How to (try to) save the planet
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There is no greater collective action problem than global warming — and there has never been a more impressive attempt to overcome collective-action obstacles than the COP process, the latest iteration of which has just wrapped up in Dubai.
Why it matters: It's easy to be cynical about the spectacle of thousands of delegates flying atmosphere-destroying planes to a petrostate capital for a global-warming conference chaired by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. But in a fracturing and deglobalizing world, it's worth taking stock of the degree of consensus and real progress that has been made over the past 30 years.
The big picture: COP, which stands for Conference of the Parties, grew out of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
- It's both the governing body of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and an ever-expanding annual meeting that this year attracted a mind-boggling 97,372 delegates (not including virtual participants) over what turned out to be 14 days.
How it works: Those delegates, including more than 100 heads of state and countless CEOs and other leaders, collectively comprise an astonishingly diverse and powerful group of individuals. Never before has so much geopolitical clout been focused, every year, on a single overarching goal — to prevent the global average temperature from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally no more than 1.5°C.
- Success on either of those measures is by no means assured. But if success arrives, it will arrive only with coordinated global action.
- That's why today's COP pledges are signed by every country — a wildly diverse group including small island states that fear extinction, oil producers like Saudi Arabia, and polluters like China.
- This year, the accord committed for the first time to transition away from fossil fuels, on top of a tripling of renewable energy capacity by 2o3o.
My thought bubble: Imagine the difficulty in getting such a pledge through just the United States Congress. Now imagine what it's like to wrangle unanimous agreement out of 197 different sovereigns, some of whom are at literal war with each other.
Between the lines: COP is an iterative process. It can feel fatally slow at times, but each COP meeting somehow builds on the last and moves the agenda forward.
- To take issue with the COP, and to wish it were tougher, is natural, justified, and necessary for further progress to be made. Moving at the pace of the slowest is extraordinarily frustrating. But it does work.
As Axios' Andrew Freedman writes, the Dubai accord can appear to just be empty promises that are not binding. But if history is any guide, its influence over energy policy is likely to be far-reaching.
The long journey from Kyoto to Dubai
COP first came to broad public attention with its third annual meeting — COP 3 — in Kyoto in 1997.
- The Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty on carbon emissions, placed obligations on neither India nor China; the U.S. never ratified it.
- While there was compelling logic to the binding structure of the Kyoto treaty, ultimately it couldn't deliver what the world needed, and the COP process moved to the current system, where each country sets its own targets.
State of play: The heavy lifting of climate policy is now done by domestic sovereign governments voluntarily setting their own targets.
- COP is necessary because the appetite for aggressive domestic policy in any given country tends to rise significantly when all other countries have committed to doing something similar.
Flashback: It wasn't until COP 17, in Durban in 2011, that all countries, including the U.S., India, and China, officially agreed to start reducing carbon emissions.
- The Paris Agreement, adopted by all countries and creating an official 1.5°C stretch goal, was approved at COP 21, in 2015.
Our thought bubble, from Axios' Andrew Freedman: If this isn't meaningful, if this doesn't do anything, why would foreign ministers, who have a lot on their plate, spend 3-4 all-nighters in a row haggling over each individual word? And why would OPEC fight tooth and nail against specific language in the text?
- Be smart: These agreements show up in national legislation, in court cases, in international legal structures, and much more.
The bottom line: We've come a very long way. The statement agreed to by countries such as Iraq and Russia in 2023, or the fact that Saudi Arabia has pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2060, would have been unthinkable in 1992.
