COP29 in Baku was a Whitewashed Tomb (Matt 25)

by Lowell Bliss, Director of Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership

(This Climate Bible Study was first published in the November 2024 newsletter of Climate Intercessors)

 Jesus said: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” (Matt 25:23-27).

It does beg the question of when and why the word “whitewash” got such a bad reputation. When my wife and I moved to India, our first landlord promised to whitewash our flat. “What colour do you want?” he asked. “White,” we said. When the colour decidedly ended up as baby blue, we asked about it. “Oh, this is white,” he said. The bluing added to the wash apparently helped prevent mold during the monsoons. Just a few years later, new arrivals to our team could choose from a modern host of hues of real paint. We were amazed, but not jealous. Our whitewash brightened up the flat and was “fit for purpose.” Even Jesus recognized that a whitewashed wall can still be beautiful.

It's not even what’s inside the whitewashed walls that makes whitewash suspect. Humans die. Tombs are part of a way that society cares for itself. It’s the intention behind the act of applying whitewash which is evil. Hypocrites, Jesus called the whitewashers. In the Greek language of the New Testament, hupokrites was “an actor under an assumed character, a stage player in a feigned part.” The hypocrites were dissemblers. In the end though, the audience won’t be fooled. A tomb full of “the bones of the dead and everything unclean” will be unable to remain unnoticed for long. Visual beauty does not cover up visceral stink. Outer liveliness is not the same thing as inner life.

In so many ways, COP29 in Baku was one of the most beautifully organized of all the COPs I have attended, and this was my eighth. The venue in the Olympic stadium worked. Smiling Azerbaijani youth served as COP29 volunteers. They seemed stationed every five meters and were genuinely helpful. The water coolers never lacked for replacement bottles. The transportation system in the city worked reliably. In and around a COP, the term “greenwashing” has replaced “whitewashing.” One can be forgiven of being suspicious of a petrostate whose GDP (nearly 50%) and export revenue (more than 90%) comes from oil and gas. Azeri president Ilham Aliyev used his opening remarks at COP29 to reiterate “that oil and gas is a ‘gift of god’ and that countries rich in natural resources should not be blamed for bringing them to the markets as they are needed. He pointed out again that eight of the 10 countries that are supplied with Azeri gas are in Europe and that the EU asked Azerbaijan to double its gas supply to the bloc by 2027.” So there is plenty of hupokrisis to go around.

Locals pointed out to us that the bike lanes and bus lanes were only installed two weeks earlier, as was the addition of an EV fleet of taxis and Ubers. That’s just something to smile about. There was a more sinister form of greenwashing when Saudi Arabia dismissed last year’s UAE Consensus with its call for a “transition away from fossil fuel.” Saudi delegates claimed that the transition statement was just “one item on the menu” and what they really wanted to promote was a “tripling of renewables by 2030.” Yet, if that tripling of renewables doesn’t replace our burning of fossil fuels, if it is used up as extra capacity to support our consumerist lifestyles, then even renewables can be whitewash. The body count inside the tomb keeps growing.

The task given to COP29 was climate finance, to come up with a New Collective Quantifiable Goal (NCQG) whereby developed nations and historical polluters could assist developing nations in their mitigation and adaptation efforts. Scientists, economists, developing nation leaders, and civil society proposed the figure US$1.3 trillion as the necessary sum of annual payments. It’s a huge sum, for sure, but apparently not for the world governments who provide subsidies to fossil fuel companies to the tune of US$7 trillion annually.

Infographic by Colin Hoogerwerf,  a member of Team Week Two of Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP2024) at COP29 in Baku. 

In the end, COP29 landed on US$300 billion mobilized annually by 2035. UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell tried to put a positive spin on the meager outcome. He addressed the closing of COP29: “This new finance goal is an insurance policy for humanity, amid worsening climate impacts hitting every country. But like any insurance policy – it only works – if premiums are paid in full, and on time. Promises must be kept, to protect billions of lives.”

Meanwhile, back home for me in Canada, I had my own lesson in how even insurance can be whitewashing. During the last week of COP29, while I was still in Azerbaijan, my wife fell down the stairs of our home. She had to call an ambulance and was treated for scrapes, contusions, concussion, and a chipped bone in her wrist. She spent many hours in waiting rooms listening to a Canadian obsession: complaining about health care wait times and fantasizing about how much better Americans have it across the border. Finally, Robynn had enough and told her captive audience: “We just moved from the U.S. and, yes, we had good insurance, but we paid $900 a month for it, and the deductibles and co-pays were $5000, and a three-day hospitalization of our daughter put us in medical debt that took us years to repay.” The American health care system is as broken as the COP system. I’m sorry, Mr. Stiell, your talk of “an insurance policy” is just so much whitewash.

The opposite of hypocrisy is “sincerity,” and this word has a similarly interesting etymology in its Latin form. Sincere literally means, “without wax,” and alludes to a practice by hypocritical pottery merchants. If a clay jug had a crack in it, it was useless and should be scrapped, not sold, but some nefarious merchants would cover the crack with wax and then paint (whitewash) over it. The wise customer would hold the jug up to the sun to see if any light could shine through any waxed-filled cracks, thus revealing the fraud. If no light was seen, the jug was declared sine cera, “without wax,” and thus worthy of purchase and use.

Civil society watchdog groups like the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition reported that at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to COP29, surpassing all the delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable nations combined. They should be banned from next year’s COP30, as should. . . wax.