[ Cocktail of Parties ] The COPs: The Great Climate Charade Rolls On
The deadlock of COP29 in Baku are anything but surprising. A talr good intentions smothered by politics, profit, and pretense.
Editor’s Note
We’re republishing in English our article from Novembre 2024, which uncovered the true origins — and the inconvenient reality — of today’s so-called climate policies. Not quite the story we’ve been spoon-fed for the past twenty years. Big business, political campaign funding, wide scale corruption, philantropists and oil majors.
Why is the idea of holding the 29th Climate COP in Baku not as incoherent as it first appears — as L’Éclaireur began exploring in a previous piece, where the dubious machinery of carbon credits offered a telling example? Why does the return of fossil fuels and their corporate titans to center stage, though it makes politicians and pundits howl, represent nothing more than a seamless continuation — perfectly aligned with the founding principles that once launched the notion of “sustainable development”?
To understand this, we have to go back to the roots of the COPs — to the origins of the Earth Summits — and trace how the guiding lines drawn half a century ago have since irrigated a vast network of institutions and organizations. From the very beginning, oil and gas industries had a seat at the table. They helped shape the conversation, while the economic agenda quietly eclipsed the environmental one. What began as “eco-development” quickly became a facade — a green gloss for a system driven by markets and money.
Finance soon muscled its way into the debate, recasting the climate crisis as a playground for speculation. The result? A carefully maintained status quo: a world where “developing nations” are kept in a perpetual state of development — and dependence.
The Birth of an Illusion
The idea, at first glance, was a noble one. The first Earth Summit — the 1972 Stockholm Conference — sought to lay the foundations of an environmental diplomacy (the word “climate” wasn’t yet in fashion) built on multilateral cooperation. The ambition was to make environment and development coexist in harmony. It was also there that the concept — as elastic as it is empty — of “sustainable development” was born.
In 1972, the United Nations claimed it wanted to reconcile human socio-economic activity with environmental protection. At the time, most developing nations, barely emerging from the colonial era, viewed the ecological concerns of industrial powers with suspicion. Unsurprisingly, consensus was already elusive — a pattern that would repeat itself through decades of summits and COPs. Stockholm, in the end, delivered little more than a press release.
Yet, for all its weakness, that first summit laid the groundwork — at least on paper — for what would become a sprawling diplomatic machine: endless meetings, conferences, and negotiations (the COPs among them), and a constellation of UN bodies like the United Nations Environment Programme and the IPCC. Their creation marked the institutionalization of environmental diplomacy — but not necessarily its effectiveness. In hindsight, Stockholm did more than launch a movement; it defined the script of symbolic gestures that would dominate climate politics for the next half-century.
One only needs to read Recommendation 103 from the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, issued in Stockholm, to grasp the mindset of the time — a mindset that, remarkably, still endures today.
“All States participating in the Conference agree not to use environmental protection as a pretext for pursuing discriminatory trade policies or for restricting access to their markets.”
In other words: yes to protecting the environment — but only within the sacred bounds of free trade. From its very inception, Stockholm enshrined what would become the guiding paradox of climate diplomacy: that the global economy must remain untouchable, even in the face of planetary collapse.
Long before the COPs turned into media spectacles, the first Earth Summit had already drawn the battle lines — pledging to save the planet without ever questioning the system driving its destruction.
Maurice Strong: Master of Ceremonies and Oil Baron
At Stockholm in 1972, Maurice Strong presided as the UN Under-Secretary-General. How he ended up there — with no known environmental credentials — remains a mystery. Was it his connections with David Rockefeller, sitting on the foundation’s board? His ties to the Club of Rome, funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation? That’s one side of the coin.
The other side is more telling: Strong was a powerful Canadian businessman, and his business was in oil and gas. He served as vice president, president, or CEO of several North American multinational firms: Dome Petroleum, Caltex (Chevron Group), Norcen Resources, Petro-Canada, and Power Corporation. “Maurice Strong was for thirty years the central global figure in the supposed fight against climate disruption — and at the same time, before or after, he ran or created oil companies,” recounts journalist Fabrice Nicolino, who has extensively studied Strong and the networks surrounding him.
Did Strong, over time and through his UN roles, develop a genuine ecological conscience? Or did he, under the triple hat of industrialist, politician, and environmental diplomat, orchestrate a cause destined to remain secondary?
In the 1970s, no one spoke of climate. Carbon dioxide wasn’t yet a household term, even though its role in the greenhouse effect and rising temperatures had been known since 1896. At the time, certain influential actors worried about planetary resource limits and environmental hazards stemming from overpopulation — a problem seen as largely external to industrialized nations. Maurice Strong was among them.
This was also the creed of the Club of Rome, founded in 1968 and funded by industrialists and banks, including the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1972, just before Stockholm, the Club published The Limits of Growth, the Meadows Report, warning of ecological and demographic constraints.
There’s nothing conspiratorial here. The evidence comes from official reports, biographies, and studies. But it’s clear that behind the scenes, a relatively small circle of decision-makers operated, and that bu — even under the guise of environmentalism — remained the driving force.
Strong went on to become a founding member of the IPCC, created in November 1988 at the behest of the G7. He also held a prominent place at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Upon his death in 2015, Klaus Schwab eulogized him:
“He was a great visionary, always ahead of his time. He was my mentor from the creation of the Forum: a great friend, an indispensable advisor, and for many years a member of our Foundation’s board. Without him, the Forum would not hold the role it does today.”
After Stockholm, Strong became the first head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). In 1992, he served as Secretary-General of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro — the same year he assumed leadership of a Canadian industrial empire, Ontario Hydro. The concept of conflict of interest seems never to have crossed the UN’s mind.
The Road to the Commodification of Nature
The path was already laid for the commodification of nature — a trajectory that Ursula von der Leyen herself would later echo when promoting “nature credits.” Finance, it seems, can be “sustainable” too. In fifty years, nothing has veered this trajectory off course.
Yet there were dissenting voices, not the kind swallowed by the façade of consensus that routinely closes summits and conferences. The 1974 Cocoyoc Declaration, issued at a UN colloquium in Mexico, condemned the international economic order and free trade, proposing a fundamental overhaul to ensure fairer distribution of wealth both between North and South, and within each country.
“Contrary to the dominant GATT discourse, the degradation of the environment is attributed to inequitable economic relations and the derisory prices of raw materials on the markets. Experts believe that countries of the South must form alliances modeled on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to demand fair prices for all raw materials,” notes Aurélien Bernier in Le Monde diplomatique.
The United States condemned the Declaration immediately upon its release. And little was heard of what was dismissed as a mere anomaly in the course of international diplomacy.
The coordinator of this colloquium — opening the door to openly anti-capitalist voices and developing countries (co-presidency was held by representatives from Tanzania and Mexico, who were aggressively nationalizing resources) — was once again Maurice Strong.
Ambivalent Maurice Strong: hailed as the “father of sustainable development,” close advisor to the President of the World Bank in 1995, navigating UN corridors, and aligned with the Davos elite. Head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1977, he was later convicted in 1992 after a long trial for attempting to seize water resources in Colorado.
Ambivalent Maurice Strong surfaces again at the helm of Molten Metal Technology, an environmental technology firm that promised to recycle hazardous products while siphoning millions in public funds, only to be liquidated amid a controversy involving fraud and campaign financing — notably Al Gore’s campaign, according to the Boston Globe. Recall that the former U.S. Vice President is alleged to have amassed nearly $330 million through his green investment company.
The Duality of Maurice Strong
Maurice Strong, on one hand a champion of nature, on the other, overseeing the construction of a luxury hotel in the highly protected Jairo Mora Sandoval Gandoca-Manzanillo Reserve in Costa Rica — apparently with little concern for indigenous rights.
Ambivalent Maurice Strong? A close advisor to former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the businessman also became entangled in what is now known as the “Oil-for-Food” scandal in Iraq. In the end, no criminal charges were ever brought against him.
Was this a carefully orchestrated contradiction? It is, at the very least, the essence of sustainable development itself — a contradiction embedded in the very semantics of the concept, inherently antinomic.
As Serge Latouche, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Orsay, points out:
“At least with non-sustainable, unsustainable development, one could still hold out hope that this deadly process would eventually come to an end. It would stop one day, undone by its contradictions, its failures, its unbearable nature, and the exhaustion of natural resources. We could then reflect and work toward a less despairing post-development, cobbling together an acceptable post-modernity. In particular, we could reintroduce social and political dimensions into economic exchange, reclaim the goal of the common good and the good life within social commerce. Sustainable development robs us of any perspective of escape.”