The Road to Dubai

The latest round of international climate negotiations is being held in a petrostate. What could go wrong?

Cop1 was held in 1995 in Berlin’s International Congress Center, a massive, metal-clad complex that looks like the set for a dystopian movie. Around nine hundred government delegates attended the weeklong negotiating session, along with about a thousand observers from non-governmental organizations. Daimler-Benz brought some electric cars to show off, while young activists brought a steamroller, to convey their opposition to cars. Delegates were invited to take a trip along the River Spree in a solar-powered boat.

Since cop1 was the first of its kind, there were no procedural rules in place, and all decisions had to be made by consensus. Presiding over the negotiations was a young Angela Merkel, then Germany’s minister for the environment. At the last plenary session, when it came time to adopt the session’s final communiqué, a delegate from Saudi Arabia rose to voice an objection. According to one journalist who was present, Merkel simply ignored him. “I think it’s all agreed,” she said, bringing down the gavel.

There have now been twenty-seven cops; this week marks the opening of the twenty-eighth, which will be held in Dubai. Over the years, everything cop-related has grown bigger and more elaborate. This year’s session is expected to attract some seventy thousand people—enough to populate a small city. Many will be representatives of governments and N.G.O.s; the rest will be lobbyists, protesters, reporters, and what are known as “overflow” delegates, who also represent governments but aren’t officially part of any delegation. Countries and advocacy groups have spent millions of dollars on World’s Fair-like pavilions, where they and their partners—mostly corporations—will tout their commitment to sustainability. This year, for the first time, Finland is springing for a pavilion; the aim, according to the organizers, is to strengthen the country’s “brand as a green tech hub.” opec, too, has decided to put up a pavilion.

“I hope all voices will be at the table at cop28,” the oil cartel’s secretary-general, Haitham al-Ghais, said, announcing this decision.

As cop has grown and grown, so, too, of course, has the problem it’s supposed to address. In 1995, global carbon-dioxide emissions amounted to twenty-three billion metric tons. This year, the total is expected to be about thirty-seven billion tons, an increase of around sixty per cent. Meanwhile, cumulative emissions—which, from a climate perspective, are what count—have doubled. Among scientists, it is widely agreed that the planet is approaching critical “tipping points,” if it hasn’t already crossed them. “Life on planet Earth is under siege,” is how a recent scientific paper put it.

Thanks to these opposing trends, cops have become a kind of travelling paradox. The meetings are the one time each year when the whole world confronts the climate crisis, and they are the time when the world demonstrates its collective failure to confront the crisis. The president of this year’s session, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, heads the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company. Does this show that even petrostates are now determined to act on climate change—or that fossil fuel interests run everything, including cops? It is worth noting that one of the great many questions that more than two dozen cops have failed to settle is how disagreements should be settled. Procedural rules have never been adopted, and so decisions must be reached by consensus, though what counts as consensus is also disputed.

Cop stands for Conference of the Parties, meaning, in this case, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. When the convention was finalized, at the so-called Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992, President George H. W. Bush flew down to sign it…