Overheard in the Newsroom: Bad COP, good COP?

We are roughly halfway through COP28, the climate change conference taking place this year in a vast hall in Dubai.

Last weekend, Pilita Clark, a veteran of seven previous COPs, wrote this personal essay on what we could expect. So we decided to catch up with her in Dubai to find out how it is going.

In short: not bad, quite good even, by COP standards.

“They started by announcing the Loss and Damage Fund [for countries that have been damaged by climate-caused weather and disasters], and then they got a pile of money from the UAE, some $30bn, and there have been other commitments, and then they came out with this fossil fuel agreement,” said Pilita.

“It is the first time the national oil companies and the western majors have come together. They are basically only saying they are going to clean up their methane, which they should do anyway, but at least they have said it and said it at a COP, which puts more pressure on them to actually do it, and it puts pressure on those who didn’t sign.”

But on the downside, she added, the research shows that carbon emissions have yet to peak, when they should be falling by now, and the temperatures in 2024 are forecast to be even hotter than this year.

The scale of this year’s event is also unprecedented. “Previous COPs have been small enough that you serendipitously bump into the people you need to see, but that is not happening so much here. And there’s a competition for who can get the most steps on their fitness tracker,” Pilita said. Greg Jackson, the founder of the UK’s Octopus Energy, told her he was averaging 30,000 steps a day.

“In some ways it is genius because everything works,” said Pilita. “A lot of people were scarred by Sharm el-Sheikh where the food ran out, the water ran out and a sewage pipe burst. People were getting electrocuted, the venue was terrible, the signage was bad.

“Here there are food trucks everywhere, the actual hall is enormous and the way it is going, it might even finish on time. I have never been to one that ended on time before.”

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