Jason P. Dinh

To get us started, we should talk about who’s at COP and who’s not at COP. This year, it’s impossible to ignore the fossil fuel industry, which has been given the reins.

COP28 is being held in the UAE, which is a petrostate, and the COP president Sultan Al Jaber is the CEO of Adnoc, which, by some metrics, has some of the most aggressive fossil fuel growth plans in the world. Who decides who is in charge of COP, and why did they choose this path? 

Amy Westervelt

That’s a great question. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, is sort of the convener of COP, which stands for the Conference of the Parties. And the parties in that are all of the countries that signed onto this framework back in the ’90s. There is a governing body for the UNFCCC and they are the folks in charge of organizing these annual climate summits. 

It’s a little bit like the World Cup or the Olympics where there are countries that lobby to be the host of COP—not just because there’s a sense that being the host country gives you a little bit of leverage in the negotiations, but also because there’s tourism and economic opportunities as well. The UAE started lobbying to be the host country in the lead-up to COP26 in Glasgow, although I would argue that they’ve had this plan for much, much longer. 

But in terms of how they let this happen? It’s not the first petrostate that’s hosted a COP. I think a lot of people argue that the United States could itself be considered a petrostate, which I wouldn’t necessarily say is wrong. COP has been hosted in lots of countries that are heavily reliant on oil and gas, even if they’re not technically called petrostates. So it’s not a disqualifying trait for hosting COP. 

Jason

I think the history is interesting to dig into, to see how this year is more of the same and how it’s different.

Amy

Even the creation of the UNFCCC itself was not devoid of fossil fuel influence. That came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit which was held in Brazil, and the president of that meeting was a former Canadian tar sands oil guy. The very first meeting where we started to talk about global governments committing to emissions reductions was presided over by an oil guy. I think that it’s much more in your face than it’s been, but I find it a little bit troubling to see how outraged and surprised people are. This process has been co-opted by the industry since the beginning. Same with the IPCC—there’s a bunch of oil guys that are authors of those reports.

Jason

This year, the fossil fuel interests feel especially brazen. What do you think changed that emboldened them to not even pretend to put up a smokescreen anymore?

Amy

That’s a good question. I feel like it’s a few things. One is that they’ve been getting away with it for a long time. Every year there’s a new count of how many more fossil fuel lobbyists there are at COP, and their affiliation doesn’t seem to have any impact on their ability to attend and do whatever they’d like. 

I think also that the industry’s feeling pretty emboldened in general right now. They have record profits and also feel like their back is up against the wall, so you’re seeing a lot of pretty extreme behavior from them. It’s this weird thing where they’re riding high on record profits but also very aware that their time is limited, so they’re going to do whatever they can to extend the lifespan of the industry. 

And, I think they’re increasingly feeling less like they have to pretend that they’re doing otherwise. It’s funny, in a weird way I feel like all the attention and legal repercussions for greenwashing have also contributed to this, where now they’re like, fine, we’re not going to pretend anymore.

Jason

My last question about the fossil fuel industry taking over this process is that the U.N. climate deals need to pass with unanimous support. What meaningful change could possibly happen with them in the negotiating room?

Amy

It pains me to say this, but I think that they have pretty smartly decided that they are going to use loss and damage as a smokescreen for not doing anything to phase out fossil fuels. 

My sense is that the UAE and its allies are going to say: Look, we got the loss and damage fund ratified, and we’re putting a bunch of money into it. They’re also going to talk about phasing out coal. And then they’re going to point to that as proof that, actually, they had the most effective COP in years, which, to be honest, isn’t wrong. That’s the sad thing—what has COP been accomplishing for the last 15 or 20 years? People point to the Paris Climate Accords, but no one is on track to meet those commitments, and they’re not legally binding. 

In terms of what they’re going to get people to actually agree to, I think probably the loss and damage fund and a phase-out of coal are going to be it. But it will still leave oil and gas completely unregulated.

Jason

I also want to talk about who is not at COP. One thing that people who are more optimistic about the COP process say is that it’s a chance for every country—big or small, rich or poor—to have a seat at the table. But there are glaring absences from the biggest emitters here. Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, the heads of state for the countries responsible for over half of the emissions since 1850, aren’t there. 

Their absence is especially glaring this year because there is such a spotlight on climate finance and funneling money toward the Global South and to those most harmed by emissions. What kind of message do you think is being sent when the heads of state of these big emitters aren’t even showing up to the table when it means so much to the other nations that are there?

Amy

I feel like it says more than the fact that the COP is being run by the head of a national oil company. It signifies that this process is irreparably broken. The most powerful heads of state who are responsible for the largest volume of emissions both historically and present day and who represent the most money in the world are not even going to bother to show up. 

Sure, Biden has sent John Kerry, but Kerry’s been a big booster of Al Jaber and has been on the record multiple times not being onboard with loss and damage. You see that in the pitiful commitment that the U.S. made. The UAE announced $100 million into the loss and damage fund and the US announced $17.5 million. That’s ridiculous. It’s like 0.001% of the defense budget. To me, it reads as a big fuck you to the Global South that they’re not even willing to show up. 

Jason

We’ve mentioned it a few times, but for those who might not know, could you help us understand what this loss and damage fund is?

Amy

Loss and damage has been talked about at COP since the late ’90s, early 2000s. It’s this idea that the countries that have the highest costs associated with both climate impacts and adaptation are generally the countries that have been least responsible historically for the problem and have also profited the least from the fossil fuel industry. Therefore, they have less money available to deal with this problem. In many cases, we’re also talking about countries where they may have had fossil fuel reserves, but those were extracted by U.S. or European companies with little benefit to the country itself.

The idea was first floated by Vanuatu in the late ’90s that there should be a fund that wealthy countries contribute to that helps with adaptation efforts and climate impacts. In the last decade or so, it’s become a lot more formalized. At COP26 in Glasgow, they started to lay the groundwork but couldn’t get countries to agree, sign off, and actually commit funds. Also, it’s important to note that several countries have been saying that they’re going to contribute to a loss and damage fund for over a decade, including the U.S., and that money has never materialized.

Now, it’s supposed to be located at the World Bank for the first couple of years. There’s a structure that’s being put in place to actually host and maintain the account and run it, which is a big deal because it hadn’t been agreed upon before.

But I would also caution folks from feeling too optimistic because only around half a billion dollars have been pledged so far, and most reports put the need for loss and damage funding at two to three billion a year minimum. So, we’ll see what happens in the next couple of years.

Jason

It sounds like there’s some good news that there’s this new formal structure, but I’ve also heard concerns about the amount of money and whether the World Bank is the right place to host this in the first place.

Amy

A lot of folks say, Well, we don’t have a good idea for an alternative yet. The World Bank has all the structures in place to be the home for this, but they also have this long history of supporting the fossil fuel industry and messing with less developed countries in lots of other ways as well. They don’t have high trust in the Global South. 

Jason

Yeah, for sure. Aside from loss and damage, the other two big developments that I’ve seen are related to methane and coal. They, too, have good news and room for concern. 

With methane, oil companies have pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions by 2030. It sounds good, but this morning, I read a comment from the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, who said this pretty clearly falls short of what we need and that there’s no room for greenwashing. 

How do you make truth of what’s happening here, given that methane is definitely heating the planet, but these pledges don’t mention phasing out fossil fuels?

Amy

Methane has been a big, big problem for a long time. It’s very frustrating because it feels like one of those things that should be easy to fix. The way this gets talked about all the time is methane leaks, and I think that that phrasing is really misleading. It makes it sound like, oh, whoopsie, there are all these tiny holes in pipelines and we can just patch them up, no problem. But the reality is venting methane and burning gas is a pretty fundamental part of how the whole thing works. So this idea that it’s going to easily go away and that the industry can be trusted to just voluntarily stop doing it is ridiculous. 

The industry has been self-regulating on methane for 20 years, and it’s done a terrible job. Every single satellite study that comes out shows that the actual amount of methane being released is around 10 times what the industry ever admits to. This is just more of the same. They’re making a vague pledge, but they’re not committing to anything beyond the same sorts of voluntary measures that have been in place and have not worked. 

That’s frustrating because the benefit of getting on top of methane emissions quickly is that methane is a shorter-lived gas, so being able to act on that in the next three to five years is a major way to buy us time to decarbonize. 

Again, I feel like the consistent theme here is the fossil fuel industry has been suggesting since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 that the best way to deal with climate change is to just let it self-regulate. That has not worked, and that’s the understatement of the year. There needs to be some way of forcing these companies to do something that they don’t want to do, but the problem is they’re more powerful than any one government. That’s why the whole COP process was created—to try to get an alliance of governments to actually force these companies to behave. But when you let that process be co-opted, then you’re right back at the same problem.

Jason

In addition to methane, we’ve also seen the U.S. join 56 countries pledging to end “unabated coal.” I was wondering if you could help us dig into the implications of that word, “unabated.”

Amy

It’s such a dangerous word. It’s so innocuous and boring and people’s eyes glaze over when they see it. But when they say unabated coal, they mean coal that doesn’t have either carbon capture or some kind of ammonia co-firing hydrogen project connected to it. But they’re assuming that those technologies are much more effective and scalable than we know them to be. 

When you focus on coal, it distracts everyone from oil and gas. And even with this coal pledge, it’s hard to tell whether this is a real commitment or not when that word is attached to it. 

In a lot of cases “abated” emissions just feed back into a petrochemical loop. In the case of carbon capture, most, around 80%, of the carbon that’s being captured today is being used for enhanced oil recovery, which is where they inject the compressed carbon into the ground to get leftover oil out of reserves that have been tapped out. If you’re abating emissions over here in a way that creates more emissions over there, that’s just a shell game.

Jason

We’ve discussed the bad news and the good-ish news with caveats. We’re talking on Monday, December 4, and I’m wondering if you’ve seen anything in the last four days that has given you hope. For me, it was seeing Colombia join an international treaty to phase out fossil fuels.

Amy

Yes, that was the one thing I was going to mention! Especially because Colombia has pretty significant coal and gas. To date, most of the countries that have signed on to the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty have been countries that don’t have a lot of economic stakes in the industry persisting, so seeing Columbia join is huge. They’re also the first Latin American country to join. 

And I guess it’s good to see some action on loss and damage. I don’t want to totally discount the fact that there is a step that’s been made there. I don’t think it’s enough, and I’m looking at it with earned skepticism. But the fact that the mechanism exists now is good. But yeah, the biggest unqualified positive is Colombia signing onto the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, I think that’s a really big deal.

Jason

What story are you following most closely in the second week of COP?

Amy

I’m really watching to see whether any language about oil and gas phase-out gets into the draft agreement. That, to me, is the most important thing. If that doesn’t happen, then I feel like everything everyone has said about this COP is true—that the intention all along from the UAE was to keep that language out.

Jason

Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you wish we did?

Amy

One thing I would add is that I had this conversation with Christiana Figueres. I asked if she thought it was time to kick the fossil fuel lobby out of COP. And she said, I don’t know why people are focused on that. It’s not like if they’re not there physically, their influence isn’t going to still be in the negotiating room.

That makes me think: Then what are we doing? Is anyone working on an alternative to COP? I see people increasingly saying, Why are we still doing this? Why are tens of thousands of people flying to a petrostate to let fossil fuel interests pretend that they’re going to do something about this problem? I see all these quotes from Guterres where he seems really fed up, and it’d be cool to see him say, Forget this, this whole thing is broken. Let’s come up with a new convention.

Jason

Yeah, for sure. I’ve had the same reaction seeing Al Jaber trade punches with Simon Stiell and Guterres, saying that his talking points are bullshit. If that’s bullshit, aren’t you the ones that can do something about it? 

Amy

Yes! This is something that I find really baffling in general. The extent to which U.N. officials who are supposedly in charge of this—or world leaders, I see Biden do this—throw up their hands and act like, I wish I could do something. It’s like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? Aren’t you the ones who have actual power here? And the really scary thing is that the fossil fuel industry just has way more power than any of them. 

What are we doing about that? What’s the proposed solution to the problem, that we’re beholden to these private empires that are more powerful than any one government and have captured multiple governments? COP was supposed to be the solution, and it is very clearly not. 

So, what’s the next idea?