical emitter of CO2, as the second largest annual emitter of CO2, as a wielder of global finance, as a developed world leader—a United States of America under the control of Trump and the Republican congress for the next four years creates an excruciatingly difficult challenge for the whole world at this crucial moment for the Paris Agreement. Project 2025 is the far-right’s plan to staff the Trump administration with loyalists and dismantle many of the policies and agencies which are implementing the US’s climate commitments. Here is a graph published by the Guardian which projects what this means in actual tonnes of additional carbon. (IRA refers to Biden’s famous climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act.)
I am so sorry for us all. This is what we face in the near future, and what will lock in so much suffering in the long term. In light of this, the four things I want to say to you are:
Your constituencies need you at COP29 more than ever before. They need a voice coming from a place that has moved on to the next big newsworthy event, i.e. COP29. They are sick and tired of hearing only about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Tell them about Azerbaijan. Many in your constituency no doubt share your opinion about climate action and a Trump presidency. They need to witness someone like you exercising agency. I agree that it would have been nice if we had a month or two to process the US election before heading off to COP29. We don’t have that luxury. Your constituencies need to know that the world didn’t end on November 5, that the Paris Agreement didn’t expire, that the world is bigger than the United States. Previous CCOPers have gone to a COP to collect stories of climate change suffering in the hopes of sparking the conscience of their constituencies. You too will engage in collecting these types of stories. But now, more than ever, you need to keep your ears open for stories of people, communities, and governments that are, in some small way, “overcoming” climate change. Maybe it’s a special act of compassion, maybe it’s a clever innovation, maybe it’s a grassroots initiative that has taken off. Look for stories that have hope built into them. If a story inspires you to persevere, it will likely inspire your readers and listeners as well. Additionally, there are likely those in your constituency who are celebrating Trump’s victory, who think that climate change is a hoax, who are excited about implementing Project 2025. You are not going to convince any of them in the next two weeks. They are too drunk on their own newly-regained power. But they too need you at COP29 more than ever before. This is called bearing witness with your body. The fact alone that you chose to travel so many kilometers and with personal sacrifice communicates that COP29 must be important. The fact that you are going as a Christian observer communicates that there is an alternative to what Christian nationalists believe the Bible says. You are a prophet even before opening your mouth.
We need each other at COP29 more than ever before. First, we will need each other’s emotional support and camaraderie. We understand each other. We belong to each other. One of my favourite TV series is Ted Lasso. In the final episode of Season 1, the fictional football (soccer) team AFC Richmond has lost a heartbreaking match and has been relegated out of the Premiere League. The team, coaches, staff and owner all sit dejected in the locker room. Coach Lasso addresses them with the following words:
“This is a sad moment right here—for all of us. And there ain’t nothing I can say standing in front of you right now that can take that away. But please do me this favour, will ya? Lift your heads up and look around this locker room. Look at everybody else in here. Now I want you to be grateful that you are going through this sad moment with all these other folks. Because, I promise you, there is something worse out there than being sad—and that is being alone and being sad.”
“Ain’t nobody in this room alone.”
You will not be alone. Secondly, as a climate movement, we will have to figure out what our next steps are, and we’ll need everyone’s wisdom. Finally, those of you who are American, you will meet many African and other non-American observers both in the Blue Zone and in our CCOP2024 Base Camp who know what it feels like to be devastated by an election outcome. They know what it means to live under a hostile and cruel government. They know what it means to do climate action with a national government that does not care, or who cares only for the billionaire class. This a great opportunity to learn from the lived experience of others. Be a learner.
Your national delegation needs you at COP29 more than ever before. If your national delegation is from a nation other than the United States, you need to convince them that THIS is their moment to exercise leadership, to step up and do what the U.S. is about to refuse to do. If your national delegation is from the US, then this will be your only chance to address US Climate Envoy John Podesta and the team that Joe Biden’s State Department has sent to Baku. Tell them to say “yes” to everything this year. Tell them to dump as much non-refundable money as they can get away with into the Climate Finance and the Loss and Damage funds. Tell them to make commitments that bind the Trump administration in such a way that the US can’t avoid sanctions, or international shame. I’m sure that is not how it works, but honestly, I want Podesta to run around acting like the steward in Luke 16:1-13. “And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’” We need friendly governments and friendly colleagues who will empathize with how at least one-half of the US electorate still wants to be a good neighbor.
On a more reasonable note: we Americans (including an expat like me in Canada) must begin to prepare the way for the redesign and relaunch of the “We Are Still In” movement. On June 1, 2017, then-President Donald Trump announced America’s intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In November of that year, at COP23 in Bonn, Germany, Jerry Brown (governor of California at the time) and Michael Bloomberg (then-mayor of New York City) were joined by other leaders including our friend, Bishop Marc Andrus of the Episcopal Diocese of San Francisco. They declared that while Trump has the power to withdraw the US federal government from the Paris Agreement, they intended to remain loyal. The UNFCCC made room for what was called “subnationals”: states, municipalities, businesses, universities, and churches—many with sizeable economies and large energy systems—who were going to work on their own, if need be, for emission reductions and finance commitments. Brian Webb brought Houghton College in as a signatory. Brian and I worked on a start-up called “We Stand with Paris,” that allowed individuals and individual families to sign on to the Paris Agreement. (We even got the UNFCCC’s attention. I’ll be happy to tell you the whole story in Baku.) But my point is this: it begins with a personal commitment. What about you? Are you still in? And that begins with a fundamental truth: you are free. No authoritarian leader, no electoral college, no voting bloc that tries to get you to conform can take away your freedom to act according to your conscience. They don’t get to decide who you are or what you aspire to be.
Your soul needs you at COP29 more than ever before. Poet and essayist Wendell Berry, age 90, has devoted his life to combating the ravages of mountaintop removal coal mining and industrial agriculture in his home state of Kentucky. He was once asked by journalist Bill Moyers about the grim prospects for success. “We don’t have a right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not,” Berry tells him. “The only question we have the right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” Elsewhere, Berry also wrote: “Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success, namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
You are very dear to God,
Lowell
On behalf of the CCOP2024 co-directors and leaders
Third Letter: Sent out to CCOPers on Friday, 8 November
Dear CCOP2024 Participants and Leaders,
This is Part Two of your Eve-of-Departure letter. If this was November 2025 and you were arriving at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, a number of things would likely be true: Donald Trump would have been inaugurated as the 47th US president, he would have already announced that the US was officially pulling out of the Paris Agreement, and if the US was sending a delegation, it might include another panel to talk about the promise of “clean coal” (like his first administration did at COP25 in Madrid.)
BUT—this is not COP30; it is COP29. That is going to be someone else’s CCOP. Yours is CCOP2024 at COP29 in Baku. Live in this year, and do not borrow trouble from tomorrow. The outcome of the US elections does change the context of COP29 and I tried to address this in Part One of the Eve-of-Departure letter, but there is so much that is unchanged about our challenge heading into COP29. Here are the three invitations that I originally wrote up for you, and they apply equally whether you are American or not:
1. I invite you to keep it simple at COP29.
You may or may not know that famed youth activist Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s Syndrome. At times she has been disabled by it: her father Svante recounts times in her childhood when she suffered from “selective mutism,” when she was so overwhelmed that she stopped speaking. In the end though, Greta came to understand her Asperger’s as a “superpower,” and exactly what the climate movement needed. Since she had trouble reading facial expressions in others, she was not easily fooled by all the politicians who tried to put their spin on the climate crisis, who tried to falsely win her over with their promises. She saw things in black-and-white and had very little patience with nuance. While often such an unsophisticated outlook on life is problematic, there are times, especially in a crisis, when things are CLEAR, or at least they should be. The planet is burning. People are dying. The NDCs don’t match up to what is needed. Even a child doesn’t need a calculator to see that the Climate Finance funds are inadequate.
We’ve warned you repeatedly that entering the Blue Zone for the first time is an overwhelming moment, but even after a few days, you will still wonder how even the UNFCCC can keep track of so much going on in so many rooms by so many officials. Chase whatever interests you at COP29, but we invite you to keep it simple by remembering what Brian Webb told us in Webinar #2 to look for at COP29:
· “Sums and Sources” for Climate Finance: Simply put, this is financial assistance from developed countries to assist in mitigation and adaptation in developing countries. The “New Collective Quantified Goal” (NCQG) for 2025 and beyond must be closer to sums of US$1 trillion than to the $100 billion goals of past stinginess. Sources for these funds must become more comprehensive and creative than voluntary public finances alone. Finally, climate finance should feature grants, not loans, lest it exacerbate another global crisis, that of Developing World Debt.
· Progress on phasing out fossil fuels: I can’t imagine that Greta made it all the way through reading the UAE Consensus without snorting, despite COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber considering it one of his greatest triumphs: the UAE Consensus calls for “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” This sounds like just lip service to the science, net zero, and the year 2050. All sectors (e.g. transportation, agriculture, etc.) must phase out fossil fuel usage, not just the energy sector. Being “orderly” is just a code word for not disrupting global capitalism. “Transition away” is too soft language for the radical phase out of fossil fuels that is needed.
· More ambitious NDCs: According to the Climate Action Tracker’s analysis, current pledges and targets (including ones already submitted in preparation for COP30’s agenda) are only sufficient to stop warming at 2.1°C. Policies and actions—what CAT defines as “real world action based on current policies” that implement those pledges—are only projected to prevent a 2.7°C warming. I’m sorry, but 2.7°C and 2.1°C are not 2.0°C and they definitely aren’t 1.5°C. COP29 may try to pat itself on the back and say that we are getting closer, but let’s not forget that every 0.1°C of warming adds exponentially to the suffering of this planet, as we witnessed last week in Spain.
2. I invite you to join me as we sit in the uncomfortable place of uncertainty and lament.
The data around climate finance, carbon emissions, and NDCs is simple. The context in which this COP is being convened is very, very complex. Here are three things we are going to be facing at COP29:
· Uninspired, overmatched, and/or oil-influenced leadership: Azerbaijan is a petrostate, albeit not as major a force in the industry as COP28’s host, the UAE. COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev is a former executive in Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, just like COP28’s president Al Jaber was in UAE’s. Keep your eyes open in the first week of COP29 for a civil society report on how many fossil fuel industry officials are attending COP29, many of them embedded in the government delegations themselves. It’s a staggering thing. Regardless, we face an additional challenge with COP29’s leadership: no one seems inspired. The president of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, seems inspired but for the wrong reasons. He is quoted on the top of the homepage of the official COP29 website: “Being elected by unanimous decision as the host country for COP29 is really a big honour for us. We consider it as a sign of respect from the international community to Azerbaijan and what we are doing, in particular, in the area of green energy.” Aliyev seems content if COP29 simply adds to the prestige of his nation. The other thing you see on the website is the banal rallying cry that Babayev’s team produced: “In Solidarity for a Green World.” At a crucial moment in the climate crisis, is he going to ask us to just “reduce, reuse, recycle”?!!! We’ve heard recently from Christiana Figueres, the architect of the Paris Agreement, and from our friend Katherine Hayhoe. Neither of them are going to COP29, which admittedly affects me in my spirit. Are there others who are “waiting it out” until COP30 in 2025 in Brazil? Can we afford to skip a year of leadership and inspiration? If an event has no inspiration, you have got to bring it with you yourself. This year, be conscious of bringing the Holy Spirit with you into the Blue Zone. In Webinar #4, Robynn taught us a breath prayer, largely for our own emotional regulation, but we can also use it to breathe inspiration into the Blue Zone.
o Breathe in: I breathe in creation’s goodness,
o Breathe out: I breathe out love.
o Breathe in: I am called to my part
o Breathe out: in the grand unfolding.
· The likely last gasps of hope for the 1.5°C target. My opinion is that for most of its existence, the 1.5°C target was largely a diplomatic gesture to the low-lying island nations. COP19 in Copenhagen in 2009 denied the target, leading Mohammed Nasheed, then president of the Maldives, to cry out to the Chinese delegation who were blocking inclusion of the target: “How can you ask my country to go extinct?” The 1.5°C target barely made it into the Paris Agreement which led with the 2°C target but added “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” Also in Paris, the UNFCCC invited the IPCC—which is an independent body—to compile a report on “the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” The report, known as SR1.5, was published right before COP24 in Katowice, Poland in 2018. The report was so devastating that it served as a jolt to the planetary conscience. It felt like the height of cruelty to our neighbors not to prioritize this more ambitious—but for some, existential—target. But can we really say that the COPs got serious about the 1.5°C target? They sure began talking about it a lot more than the 2°C target. Please examine this graph that the IPCC just re-released last month. Is this a record of seriousness?
The COP29 webpage declares a three-fold Framework for Action which includes one they call Our Fixed Objective: “We all have a moral duty to avoid overshooting the 1.5°C temperature target. But the window of opportunity is closing and we must focus on the need to invest today to save tomorrow. Our fixed priority is delivering deep, rapid and sustained emission reductions now to keep temperatures under control and stay below 1.5°C, while leaving no one behind.” This makes we want to scream, “Keep 1.5 out of your damn mouth!” No, you HAD a moral duty to avoid a 1.5°C warming and you sold it for another fiscal quarter of record high fossil fuel profits. I also believe that we should be suspicious of the use of this new word “overshoot.” I fear it is an excuse to introduce other terms like “clawback,” or for fossil fuel delegates to falsely tout the effectiveness and scalability of carbon capture and sequestration. False promises of quickly going “net negative” means, among other things, that the historic polluters never need to get serious about Loss & Damage. If you can always get back to 1.5°C despite overshooting it, then you’ve never really betrayed the vulnerable nations. As a Christian observer at COP29, walk respectfully and soberly with the 1.5°C target. We owe Mohammad Nasheed that dignity.
· The uncertainty of the US election outcomes. (Well, no uncertainty here any longer. I’ll refer you to the Part One letter to you and move on...)
3. I invite you to listen whether Jesus is calling you to a new level of Christlike radicalization toward the systems which are callously breaching the 1.5°C target. When famed activist Bill McKibben joined us for our team dinner in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, we asked him what he felt was unique about COP27. He responded, “Well, it’s the first time I’ve been to a COP in a police state.” There was no climate march by Civil Society that year. There wasn’t one last year in Dubai. There won’t be one in Baku. I’m sorry that you will miss out, because the annual climate marches (usually held on the Saturday between the two weeks) were fun, empowering, inspiring, and they helped to metabolize a lot of emotional energy. They also allowed you to rub shoulders with climate action’s more radical players. In the last two COPs, the presidency has allowed an internal march through the COP grounds, but it wasn’t the same. We were all credentialled observers who had signed the Code of Conduct. COP meetings continued around us and the whole thing was, in a word, contained. In Katowice for COP24, though the march was in the city, there was a phalanx of police along the route, and there were reports of young Polish activists who were detained at the city borders before they could join us, but Greenpeace freely ran a “Climate Hub” right across the street from the COP. You could go in ask them, “Why aren’t you going inside the COP?” and they would passionately tell you all the ways that the system is betraying us. Extinction Rebellion showed up in Madrid for COP25. In Glasgow for COP26, Brits and Europeans rode the trains to come in just for the march so that they could shout as loudly as their anguished hearts could muster: “We want climate justice, NOW!”
Many of you grew up as I did, in the white majority in a quiet evangelical church. You were never trained in non-violent resistance or civil disobedience. You were taught that a Christian who keeps it nice and orderly is a holy Christian, a good one, a pleasing one. You were taught about personal righteousness, not about social justice. Consequently, you might (if you were feeling a little prophetic) find a misguided individual to blame, a villain like Donald Trump or Sultan Al Jaber or the president of ExxonMobil. You were discouraged against questioning the system that gave those villains power in the first place.
If, at COP29, we don’t have Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, or a good ol’ climate march to open the conversation for us about radicalization, I guess we’ll have to turn to Jesus instead, our eager teacher, who knows a thing or two about turning over the tables of the money changers in the temple. During the Tuesday and Thursday devotional times in the mornings of Week One and Week Two, I’m thinking we’ll take up the study of Jesus cleansing the temple from Matthew 21:12–17, Mark 11:15–19, Luke 19:45–48, and John 2:13–16. If it is Jesus who radicalizes you, you’ve been radicalized indeed!
My plane from Istanbul to Baku leaves in a few hours. I’m so excited to meet you in person.
You are very dear to God,
Lowell
On behalf of CCOP2024 co-directors and leaders