COP28 - What Are We Doing Here? Not a Lot.
The COP format has outlived its usefulness. Time to move on.
The people in this photo equal about half the amount of those now attending COP28.
Photo by Mitch Rosen on Unsplash
COP28 is underway.
COP28 started in Dubai last week, and as usual, there are many media pieces about how important COP28 is and what will get done there.
COP28 isn’t very important and not much will get done there.
Yes, on the first day of the meeting last week, there was an agreement on the loss and damage fund, which looks like it will finally provide money to the fund that has been promised at multiple past COP meetings. About $300 million has been pledged to the fund to help developing countries deal with climate change.
That isn’t nothing, but in the grand scheme of things – it’s not much.
Look at this chart:
CO2 ppm is the parts of CO2 parts per million in our atmosphere. The “safe” range of CO2 ppm has been somewhere between 200 – 300 for most of human history. We were at about 360 ppm at the first COP in 1995. We are now at about 420 ppm and that line has gone straight up in a consistent 45-degree angle between every COP. It is quite impressive and depressing how the COP process has consistently failed, year after year.
The job of COPs 1 – 28 has been to bend the CO2 ppm curve down. It has failed, continues to fail, and will likely continue to fail.
Virtue signaling is a competitive sport.
There will be over 70,000 delegates at this year's COP meeting.
To put that in perspective:
- 68,000 people attended the 2023 Super Bowl.
- 73,000 people attended this year’s Burning Man festival.
- 51,000 people die of heart disease each day in the world.
- The city I live in, in the United States, has less than 70,000 people. There are about 30 large grocery stores in the city that serve that population.
It does not take 70,000 people to iron out a climate deal. If you have ever tried to get something done in a group, you know the bigger the size of that group, the harder it is to get anything done. COP 28 is not about getting anything done, it is about being seen getting something done. I’m sure there is real work being done at COP 28, but many, if not most of the people there don’t need to be there. COP has become a festival; it is the Woodstock of the climate world.
That isn’t useful.
Also, how are all these people going to get there?
Most of them are going to fly.
This is a meeting that is purported to take climate change seriously, yet the amount of private jets flying into Dubai for the meetings will make COP28 the event with the largest carbon footprint in the history of humanity – that is, until next year for COP29.
The optics aren’t great.
Then there is the fact that this year's COP confab is being held in the UAE, one of the world’s largest oil producers. The president of COP 28 is Sultan al-Jabar, the head of the UAE national oil company.
That sounds like a conflict of interest because it is. Just two days into the meeting, the Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC revealed that the UAE delegation was instructed to promote oil and gas deals at the year’s pre-eminent climate change conference.
This follows on the heels of al-Jaber stating in a meeting leading up to COP 28 that there is “no science” to support the assertion that the phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to keep the world on track to limit global warming to 1.5C.
Just when you thought that al-Jabar might be a comic book villain, there is more. At the event where he made the “no evidence” declaration, he stated that humanity would go back to living in caves without fossil fuels.
I’m going to do a quick history check and confirm that we were well out of caves as a species when oil was first discovered in 1859 in Pennsylvania.
You’ve got that right, the man in charge of the conference that is supposed to address climate change is telling us that if we address climate change, we will all go back to living in caves.
Great. Confidence in his leadership is … what’s below the basement? That’s the word I’m looking for.
Why do we keep doing this?
The world has fallen into the habit of seeing the annual COP meeting as the time to talk and think about climate change. There are certainly stories about climate change throughout the year, but the COP series is seen as the yearly “Super Bowl” of climate change meetings. Lots of important people fly into some place in the world, talk for about a week, and then there is drama around what will come out of the meeting. The media reports on what comes out of the meeting and then we are on to the next thing.
Then it’s, “See you again in a year and we’ll talk about climate change again.”
This is no way to get something substantive done. COP creates the illusion of action because people hear a lot of noise about a meeting with 70,000 people going and assume something important happened. The meeting itself isn’t designed to get substantive things done. It has evolved into an expensive and extravagant virtue-signaling exercise and networking opportunity.
Go through Linkedin this week and see how many times you see people saying they are going to COP28. I have a lot of them in my Linkedin feed because I’m in the sustainable finance world and linked to a lot of people who talk about climate change. If you aren’t in these circles, just do a COP28 search. You will find tens of thousands of people going to COP 28.
Most of them don’t need to be there.
Most of them are well-intentioned, but after a certain point, you get to the law of diminishing returns. Those diminishing returns started happening a long time before we got to 70,000. COPs 1-27 did not bend the curve. COP 28 will be no different. If we aren’t bending that curve, what is the point of all this?
I have a better idea.
Cancel COP.
It does no good and is just a highly expensive illusion of action. You don’t need an expensive and polluting meeting with 70,000 people to iron out a loss and damage fund.
The only thing COP gets done is getting climate concern in the news cycle so that heads of government can be seen to be doing something when nothing of much substance ever gets done. The COP format is an expensive and cynical waste of time.
All energy should be focused on bending the ppm curve. COP has not and cannot do that.
End COP.
People may complain and say without COP they won’t have a seat at the table. But no table with 70,000 seats at it is ever going to get anything done. No table with 70,000 seats at it is a meeting. At that point, you are at a sporting event.
We don’t need more of these extravagant meetings. We need less of them. What we need is leadership on climate. We need leaders in government and business to stick their necks out and take bold action.
Bold action comes from a small group of people or even one person. Bold action never has and never will come from 70,000 people at an event. Gathering with 70,000 people provides cover for doing very little. It provides cover for business as usual, with incremental changes that do nothing to bend the curve but will read well in a press release.
Go find people who want to take action and start gathering around a table with them. When people who have been desperate for action for the past 28 years see action being taken, they will come to that table with you and maybe get something done.