COP28: The Conference of the Parties or The Conference of the Pirates?

Everything You Wanted to Know—and Everything You Didn’t—About This Year’s COP.

Happy New Year to all of you who take the time to read this blog. Reading can be demanding. Reading can be monotonous and tiring. It can tax our brains and sap our energy. But words remain the most effective means of conveying information, and reading, as a result, remains an indispensable office.

This is all to say that the notion that there are people out there who will sit down and read this blog touches me. It touches me deeply. Thank you for your support and for making this past year one of the most special years in recent memory. This blog hasn’t even been around for five months, and yet this website receives hundreds of visits. Hopefully that number will soon balloon into the thousands—I like the idea of four digits.

Please, if you don’t mind, continue sharing the blog with whomever might be interested. Also, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the blog to have new stories delivered right to your inbox.

Oh, and for those of you participating in “Dry January”—spending this dark, dreary, and interminable month without having recourse to the bottle—I wish you good luck. And for that matter, good luck to anyone undertaking a New Year’s resolution.

My resolution is to be more grateful, which in many ways is the ideal resolution because it’s vague, and when a resolution is vague, it’s easier to break it without being aware that you’re breaking it. My other resolution is to use the phrase “liable to,” as in “he’s liable to ride that horse.” I’m hoping that this phrase, coupled with a greasy paisley bandana I’ve started tucking in my back pocket, will make me appear a bit folksy. By appearing folksier, I plan on tapping into a new audience and broadening my demographic.

Now that it’s 2024 you can expect more content. You can consider this the start of season two. The blog has been renewed. The network is pleased and has extended my contract and Stanley Tucci has agreed to star.

I plan on posting more routinely and with less time in between the blogs. And now that we are feeling the first tremors of the battle for the 2024 presidency, I’m considering shifting the focus of this blog to the campaign trail. It’s shaping up to be an interesting election, and I think it would be fun to write about it.

Down and Out in Dubai

Last month, almost 100,000 people arrived in Dubai for COP28. The turnout broke records. But the turnout for COP28 wasn’t the only record broken in 2023. The record for the hottest year was also broken, and this fact serves to emphasize the importance of COP, or the Conference of the Parties. Organized under the auspices of the U.N., the COP occurs annually and brings together representatives from 198 countries, or “parties,” to discuss ongoing efforts to combat climate change.

The conference lasts for two weeks, although it rarely ends on time and usually goes over schedule (COP28 went a full-day over), and the conference's negotiations culminate in the release of a written statement that must receive all 198 nations’ approbation. As U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Steill put it, “These climate conferences are of course a consensus-based process, meaning all Parties must agree on every word, every comma, every full stop.”           

This year’s COP was unique because it finished with the world’s first Global Stocktake, the purpose of which process is to evaluate the planet’s collective progress toward the goals outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, itself a product of COP21 held in, you guessed it, Paris.

The heart of the Paris Agreement is the desire to limit the rise in the global average temperature to 2°C relative to preindustrial levels, although this is a sort of backup goal, with the real aim being to limit the rise to 1.5°C.

Beyond 1.5°C, the world is in danger of triggering “tipping points,” which means, in climate-change idiom, causing lasting and irreversible damage to the environment, like a large loss of polar ice. The importance of the 1.5°C limit can explain why the number has become totemic and why some diplomats are liable to

speak of it in language that borders on the mystical. Both COP’s president and U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry called 1.5°C “the north star.”

Two months before COP28 convened, the U.N. published a report summarizing its findings on our progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement. The report revealed that we are perilously off track and that the window for achieving the 1.5°C limit is “rapidly narrowing.”  

In order to have a chance of securing the 1.5°C limit, the report concluded, greenhouse gas emissions must be slashed by 43% (relative to 2019 levels), and emissions must be net zero by 2050. These startling revelations marked an inauspicious beginning to the Paris Agreement and lent an extra sense of urgency to the proceedings at this year’s COP.

COP28 was the 28th climate conference. The first COP occurred in 1995 and was held in Berlin and less than 4,000 delegates were in attendance. Even five years later, at COP6 in Hague, the turnout was small enough that everyone could fit into a single auditorium. But as the significance of climate change grew, so too did the significance of the COP.

The COP is unlike any other international summit. It lacks the dour formality of a G7 or a G20 conference. Nor is it redolent of Eyes Wide Shut, like Davos. It can perhaps best be likened to FIFA’s World Cup.

Like FIFA, the COP is about ostentation and extravagance. COP28 took place in Dubai’s Expo City, a $7-billion futuristic metropolis that stands in a spot that was nothing but arid desert as recent as 2016.

Diversions at this year’s COP included concerts and fashion shows. There was a presentation with the title “responsible yachting, today and tomorrow.”

Egypt, the host of the previous COP, that would be COP27, chose the resort-town of Sharm el-Sheikh as its venue for the conference. Hotels in the area cost $250 to $300 a night, a price that was decidedly outside the budget of many climate activists hoping to attend the event. Egypt, a police-state opposed to any semblance of dissent, was unlikely upset about fewer activists being able to attend.

Like FIFA, the COP has corporate sponsors. One of COP27’s sponsors was Coca Cola, a controversial choice given Coca Cola’s status as the world’s largest plastic polluter. Coca Cola’s sponsorship was seen by some as green-washing.

COP and corporations might seem like strange bedfellows. They are. Many climate activists believe that corporations have coopted COP, hijacking the conference’s agenda and scuttling any attempts at making substantive progress.

COP28 did little to allay such fears and suspicions. At least 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists were present at this year’s COP, a new record that nearly quadruples the 636 lobbyists in attendance at last year’s conference.

But the fossil fuel industry’s presence wasn’t limited to lobbyists and the occasional oil executive. COP28’s own president, Sultan Al Jaber, the man charged with overseeing climate negotiations, with propelling the world toward a greener future, has an interesting and very remunerative side-hustle.

His side-hustle isn’t being an Uber driver or making the occasional Door-Dash delivery or playing the markets. No, Al Jaber’s side-hustle is being the CEO of the U.A.E.’s state-owned oil company, ADNOC. His appointment was an odd and controversial choice, one that prompted anger and outcry, and Al Gore, our nation’s avuncular environmentalist, said that the fossil fuel industry had “gone too far” in making him president.

More than 100 member of the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament called for Al Jaber to abdicate his presidency. John Kerry, in his turn, defended Al Jaber’s appointment, saying that fossil fuel companies must be a part of the negotiating process. Kerry isn’t entirely wrong, but there are presumably better ways to include the fossil fuel industry than making an oil executive the leader of the premier conference on climate change. 

The controversy didn’t end with Al Jaber’s selection as president. The U.A.E, it was reported, planned on using climate meetings with other countries to promote oil and gas deals. And it was also revealed that ADNOC had access to emails from the COP28 office, the border separating the two entities being very porous.

And like FIFA, COP has recently shown a willingness, if not a downright inclination, to work with authoritarian states. Next year’s COP will be in Azerbaijan, thus continuing the tradition of collaborating with undemocratic regimes whose draconian speech laws act as a major deterrent to protests and demonstrations.

Don’t expect to see a COP in Europe any time soon. After his invasion of Ukraine and his subsequent alienation from much of the international community, Putin announced that he would veto any vote to host the conference in the European Union.

I wanted to attend this year’s COP, so I asked Davis Thompson, who is the closest thing I have to an editor, for permission to go. I handed him a sheet of paper that outlined the kind of trip I had in mind, a trip that was replete with all types of transportation—planes, limousines, jet-packs, rickshaws, and pogo sticks. I needed four, no make that five, rooms in the Burj Khalifa, where I would entertain different dignitaries and ply them for information, classified information, about the COP. And if possible, I asked, maybe we could requisition a helicopter to make my commutes between the COP and the Burj Khalifa a little easier. I was fully aware that the helicopter might be a stretch.

Davis finished reading my proposal and took off his glasses. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He sighed and bowed his head. Then he looked up at me and said:

            “We couldn’t even afford the pogo stick.”

It turns out that the GoodbarBlog is a much humbler operation than I’d realized.

You’d be forgiven if the COP wasn’t on your radar last year. With two bloody wars being prosecuted and a presidential election on the horizon, the conference might seem insignificant. It might seem irrelevant, seem like a strange and ossified vestige of the days—now of yore—of international diplomacy and global aspirations. But it’s far from insignificant, far from irrelevant.

The use of “existential” as an adjective is often gratuitous. People use it to indicate that, despite their day-job as an account manager at NBC or as a hostess at the Olive Garden, they just might be a French philosopher, that they just might be scribbling away, in the lonely nighttime hours, on a novel or novella that explores the myth of Sisyphus. People say “existential” half-expecting to exhale cigarette smoke as they do so.

But when people use the word “existential” to describe the climate crisis, they are correct. It is existential. 2023 was the hottest year on record. Severe and unpredictable weather buffeted islands and low-lying coastal states, the regions most often affected by climate change.

Biblical floods overwhelmed some nations. Wildfires vexed others. Severe droughts hounded farmers and created food insecurity. This is all indissolubly bound to climate change.

As the dominant conference on climate science and activism, the COP is an important global event, one that has the potential to bend the arc of civilization toward a greener and better future. And yet, despite this awesome potential, the COP routinely fails to deliver genuine progress. Too often, the COP’s momentum is checked by the ponderous machinery of diplomacy, checked by the insidious interests of fossil fuel companies. Too often the COP falls short. This year’s COP fell short.

COP28 was primarily celebrated for two reasons. The first reason was the operationalizing of the loss and damage fund, a fund that allows developing nations suffering from climate-change-induced devastation to access money to rebuild. The fund, unfortunately, depends on the largesse of bigger countries. Germany and the U.A.E. each contributed $100 million. The U.S. only coughed up $17 million. The total contributions amounted to $790 million, a fraction of the estimated $400 billion of annual damage caused by climate change. $790 million is barely enough to keep the lights on.

The World Bank was tapped to act as the fund’s tentative trustee, a decision that has activists asking how the bank will deliver the aid, in the form of grants or loans? Islands and low-lying coastal states, the countries that suffer most acutely from climate change—the mordant irony being that they contribute the least to it—are already drowning in debt. To be saddled with another onerous loan is the last thing these nations need. The lack of clarity in how this money is to be distributed is just one more reason why this accomplishment is no accomplishment at all, despite the COP's best efforts to convince people otherwise.

The second reason COP28 was celebrated was because of a line in the final agreement that called for the “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems…accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050.”

The excitement over the line derived, in part, from it being the first time that fossil fuels were explicitly called out in a final document, a fact that’s shocking given fossil fuels’ status as the leading contributor of greenhouse gasses (they contribute more than 75%), and a fact that stresses the glacial pace at which the conference moves forward.

This “transitioning away” from fossil fuels was not the longed-for “phase-out” of fossil fuels. It wasn’t even the weaker “phase-down” that some had hoped for—COP has its own language and is as much a conference dedicated to semantics as it is a conference dedicated to fighting climate change. The U.A.E., China, and Russia are all opposed to a phase-out of fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia is even against a phase-down. A previous draft of the agreement was criticized for having even weaker language on fossil fuels.

There is other problematic language in the final text, such as the statement that “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition.” “Transitional fuel” is widely understood to be a euphemism for natural gas, and the inclusion of the statement marks a signal victory for fossil fuel companies, who engaged in a concerted campaign, first begun at COP27, to rebrand natural gas as a “transitional fuel.”

Another problem is the use of language pertaining to carbon capture and storage in phrases like the “phase-down of unabated coal power.” This phrase is another example of that dedication to semantics, with the wording here being artfully evasive and deliciously qualified.

"Unabated,” to translate, means the use of coal power without carbon capture and storage, a technology that removes a portion of CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it underground. The COP, though, has never specified just how much CO2 must be removed and stored to constitute “abated” use. Would burning coal and using carbon capture to remove 1% of the consequent CO2 from the atmosphere be “abated” use? The words are too ambiguous and give the different parties too much latitude in forming their own interpretations.

Carbon capture is yet to be fully scaled, and its efficacy remains unknown. Scientists have been clear that the technology will help contribute toward the 1.5°C goal but only in a very limited capacity. The scientific consensus is at odds with the fossil fuel companies, who continue to peddle carbon capture as a kind of climate change cure-all.

I’m not upset that I didn’t get to go to COP28. It would have been nice to see the famed Expo City and sample the fresh juices and vegan treats being served from the myriad food trucks. It would have been nice to rub elbows with the different diplomats, presidents, and potentates. But this is a blog, condemned to make do with a blog's meager resources. A flight to Dubai requires OnlyFans money

Although this COP did produce some notable achievements—the ambitious call for the tripling of renewable energy capacity and the doubling of energy efficiency improvements by 2030—it didn’t do nearly enough.

The COP is a victim of its own success, a wayward climate conference led astray by its own importance and wealth. It is more about pomp than progress, more about the present than about posterity.

The 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance outnumbered every party’s delegation, except for the delegations of the host nation and of Brazil. The lobbyists outnumbered the Indigenous representatives by a margin of 7:1.

Pirates and cutpurses and fossil fuel desperadoes were everywhere.

And with delegates from Syria in attendance for the first time since al-Assad launched a devastating war on his own civilian population, one is left with the sobering conclusion that the COP is nothing but a massive P.R. opportunity for slick petro-states and rehabilitated war criminals. Or, for Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Tony Blair, all of whom spoke, it represents a nice sinecure for failed presidential candidates and unpopular prime ministers.

And then there’s the terrifying truth about all of this. If the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be any guide—after which invasion, the entire world did a hard pivot toward high-carbon energy sources—a larger conflict, one between, say, the U.S. and China would mean the laying to waste of all climate goals.

The environment will always take the backseat when matters of national security are at stake. If such a conflict broke out, the 1.5°C limit would be as good as gone.

These thoughts are taking on a nihilistic bent. I’m purchasing that pogo stick, and I’m going to pogo through the meadows and pastures while there are still meadows and pastures to pogo through.