COP should put itself out of business
I’ve asked myself this question a lot in the past 48 hours, while navigating Antalya’s maddeningly overwhelmed transit system (although I will say the COP venue itself, if you can manage to get inside, is the nicest one we’ve had in years).
Key points
- And it’s impossible to say precisely what role COP, per se, has had in the pace of the clean energy rollout up to now.
- And needless to say, nothing that happens at COP has any real legally binding force on any country.
- Between the idealism-bordering-on-naivete, and the impenetrable thicket of acronyms, jargon, and obscure treaty provisions, “sometimes I come into negotiation rooms and the contrast with the real world cannot be any bigger,” Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s special climate envoy, told me here.
Tim’s view In the decade since the Paris Agreement, the annual round of UN climate summits has seemed like a parallel universe, increasingly out of touch with geopolitics and the real economy.
Additional details
- While the Iran war certainly did drive some countries to accelerate their adoption of renewables, the global reprioritization of energy security means “there is no doubt we’re backsliding” on the goal adopted at COP28, in Dubai, to transition away from fossil fuels, Mohamed said.
- That’s basically another version of the fossil fuel transition goal, viewed through the opposite end of the kaleidoscope, which could be more palatable to the oil-producing countries that are usually the spoilers here.
- “The transition is going to happen whether you want it to or not.” Notable In December, new US Commerce Department rules will make it costlier to import Chinese manufacturing components for solar panels, as part of an effort to make it harder for US solar firms to rely on China.
- There are still many people here at COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, this week who would love to see the oil and gas industry shuttered tomorrow, energy access and prices be damned.
- And while it may not be happening at activists’ preferred pace, clean energy adoption already driving a tangible transition away from fossil fuels.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.