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Countries at the United Nations climate summit in Baku struck a final deal on the broad rules to launch carbon trading markets, almost a decade after being first proposed.

The agreement passed at the UN COP29 climate summit late on Saturday night will allow countries and companies to trade credits for cuts in carbon emissions to offset their carbon footprints.

The carbon trading mechanism had first been formally sketched out in the 2015 Paris agreement on limiting climate change, as a way for polluters to pay for other countries to cut emissions on their behalf. 

But it has proved controversial over fears it will not result in the promised removal of carbon from the atmosphere.

The head of delegation for a group of heavily forested countries, including Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kevin Conrad, said “properly regulated, markets can become a force for good, and start to reverse the market failures causing environmental and atmospheric destruction”.

The birth of the market prompted cheers and standing ovations by UN negotiators in the first session of the final plenary, in a rare breakthrough at the summit that was otherwise on the verge of collapse.

States and companies will be able to trade credits meant to represent one tonne of carbon dioxide saved or removed from the atmosphere, under mechanisms subject to loose oversight by the UN and designed to avoid double-counting of emissions cuts.

The final agreement overcame a quarrel about a proposed UN registry for tracking the flow in emission claims, with the US forced to compromise on how much power this registry should have.

Host country Azerbaijan made the issue of carbon emissions trading a priority, pushing successfully on the first day of the two-week summit for countries to adopt an initial element of the global market.

In subsequent negotiations to settle the rules, it drove the participants to overcome their disagreements. This included on a series of trade-offs between requiring more rigorous accounting and easing the pathway to get the market off the ground, with a rule book on principles for how credits should be traded, counted and checked.

Countries and companies took advantage of the prospective launch of the market by signing preliminary deals in recent weeks. Commodity trader Trafigura announced a “pilot” carbon project to help Mozambique develop carbon restoration projects.

Some experts warned however that the new market could face many of the same greenwashing allegations that have plagued the existing unregulated trade in credits between companies.

These have caused the voluntary credit markets to shrink from $1.4bn in 2022 to $1.1bn last year, based on MSCI Carbon Markets estimates.

“The deal leaves a lot of trust in the hands of [countries] which is a problem because the rules themselves are not yet net zero [emissions] aligned,” said Injy Johnstone, a research fellow at the University of Oxford.

The concerns were echoed by Isa Mulder of Carbon Market Watch, who said the “dangerously loose and opaque” deal enshrined a “free-for-all” approach.

UN carbon market experts will continue to discuss which types of credits countries can buy. For example, some countries would like to sell credits linked to hypothetical CO₂ that is not emitted, for example from protecting a forest, closing a coal mine or cooking on a stove using gas rather than wood as fuel, to cancel out real greenhouse gas emissions.

These types of credits could ultimately lead to more CO₂ entering the atmosphere, some experts say, in part because it could lessen the incentive for polluters to make plans to cut their underlying emissions.

One negotiator described discussions as “very, very tough” before ultimately settling on a “buyer beware” approach which will rely mainly on transparency to shame countries which fall into bad practice.

The money raised by carbon deals could help contribute to the climate finance needs of poorer countries, which economists estimated at $1.3tn a year.

But others expressed caution about the solutions provided by carbon emissions trading. Brazil’s environment minister Marina Silva said it was not a “panacea” for boosting finance to developing countries.

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Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, presidential hopeful and populist who championed Democratic Party reforms in the turbulent 1960s, died Saturday. He was 94.

Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to The Associated Press. He had lived in New Mexico since 1976.

“Fred Harris passed peacefully early this morning of natural causes. He was 94. He was a wonderful and beloved man. His memory is a blessing,” Elliston said in a text message.

Harris served eight years in the Senate, first winning in 1964 to fill a vacancy, and made unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1976.

“I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of my longtime friend Fred Harris today,” Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote in a post to social media. “Harris was a towering presence in politics and in academia, and his work over many decades improved New Mexico and the nation.  He will be greatly missed.”

Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said in a statement that “New Mexico and our nation have lost a giant,” describing him as a “tireless champion of civil rights, tribal sovereignty and working families.”

It fell to Harris, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, to help heal the party’s wounds from the tumultuous national convention in 1968 when protesters and police clashed in Chicago.

He ushered in rule changes that led to more women and minorities as convention delegates and in leadership positions.

“I think it’s worked wonderfully,” Harris recalled in 2004, when he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “It’s made the selection much more legitimate and democratic.”

“The Democratic Party was not democratic, and many of the delegations were pretty much boss-controlled or -dominated. And in the South, there was terrible discrimination against African Americans,” he said.

Harris ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, quitting after poor showings in early contests, including a fourth-place win in New Hampshire. The more moderate Jimmy Carter went on to win the presidency.

Harris moved to New Mexico that year and became a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. He wrote and edited more than a dozen books, mostly on politics and Congress. In 1999 he broadened his writings with a mystery set in Depression-era Oklahoma.

Throughout his political career, Harris was a leading liberal voice for civil rights and anti-poverty programs to help minorities and the disadvantaged. Along with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comanche, he also was active in Native American issues.

“I’ve always called myself a populist or progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I’m against concentrated power. I don’t like the power of money in politics. I think we ought to have programs for the middle class and working class.”

“Today ‘populism’ is often a dirty word because of how certain leaders wield power,” Heinrich said in his statement Saturday. “But Fred represented a different brand of populism — one that was never mean or exclusionary. Instead, Fred focused his work and attention on regular people who are often overlooked by the political class.”

Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the urban riots of the late 1960s.

The commission’s groundbreaking report in 1968 declared, “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

Thirty years later, Harris co-wrote a report that concluded the commission’s “prophecy has come to pass.”

“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and minorities are suffering disproportionately,” said the report by Harris and Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which continued the work of the commission.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris rose to prominence in Congress as a “fiery populist.”

“That resonates with people…the notion of the average person against the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a real ability to articulate those concerns, particularly of the downtrodden.”

In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of the presidential campaign of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He and others pressed Humphrey to use the convention to break with Johnson on the Vietnam War. But Humphrey waited to do so until late in the campaign, and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.

“That was the worst year of my life, ’68. We had Dr. Martin Luther King killed. We had my Senate seatmate Robert Kennedy killed and then we had this terrible convention,” Harris said in 1996.

“I left the convention — because of the terrible disorders and the way they had been handled and the failure to adopt a new peace platform — really downhearted.”

After assuming the Democratic Party leadership post, Harris appointed commissions that recommended reforms in the procedures for selecting delegates and presidential nominees. While lauding the greater openness and diversity, he said there had been a side effect: “It’s much to the good. But the one result of it is that conventions today are ratifying conventions. So it’s hard to make them interesting.”

“My own thought is they ought to be shortened to a couple of days. But they are still worth having, I think, as a way to adopt a platform, as a kind of pep rally, as a way to get people together in a kind of coalition-building,” he said.

Harris was born Nov. 13, 1930, in a two-room farmhouse near Walters, in southwestern Oklahoma, about 15 miles from the Texas line. The home had no electricity, indoor toilet or running water.

At age 5 he was working on the farm and received 10 cents a day to drive a horse in circles to supply power for a hay bailer.

He worked part-time as a janitor and printer’s assistant to help for his education at University of Oklahoma. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1952, majoring in political science and history. He received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954, and then moved to Lawton to practice.

In 1956, he won election to the Oklahoma state Senate and served for eight years. In 1964, he launched his career in national politics in the race to replace Sen. Robert S. Kerr, who died in January 1963.

Harris won the Democratic nomination in a runoff election against J. Howard Edmondson, who left the governorship to fill Kerr’s vacancy until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated an Oklahoma sports legend — Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, who had coached OU football for 17 years.

Harris won a six-year term in 1966 but left the Senate in 1972 when there were doubts that he, as a left-leaning Democrat, could win reelection.

Harris married his high school sweetheart, LaDonna Vita Crawford, in 1949, and had three children, Kathryn, Byron and Laura. After the couple divorced, Harris married Margaret Elliston in 1983. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available Saturday.

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Stanford University professor and Covid-19 lockdown sceptic Jay Bhattacharya has emerged as the frontrunner to run the National Institutes of Health, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The nomination of Bhattacharya, who rose to prominence during the pandemic for opposing lockdown restrictions, would put another ally of Robert Kennedy Jr, the vaccine sceptic who is Trump’s pick to run the US health department, in charge of one of the country’s most powerful public health agencies.

With an annual budget of $48bn, NIH is the biggest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world, providing more than 60,000 grants a year to support medical and scientific research.

Senior officials within Trump’s transition team have spoken with Bhattacharya, who runs Stanford’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, in recent days, the people said.

The pick for NIH director is likely to be announced in the coming days but plans may change and another candidate may emerge, the people added.

Representatives for Trump’s transition team and Kennedy did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bhattacharya could also not be reached for comment.

Late on Friday, Trump’s transition team announced a flurry of high profile nominations, including Treasury secretary, Labor secretary and three key health official picks.

Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who opposed the Covid-19 vaccine mandate, was nominated to run the Food and Drug Administration. Physician and former GOP congressman Dave Weldon, who has cast doubts on vaccine safety, was tapped to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bhattacharya appeared alongside Kennedy at a campaign event during his independent campaign for President, during which he unveiled his running mate Nicole Shanahan.

Since backing Trump’s bid for presidency in August, Kennedy has been given significant influence over the president’s healthcare policy agenda as part of his “Make American Healthy Again” campaign. Trump’s choice of Fox News medical contributor Janette Nesheiwat was the only one of the health appointees so far not close to Kennedy, the people added.

Alongside two other professors, Bhattacharya became the face of the “Great Barrington Declaration” during the pandemic, an open letter published in October 2020 opposing widescale lockdowns and instead calling for restrictions focused on at-risk groups, such as elderly individuals. The letter provoked criticism from then-NIH director Francis Collins, who dismissed the authors as “fringe experts”.

Much of Bhattacharya’s public criticism of the NIH has focused on how Collins and Anthony Fauci — former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of NIH — responded to the pandemic.

Bhattacharya told the Financial Times this month that he supported term limits for NIH directors. “I think there’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few people: there should not be another Tony Fauci,” he said.

Kennedy’s nomination as Health and Human Services secretary has worried the pharmaceutical industry and public health bodies because of his sceptical views on vaccines, his stated aim to eliminate “entire departments” within the FDA and his plans to remove fluoride from drinking water. However, Kennedy has promised not to limit vaccine access.

In an article on digital media site UnHerd published last week, Bhattacharya brushed away concerns about some of Kennedy’s debunked claims, saying: “Kennedy is not a scientist, but his good-faith calls for better research and more debate are echoed by many Americans.”

He added that “the American public voted for disrupters like RFK Jr in 2024, and academic medicine now has an opportunity to atone for its Covid-era blunders.”