A few weeks ago, al-Jaber downplayed the science around the need to phase out fossil fuels. He has since defended himself against his previous statements, as well as against reports exposing backdoor oil deals planned for the summit. Meanwhile, a record 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists flooded Dubai to attend and extend their influence. 

On the flip side, the conference is the only existing international gathering to set climate policy globally. It’s the only convening where island nations and developing countries suffering the worst from climate change get to vote on climate agreements alongside polluting countries that caused the crisis. This year’s event has been historic with the establishment of the loss and damage fund, which will provide financial assistance to low-income nations unable to cover the costs of surviving the climate emergency. 

Despite the progress, much work remains to cut carbon pollution and soften the blow that humanity faces. While 23 countries have committed over $655 million to the loss and damage fund, estimates of what’s actually needed for climate reparations range in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

After nearly 30 years, some activists are beginning to question whether COP is a worthwhile space at all. Others, however, refuse to abandon the only international stage that exists for them to propose solutions directly to world leaders—and to call out the glacial pace at which legislators pass climate policy.

After decades of growing research and public distress over the planet’s warming, the United Nations moved forward to make a COP possible in 1992. The first global climate convening came three years later in Berlin under the newly formed United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The fight for developed countries to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions started back then. It continues today.

Surely, that initial meeting sparked some hope—COP offered the world a semblance that leaders were tackling one of the planet’s most urgent issues. However, that image quickly shattered. The early years of negotiations were mired in disagreements and failed proposals. Even the wins were underwhelming. The Kyoto Protocol, the first attempt to set emissions reduction targets, took over seven years to enter into force in 2005, but the U.S. never joined. Several other declarations and agreements came and passed over the years, but nothing of promise moved forward until 2015 when parties adopted the Paris Agreement, marking their first global treaty to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

COP’s contentious negotiations history has been outlined in painstaking detail in an October report by the Harvard Kennedy School. Alongside summaries of every COP, the report authors also offer recommendations on how the process should improve and evolve. They note that part of that work should involve empowering groups that have long been excluded—like women and Indigenous folks—“given these are often the people best placed to implement climate solutions,” the authors write. 

They also recommend reining in “the extravaganza” at COP. Nowadays, influencers and corporate suits take over the climate conference for photoshoot moments or panel discussions. The report’s authors argue that these can distract negotiators and delay talks. While there’s value in civil society influencing the talks from the outside, the report suggests the U.N. should better prioritize country delegations, instead. 

Indeed, the Instagramization of COP has diminished the event’s value for Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the Brooklyn-based environmental group UPROSE. “Really? That’s what we’re doing? Selfies?” she said. Yeampierre, who has never attended a conference despite opportunities, has been part of the growing chorus alongside Hudson calling for an alternative. She believes the resources spent sending advocates there could be better spent elsewhere.

“The more I talked about it around the country, the more I got the feeling there was an appetite for doing something that was an alternative to the COP,” Yeampierre said. “We need to do something where we let people know, Wait a minute, there’s another way of moving forward.”

Like Hudson, she’s been thinking about an alternative to COP for years. Now, the two are forming their ideas into something more tangible. During Climate Week in New York in September, they held a public conversation on the topic where they posed a simple question: Is COP complicit in the climate crisis? 

“I’m not interested in the machines that can suck carbon from the air if they’re not also going to suck racism from the air, classism from the air, and sexism from the air because these are the things that are actually at the core of the climate crisis,” Hudson said during the event, speaking to the attention governments give to direct air capture and carbon removal technologies.

Yeampierre and Hudson understand how COP is valuable to low-income nations whose climate concerns are rarely heard, but they wish the marginalized of the world—both in the U.S. and abroad—would come together to address their joint issues in a protest event that challenges the legitimacy of COP. They’d like to see U.S.-based activists who go to the climate summit every year skip it and direct more energy and resources toward the urgent issues unfolding back home instead. Americans did not contribute equally to the world’s carbon emissions. They aren’t feeling its impacts equally, either. And their plight, they feel, is a footnote of the flagship climate conference.

“Insane amounts of inequality are everywhere,” Hudson said during the September panel. “The wealthiest people in the world are everywhere. And the poorest most disenfranchised—the disposable people of the world—are everywhere. They’re here in Brooklyn… The people of the Global Majority, the people who will be hurt most by climate change, are found in every nation.”

Frontline communities in the U.S. need support and resources. There are Black leaders fighting to fix their water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. There are also the warriors of Standing Rock, North Dakota, rallying to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline—but reparations for these harms are rarely discussed during COP negotiations.

“The narrative across the world, even among people from the Global South, is that because the United States is responsible for so much harm, that somehow we’re OK,” Yeampierre said. “They forget that the Global South lives in the United States. That our communities are surrounded by radioactive waste. There are people in communities with dioxin in their bloodstream. They forget because all they see is the wealth and the privilege and the heavy footing of the U.S. in these international spaces. It’s up to us as climate justice advocates to hold that space and to flip the narrative and to flip the resources and attention to the communities here in the U.S. that are part of that legacy of toxic exposure and extraction.” 

Corrie Grosse, an associate environmental studies professor at the College of Saint Benedict & Saint John’s University who studies social movements, sees value in an anti-COP because it can inspire individuals to take action when they return home—but COP already offers some of that. While she felt disillusioned by the conference when she first attended in her youth, she was also invigorated with joy after being surrounded by so many like-minded people. Building people power is one of the most beautiful outcomes at COP. Activists come from around the world to finally meet in person. They have a rare opportunity to build international coalitions and cross-movement strategies.

Indeed, this is part of why many frontline activists attend every COP they can. They’ve been there since the beginning—fighting for the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, for forest protections, for Indigenous land management. There’s the Indigenous Environmental Network, an organization dedicated to Indigenous issues that first attended the conference in 1998. 

Since 2009, the leading environmental coalition Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJA) has invested resources to ensure its values of resistance and reciprocity have a presence at these high-stakes meetings just about every year. Back then, they were exposing the harms of carbon credit plans. These days, they’re calling out the lies of carbon removal technologies.

“We know that as difficult as the conditions are in the UNFCCC, that is where climate policy is being shaped at a global level,” said Jaron Browne, organizing director for the alliance. “If we are not there, it is just being shaped without us.”

This year, the organization isn’t attending the summit—a decision staff do not take lightly—to stand in solidarity with Palestinian environmentalists calling on allies to boycott due to the event’s “greenwashing of genocide in Gaza,” as the group described online. This isn’t the first COP to draw such scrutiny. In Egypt last year, many activists called on their peers to skip attending due to the country’s human rights violations of LGBTQIA+ communities. However, activists are similarly critical whenever the conference takes place in developed nations where fewer human rights violations occur but are logistically difficult and costly to attend. The event’s accessibility to those most vulnerable to climate change impacts has been a recurring concern throughout recent years. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry gets to set the agenda.

And that’s exactly why groups like GGJA need to be at COP. The demonstrations they plan outside the event—and sometimes even inside—help expose the facade, Browne said. “The movement’s role is critical,” he said.

Large-scale protests can raise awareness, explained Thomas Piñeros Shields, an associate teaching professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. However, even protests can become routine—the public is easily distracted by something new.

“The politics of spectacle need to shift to politics of power,” he said in an email. “Actions that force decision-makers in government and finance especially to consider real costs of inaction. We need to make it too expensive to not take action.”

Piñeros Shields worries that an anti-COP could serve corporate interests that would love to see activists disappear from the negotiations altogether.

“The Left spends too much time fighting with one another,” he said. “We eat our own and leave space for more established, unified, and pre-existing interests to march forward.”