85,000 strong, the people milling the halls and conference rooms of COP28 could have formed a small country. This year, over a dozen Yale undergraduates added their numbers to this massive group of legislators, activists, policymakers, scientists, lobbyists, and civilians in Dubai. Since 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has hosted the Conference of the Parties (COP) as the only global forum for international climate rule-making. Every fall, these negotiators meet to hammer out a new version of an international climate treaty.
While a COP happens each year, 2023 was unique. It was the first time the Parties have completed a Global Stocktake (GST) in which nations evaluate their progress using data on emissions reduction, the state of implementation efforts, and the financial flows of national climate action.
“[The GST says] here’s where we are at, here’s where we need to go, here’s how we get there,” said Nate Warszawski, Yale School of the Environment ‘25 and an analyst with the World Resources Institute. Warszawski attended COP28 with the government of Vanuatu, a small island nation in the Western Pacific Ocean.
The idea is that, after every Global Stocktake, each country will reevaluate and increase the ambition of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are the self-determined limits to fossil fuel emissions that each country can produce to keep global temperatures from rising more 1.5 degrees above preindustrial temperature levels. This idea—ratcheting up a country’s commitments every five years—is known as the Paris Ambition Mechanism.
Yet, while on the ground at COP, I found myself confused. The GST sounds like a report card, so where are the grades? The final text of the GST is 21 pages of statements that speak to the direction in which the world needs to go—in generalities. I wasn’t alone in seeking greater specificity.
“I always bemoan the fact that at these COPs, even with the GST, we don’t spend time saying what is working and what isn’t working,” said Valerie Hickey, COP veteran and the World Bank’s Global Director for Environment, Natural Resources, and Blue Economy. When we sat down, Hickey spoke to the pressure that conference participants feel to say that everything is going well. “It’s collective folly that we are all participating in.”
This lack of specificity played out not only in the negotiation room but also in the side events hosted by public and private institutions at COP. While some events provided relevant, specific perspectives, often the more ‘high-level’ an event—in other words, the more country ministers on the speaker list—the less substantive the outcome. At first, I filled up my agenda with events featuring the Minister of Environment for this country or the Chair of Energy for that nation – but I soon learned my lesson.
“Particularly at the more formal events where there are ministers involved,” noted Hickey, “I’m not sure what the agenda is, and I don’t know what the event’s success looks like.” Hickey felt that in many cases, people thought “success is the number of ministers attended.”
At COP, I worked for Hickey, accompanying her to take notes, photos, and videos. I watched her interact with countless different panels, topics, and atmospheres, nimbly existing in the space between praise and pragmatism. Caught between what one is supposed to say and how one feels, Hickey affirms that “there is always a tension between the choreography and the dance.”
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Much of my experience at COP28 was shaded by the setting. Each year, the UNFCCC hosts COP in a different country, ensuring that no single region gets to dominate the international climate conversation. Hosting COP is like being the maid of honor, officiant, and fiancé of a wedding at the same time—you plan, shape, and lead the entire event. As such, the political climate of the host country has an outsized impact on the nature of the COP. In democratic Scotland, the host of COP26, protestors lined the streets chanting for greater climate urgency—and COP attendees joined them. However, the past two COPs have been hosted in socially restrictive, oil-soaked nations: Egypt (Sharm el Sheikh, COP27) and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai, COP28). Next year, COP29 will be held in Azerbaijan, another fossil fuel wealthy nation.
On the ground at Expo City in Dubai, the planners’ bias showed. In sharp contrast to the activist-lined streets of COP26, protests within the Dubai conference center were limited and short-lived. Additionally, the physical constraints of the conference center made spontaneous interaction incredibly difficult.
Hickey highlighted the fact that this year’s COP was spread out over three large areas with individual assignments for spaces where companies, countries, and research organizations could host events. As a result, if someone wanted to attend an event, they had to search through the schedules of every pavilion they were interested in and make the pilgrimage amongst a maze of identical buildings to its location. This dissipated energy inhibited the spirit of spontaneous connection and collaboration.
“It’s about what happens in the hallways,” said Hickey. COP28, however, did not have many of those.
Another notable factor of COP28 was its overwhelming scale, which had pros and cons. In a venue bursting at the seams with passionate experts, the fragmentation of civil society diluted the demands made of this Conference. The passion and innovation of civil society felt completely disconnected from what Hickey called the “tweezer negotiations” that happened next door. The large COP meant that not everyone had specific motivation for attending the conference. The arrival of a big name like Hillary Clinton or Bill Gates turned more than a few attendees into celebrity chasers, rather than engaging meaningfully with the negotiations at stake. Based on personal experience, the term ‘COP tourism’ was coined with good reason.
This being said, expanding the scale of COP brought more groups into the conversation who needed to be there. Professor Paul Simons—former COO of the International Energy Agency and US Ambassador to Chile—told The Politic that industries such as shipping, aviation, insurance, and health were present at COP28 but left out of landmark COP negotiations in Paris back in 2015. While one could say the conference is out of control, “it shows that a lot more sectors are buying in and seeing co-benefits of [fighting climate change].”
Despite the industries newly included in the conversation, I couldn’t help but notice how many voices were left out. For example, many countries had their own pavilion where they extolled their nation’s environmental involvement. But hosting a pavilion is incredibly expensive; many nations facing the greatest climate impacts (for example, Vanuatu, the country for which Warszawski worked) were priced out. They had to share pavilions with other countries and, in some cases, could not afford pavilions at all. The inequities for smaller, under-resourced countries didn’t end there. With limited staffs, governments like Vanuatu had fewer negotiators to spread across the same number of agenda items when compared with larger delegations from wealthier nations.
For observers (in other words, anyone who is not a negotiator), equity problems abound. In the leadup to COP28, the Yale Student Environmental Coalition—the organization of which I am co-President that provides badges each year to the Yale undergraduate delegation—received countless requests from young, international, highly-qualified climate activists who could not find an organization to sponsor them for a badge. While we accommodate all the requests that we could, it highlighted just how many necessary voices are denied entry.
Even with a badge, there were more closed doors than open ones in the negotiation rooms. I recall sprinting to make it to a negotiation on the Santiago Network only to be told that there was no more room for observers. When the door opened, I saw large expanses of empty space.
What was more concerning about that incident was not that I was denied access, but that representatives of the Indigenous People’s Caucus were prevented from entering as well. If observers are not permitted to observe, they become but tokens of inclusion.
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Like many attendees going into COP28, I was concerned about the potential for success of a climate conference led by a nation made rich by oil. According to in-depth research by the Kick Big Polluters Out Coalition, the number of UNFCCC accredited fossil fuel lobbyists and employees in attendance at COP28 was over 2,400—nearly fourfold from last year’s COP. During the conference, the Guardian published an article revealing that COP President Sultan Al Jaber—the CEO of state oil company Adnoc—said that “there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 C.”
After a public outcry, Sultan Al Jaber clarified his statement, explaining that he believed “a phase-down and a phase-out of fossil fuel…is inevitable,” but that the world must be “real serious and pragmatic about it.” Walking past pavilions at COP hosted by groups such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), one questions what the President’s idea of pragmatism might be.
One night after a long day at the conference center, I recall standing at the top of the Burj Khalifa and gazing out over the sprawling city of Dubai, overflowing with light. Everything below the world’s tallest building was once dunes and wind. Then, in 1966, oil was discovered, and the race to expand began. Dubai is a city built on oil. In order to establish a livable future, the fossil fuel systems on which the entire city—and the entire world—is founded on will have to change. How can such fundamental disruption of the status quo ever be accepted by a fossil fuel executive as ‘pragmatic’?
This being said, it is true that many in the climate movement expected this COP to skirt around fossil-fuel reduction. In some ways, that narrative was over-emphasized. For example, while Al Jaber made the inflammatory statements over a week before the conference, the Guardian waited until the conference was well underway to publish the piece, maximizing public outcry and painting the Presidency in a negative light.
In fact, although not ideal, it is arguably necessary to involve fossil fuel companies in climate and environmental negotiations. As an example, Hickey compared fossil fuel reform to other reform movements, such as in the healthcare industry.
“We can’t have a conversation about healthcare without bringing in the pharmaceutical industry,” said Hickey.
Is the production and burning of fossil fuels directly causing climate change? Undeniably, yes. But as long as the debate remains one of morality that situates some interests as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad,’ progress is hindered.
Often, when fossil fuel interests are invited to an event like COP, “they are brought to shame [by the anti-fossil fuel community],” said Hickey. Instead, she suggests a bringing these energy interests into a good faith conversation about how they assess demand and how they plan to transition their assets away from fossil fuels.
In Dubai, the fossil fuel industry was present but shielded from true rigorous inquiry like this. However, progress was arguably made. The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter (OGDC), for example, was launched at the conference, and included commitments from 50 oil and gas companies to align with net zero by 2050 targets, zero-out methane emissions, eliminate routine flaring by 2030, and work towards “industry best practices in emission reduction.”
Regarding the OGDC talks, Ambassador Simons pointed out how unusual it was to see 50 oil and gas CEOs “around a table talking about how they were going to decarbonize.”
I certainly recognize the necessity for fossil interests to be involved in this transition, and this Charter is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. However, there are conflicts of interest that will continue to play a role when fossil fuel companies are engaged in climate talks. For example, the language of the OGDC is telling: oil and gas will be ‘decarbonized,’ not ‘removed.’ On the announcement’s webpage, the words ‘fossil fuels’ never appear.
There is no easy answer to what extent fossil fuel companies should be included at the table during climate negotiations. Al Jaber, as the CEO of an oil company, directly stands to benefit if this transition is as slow as possible.
We would not have put the tobacco industry in charge of the anti-smoking campaign. On the other hand, fossil fuel companies are stakeholders who hold great power to effect change. It would be shortsighted to leave them out of the conversation.
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So, was COP28 a success or a failure?
Despite the climate movement’s trepidations, COP28 did in fact result in a number of positive political outcomes. For the first time since the UNFCCC began in 1992, the treaty directly addressed the need to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” While this statement is common sense for many socially conscious people, language like this being included in the final treaty—which must be approved by all member states—is an enormous accomplishment, a first in the 30-year history of the conference.
The treaty also calls for a “phase-down of unabated coal power.” However, this language implies that ‘abated’ coal—those including carbon capture and storage—are not necessarily out of the question, prolonging the social acceptance of a fundamentally exploitative industry.
The agreement reached by the treaty has been dubbed the UAE Consensus and takes many strides towards finally addressing global climate change. The Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Pledge, for example, set an ambitious goal of 11,000 Gigawatts of renewable energy and a doubling of energy efficiency by 2030. In perhaps the most important development from COP28, the first day of the conference saw the passage of the Loss and Damage Fund, a mechanism to finance developing countries as they repair from the economic and environmental impacts of climate change. The Loss and Damage Fund will be made up of voluntary contributions, most of them from developed countries (The donations made thus far range. While Germany, France, Italy, and the UAE have dedicated $100 million each, the United States has contributed just $17.5 million.)
Additionally, COP28 hosted an unprecedented number of youth climate activists, even appointing the first-ever official Youth Climate Champion. In previous climate conversations, activists have worried that the inclusion of young people was driven by the desire to tokenize these voices. In some ways, this held true at COP28: at many of the events I attended, a young person would speak for ninety seconds about ‘the youth perspective’ before the moderator returned to other speakers. Even still, the climate organizers I met at COP—associated with YOUNGO, a university, or another organization—were carrying out significant work in their homes and around the world.
It is certainly not true that no losses occurred at COP28. Decisions regarding Article 6, which would establish global carbon markets, were punted to COP29. So too was discussion on the New Collective Qualitative Goal (NCQG), which would dedicate a greater fund to developing countries for adaptation to climate change.
Looking towards COP29, we are nowhere near as far as we should be—and yet, we are farther than ever before. Just as the Paris Ambition Mechanism calls for increasingly ambitious National Targets, we must maintain an Ambition Mechanism in our hearts to evaluate our progress and increase our goals on the scale of months, not years. Complacency seems to abound at home and overseas; during a roundtable discussion with US Congress staffers at COP, I was surprised at their defensiveness when asked about their Congressperson’s plan for climate action. They largely restricted their comments to describing the success of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which included many green and climate-friendly initiatives. But while vital, the IRA—like COP28—is merely a first step. Our ambition must keep pace with our accomplishments.
But all of this discussion perhaps fails to answer the question at the heart of COP dialogue. Ultimately, observers want to conclude: was COP28 a success or a failure?
Hickey feels that we are too focused on the spectacle of COP, the who’s who of political high profile events.
“We’ve forgotten that these COPs are touchpoints in a difficult and long marathon,” said Hickey. All told, COP28 seems to have been a generative touchpoint. While Hickey hasn’t noticed a stark shift in direction following COP28, she finds it has shifted the speed of action.
One of my greatest takeaways from COP28 was that, when it comes to advancing global goals, we may have to make some undesirable bedfellows to advance climate action. We cannot reinvent the energy system behind the backs of fossil fuel companies; they must be along for the ride.
My commute to the conference center each morning was an apt metaphor for this transition. From the safety of the elevated train, I watched the sunrise over a desert skyline dominated by the hulking figures of a fossil fuel facility, like black skeletons against the hazy dawn. At first, I scoffed at the proximity of these skeletons to the world’s largest climate conference; I saw it as a symbol of destruction. However, by the end of the week—a week in which I watched compromise happen in real time—my interpretation of that image changed. In order to reach the equitable, clean, and beautiful future that will sustain life on earth, we cannot go around the fossil fuel industry. We cannot leap over the obstacles to justice. Valiantly, we must push through.