Greta Thunberg isn’t alone in rejecting the UN climate conference, but we still have to be there
Greta Thunberg is not a fan of Cop27, the climate conference that got under way in Egypt overnight on Sunday. She reckons it’s just a chance for the powerful to get away with “greenwashing, lying and cheating”, and that the annual summits of national governments, policy experts, spruikers and hangers-on aren’t working. She’s not going.
She might be right not to go. As a privileged middle-aged man from a generation that has failed to do enough to address the climate crisis – more than half all historic emissions have been in the past 30 years – I’m not here to say she’s wrong.
There is plenty to be cynical about. The Egyptian hosts have named CocaCola, which uses fossil fuels to produce about 120bn throwaway plastic bottles each year, as a sponsor of the conference. In Kenya, a civil society group has pointed out that nearly half of the plastic bottle waste in its country can be traced back to Coke. It’s a similar story across the developing world, where plastic rubbish clogs cities and waterways.
There is a tradition of this sort of thing across 27 years of UN climate summits. As reported in last year’s Australia v The Climate podcast series, some conferences have been sponsored by coal companies. Last year, an Australian government pavilion in Glasgow gave over its main display space to Santos, a still-expanding oil and gas company.
The problems going into Cop27 are broader than this. Tens of thousands of people are expected in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, but protesters are not welcome. Instead, civil society has been offered a pen far from the conference centre where they will be allowed to express their views behind a fence in the desert sun.
Activists estimate Egypt has 60,000 political prisoners. In the lead-up to the event, civil society groups have been calling for the release of Alaa Abd ElFattah, a pro-democracy activist who has spent most of the past decade in prison and has been on a hunger strike since April. At the time of publication, the Egyptian government hasn’t responded. Meanwhile, youth activists from across Africa, from some of the countries most sharply affected by the climate crisis, say they have struggled to get passes to what is supposed to be the African Cop, reinforcing a perception that UN climate conferences are an event for the wealthy and comfortable.
Hopes for progress at the talks themselves are limited and have fallen since the relative high of Cop26 in Glasgow last year. Then, countries agreed to limit global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – an advancement on the landmark 2015 Paris agreement – and acknowledged that meant immediately considering how to ratchet up action this decade. But 2022 has not delivered on that promise. Only 24 countries have updated their voluntary pledges to the UN, and only India and Australia have taken noteworthy strides forward, the latter from a very low base.
This will again be a focus in Sharm el-Sheikh, alongside an emphasis on the need for financial support for developing countries. The world agreed more than a decade ago that at least US $100bn a year was needed to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt to unavoidable change, but hasn’t yet met this goal.
A related, and possibly bigger, issue at Cop27 will be loss and damage from climate disasters in societies that have not caused the problem. Climate justice demands the wealthy step in to ensure communities can continue to develop and improve lives, not just struggle to survive.
Whether Cop27 can deliver on these issues is unclear, but pessimism over whether major progress is possible in the next fortnight is justified. The Egyptians have described the event as an “implementation Cop”, which suggests bedding down what has already been agreed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis have distracted international attention while also likely accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy.
What is certain is that the fortnightlong talks will be fraught – they always are – and at some point become frantic as delegates from nearly 200 countries try to reach consensus on meaningful change that vaults the negotiations forward or, failing that, prevents them from falling apart.
I’ll be in Sharm for the sprint to the line in the second week. I’ve been asked a few times why I’m bothering, given the logistical challenges, the ethical questions hanging over the summit and all the caveats about what will be achieved. It’s a fair question.
From an Australian perspective, this is the first Cop appearance by the Albanese government, which has promised a wholesale transformation in how the country contributes to the global climate effort. As observers have told Guardian Australia, Australia has gone from being a global laggard under Scott Morrison to now being in the middle of the road. Politically, it is a big shift, but it will be asked to back up its new rhetoric by committing to do more than it has promised so far.
The Australian delegation led by the climate and energy minister, Chris Bowen, can expect questions about what it is prepared to support on finance and loss and damage. Will it, for example, rejoin the green climate fund that Morrison quit during an on-air chat with Alan Jones?
The scrutiny will be heightened due to Australia’s bid to host Cop31 in 2026, an ambitious goal that may pit it in competition with Germany and Switzerland. Expect there to be focus on Australia’s support for an expansion in fossil fuel exports, which is at odds with its policies promising to ramp up domestic action. How Pacific islands representatives, the Albanese government’s potential partners in the hosting bid, respond to that will be key. All of this is worth documenting.
More broadly, there is a responsibility on journalists who can get to Cop27 to interpret and relay the often highly technical discussions at the conference for those who can’t be there. For all the justified criticism that 27 years of UN climate conferences have not solved the problem, they have made a difference. The Paris agreement has been genuinely transformative, prompting an escalation in national commitments that have reduced forecasts of future heating by 1C – just nothing like enough, yet.
It also forced a change among investors and businesses. There is still no shortage of corporate and political greenwashing, but there is less outright denial. As the cost of acting falls – solar power is now considered the cheapest form of energy in human history – excuses for inaction are melting away.
The role of the journalist in all this should, of course, be to hold everyone involved to account. And, in turn, to be held to account by their audience. The bottom line is that none of us should look away. It matters.
This is the first Cop appearance by the Albanese government, which has promised a wholesale transformation