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Geopolitics, the heightened importance of climate change, and the sheer size of the conference have transformed the event into something that it was never meant to be.
It didn’t attract a lot of attention, but for a few months, it looked like the United Nations climate process might break down.
There, process is substance: One of the most important acts every year is the selection of the next country to run the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP. This distinction normally rotates among the UN’s five regional country groups; next year, a country in the “Eastern Europe” group is due to host. All the members of a group must unanimously agree on which country will get to host.
This is a highly contingent way to decide who gets to host a climate conference. Really, the entire schema of UN regional groups represents a hangover of Cold War geopolitics that is now indefinitely unchangeable. (The “Western Europe” group is essentially the early members of NATO; it includes such notably non-western-European countries as Turkey, the United States, and — hilariously — Australia.)
The “Eastern Europe” group, meanwhile, amounts to more or less the former members of the Warsaw Pact. For obvious reasons, these countries cannot agree on a consensus choice in 2023. Russia, the group’s largest member, was not amenable to holding the COP in any eastern Europe NATO member state, such as Poland, Latvia, or Finland. The eastern European NATO members — as well as Ukraine, which is also in the UN regional group — were similarly opposed to holding the COP in Russia.
That meant that attention focused on the group’s countries in the Caucasus, at the edge of central Asia: Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Yet difficulties presented themselves here too. Azerbaijan successfully seized an Armenian exclave earlier this year, evicting up to 120,000 Armenians as part of a campaign described as ethnic cleansing. Armenia blocked any Azeri bid to host the COP.
For the first time in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s history, no country would have been able to lead COP the following year. Geopolitics had seemingly broken the consensus mechanism that makes the climate conference work.
This amounted to more than just a deficiency in party planning. It would have forced Bonn, Germany — the home of the UNFCC’s permanent headquarters — to host COP29, a kind of “break in case of emergency” default option. And it would have allowed the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate that has reportedly used the COP to make oil deals, to retain the conference presidency for at least another year.
That didn’t happen. Late last week, Armenia lifted its block of Azerbaijan’s bid, and the two countries mutually released prisoners in a gesture of good will. (Their rapprochement happened suspiciously close to President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the U.A.E.) Next year’s COP will seemingly happen in Baku, the Azeri capital.
But just because the COP process didn’t break doesn’t mean that it’s not being stretched. All is not well with the COP. During this year’s conference, a picture emerged of a COP being tested by a more rivalrous, conflict-prone world. Geopolitics, the heightened importance of climate change, and the sheer size of the conference have transformed the event into something that it was never meant to be.
This year, more than 100,000 people attended the COP. It was held at Dubai’s opulent Expo City, the Disney World-style convention campus initially built for the 2020 World Expo, the modern successor to World’s Fairs. Hundreds of nonprofit groups and companies, as well as more than 190 countries, ran public pavilions that advertised their climate accomplishments and views on decarbonization. Negotiators divided into different blocs: China and the United States, oil-producing states and small island nations, the West and the rest.
It wasn’t always like this. When the first COP was held in Berlin in 1995, the world was in a very different era, Lee Beck, the senior director for Europe and the Middle East at the Clean Air Task Force, told me. It was “the peak of multilateralism, followed by relative geopolitical stability and peace,” she said. The United States and the broader West set the agenda for global events.
“In the last two years — others would say the writing was on the wall as early as 2014 — geopolitical fragmentation really is visible,” she said. “You’re really pushing the limits of multilateralism at this one. One of the cracks is we’re unable to agree where the COP even will be.”
But geopolitics are not the only force stretching COP to the limit. Another is the sheer size of the event itself.
There used to be “big COPs” and “small COPs”: COP21, the 2015 meeting where the Paris Agreement was finalized, was a “big COP,” but the following year’s conference in Marrakech, Morocco, was a fairly minor one. Even COP21 was less than half the size of this year’s COP. And in one possible read, this year should have been a smaller COP — the biggest to-dos were formally launching the Loss and Damage fund and writing the Global Stocktake report, a kind of report card on the world’s climate progress (or lack thereof).
But small COPs don’t seem to happen any more. Since the pandemic ended and COP26 took place in Glasgow, Scotland, COPs have swollen in size, creating the age of the new “mega-COP.” More than 100,000 people attended the conference this year, making it by far the biggest COP ever. It was more than twice the size of last year’s confab in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt, which was previously the biggest COP ever. Most of those attendees had nothing to do with the negotiations ostensibly at the center of the conference — they were investors, technologists, scholars, scientists, or experts — and instead made up a de facto global trade show on climate solutions.
COP is now so big and climate is now so important that even the lack of news about the conference can generate news. When President Joe Biden declined to attend this year’s conference, The New York Times push-alerted it.
But there are possibilities that could improve the situation. One of them might be that COP simply becomes so unmanageable that it has to scale back. Few cities have the spare capacity to house an extra 100,000 visitors for 12 days. New York City, for instance, only has about 123,000 hotel rooms total. If COP were to keep growing, the problem would only get harder. When 150,000 people descended on San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual conference in 2015, the company docked a cruise ship in the bay to provide an extra thousand rooms.
There are solutions, Beck said. She noted this was the first year that every continent had held its own Climate Week: a smaller event focusing on more region-specific decarbonization challenges. This COP has also seen the emergence of country coalitions that rally around different issues or approaches. The set of countries that backed a pledge to triple renewable capacity, for instance, is different from the smaller coalition that wanted to triple nuclear capacity. These smaller, more sector-specific coalitions may have more ability to actually decarbonize and address climate change, she said.
For all these challenges, perhaps the biggest miracle is that the UNFCC process works at all, Eve Tamme, a former climate negotiator for the European Commission, told me.
“The UNFCCC process is based on consensus between almost 200 countries. Judging based on the complexity of the issue at hand and the divergence of views among the countries, it seems impossible that such a process could deliver anything at all,” she said. Even when you follow the negotiations closely, it may seem like there’s barely any movement at all, she said.
“But then again, we got the Kyoto Protocol,” she said. “And we got the Paris Agreement. So while it may look broken in the short term, somehow this dysfunctional process can still deliver.”
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If you want to donate to fight climate change, what’s the best way to spend your money?
For the past five years, Giving Green has been trying to find out. Each year, the nonprofit recommends a set of nonprofits that are trying to solve the climate problem effectively and efficiently, and get the world closer to decarbonization.
Giving Green, in other words, is somewhat like the climate-specific version of Givewell, an uber-utilitarian group that identifies which global charities maximize the number of lives saved per dollar spent. But it’s much more difficult— or at least much less clear — to identify which nonprofits might best fight climate change than it is which nonprofits might save the most lives through targeted interventions.
Climate change is a globe-spanning sociotechnical problem, a political quandary baked into humanity’s largest-scale engineering systems. Even when a government or technology has seemingly pushed the world forward, it can be unclear why the improvement happened, or whether, in the long run, it will make a meaningful difference. The Paris Agreement, after all, has been around for nearly a decade, the European Union’s cap-and-trade scheme for nearly two. Yet academics, experts, and politicians can (and do) disagree about whether either policy has ultimately helped — and even why they happened in the first place.
To resolve this problem, Giving Green reviews the historical record to identify philanthropic strategies that seem like they have a good shot of leading to emissions reductions. This year, it has focused on eight, including next-generation geothermal, decarbonizing aviation and marine shipping, advancing nuclear energy, and speeding the energy transition in low- and middle-income countries. Then it looks for groups that are working on those problems in time-proven ways. This year, it also started a grant fund so that it could support some of these groups itself.
I spoke with Daniel Stein, Giving Green’s director, earlier this week. Our interview has been edited and condensed for readability.
What is Giving Green’s goal with these recommendations?
The main goal — the problem we are trying to solve — is that we believe that there are lots of people who want to do something about climate, and there’s a lot of money that’s paralyzed by indecision and sits on the sidelines. So we provide a comprehensively researched guide with a systematic approach to try and determine where the high leverage points are in climate philanthropy — and by high-leverage, I’m thinking most greenhouse gas reductions per dollar.
We focus in on what we call philanthropic strategies, specific things that people could be doing. Then we find organizations working on those strategies that are doing a great job and promote them.
Can you tell me about a few of the organizations that you have chosen?
We have some that we’ve recommended for a few years, such as Clean Air Task Force. Last year, one of our big pushes was geothermal energy, and so we’ve recommended Project Innerspace, who are a big advocate for geothermal and work a lot with both private industry and the government.
Another big area of focus for us over the past few years has been heavy industry. The case for philanthropic support for heavy industry is really, really clear. Depending on what estimate you use, heavy industry accounts for roughly a quarter of carbon emissions, but something like less than 5% of philanthropic spending. There’s very little policy teeth almost anywhere in the world on industry, and basically nothing in the U.S., but there are pathways to solving it. We kind of know how to make green steel and green aluminum, and at least have ideas on concrete and plastic. There’s a lot nonprofits can do to pave the way forward in terms of: What does policy look like? How do we get from where we are today — where we kind of know the technology but no one’s using it — to a place where there’s actually supply and demand in the future? So our top recommendations for that is an organization called Industrious Labs in the U.S. and an organization called Future Cleantech Architects in Europe.
Over the past five years, I feel like I’ve seen your mission evolve and your strategies evolve. At the beginning, you recommended giving to a mix of high-end research and policy-development groups, and then also to more grassroots, movement-type groups. But over time, your set of recommendations have become much more focused on groups that are like CATF, that are providing nonpartisan, highly expert information and analysis.
I think that’s right, but it is not necessarily that we have just changed our mind on what works. I think different moments in time call for different approaches. And in those heady years leading up to the Inflation Reduction Act — where there was hope for a Democratic trifecta, and then it happened — there was a major opportunity for a left-driven, all-of-government push on climate. That was what we thought these grassroots groups were in a good position to push forward.
I think when you look back, you see groups like Sunrise having a really powerful influence. Obviously people disagree on what forces got the IRA to happen. But I really do think that you can draw a direct line from this progressive advocacy to the Democrats believing that they had to do something about climate to please their base.
But our view is that that moment has passed. Especially post-IRA, this opportunity for a more progressive-led legislative process has ended. Even if the Democrats were still in control, I think you weren’t going to get big bills like the IRA. We moved to a point where we need to focus on the wonky details of implementing these bills and then passing more technical, focused policy in the future. Our view is that in the U.S., the big opportunities have shifted to what we would call the “insider” groups. But I think that could change again, and it could change based on geography.
Are there any big climate strategies nobody is working on right now — where you identified a place where money could be spent, but you couldn’t find a nonprofit focused on it?
One of our high-level strategies is solar radiation management. That was something that was new for us this year. And within that, we would look at very specific substrategies. Should we be funding research? Should we be funding governance? And within those little sub-elements, we occasionally found stuff where we were like, wow, we really wish there was a group working on this, but we didn’t find anything.
But one of the nice things about having a [grant-making] fund this year, for the first time ever, is that we could help get things started that didn’t exist before. We’re super excited about industry, and so much industry is happening in developing countries. But when you ask, Who is focused on reducing steel emissions in Indonesia?, there were very few organizations. We made a grant to an organization called Climate Catalyst — they were already working on steel in India, and we helped them expand into emissions reduction in Indonesia.
I think some people might see your list and go, Wow, these are a bunch of high-end research and elite advocacy organizations, but what’s actually going to solve the climate crisis is local organizing.How would you reply to that?
I think that’s a reasonable point. We are open to all of these things, and we have considered them, and I think there is a time and place for grassroots approaches and activism. But looking at the historical research and our own research, I believe that the approaches that work on this are ones where the activism is tied to clear policy demands — that are good policies, that can have big, systematic decreases in emissions and seem to have some sort of feasible pathway to success.
What I’ve seen in a lot of grassroots movements in recent years are things like throwing soup at paintings, or blocking streets, which have not had this direct policy connection, and we are pretty skeptical of those approaches. But if grassroots approaches came on our radar that have a super viable theory of change to altering policy, we are very open.
This is the fifth year you’ve put out recommendations like this, right? What have you learned or changed your mind about during that time?
One of the things that’s really crystallized in our mind is that we really think the big levers are in systems. And that can mean a lot of things, but to us, it really means three things — it means policy, technology, and markets.
To solve the climate crisis, you need to change the rules of the game, such that everyday actors — people making decisions, businesses — everybody changes their behavior because some technology got cheaper, or some policy changed. We really use that to focus ourselves to think about, What are the big changes that need to happen, and how do we work backward to the actions that get us there?
So I think that might be why you see some of these more insider, techno-analysis-driven approaches. Because when you step back and you think, alright, we need this market to change in this way, or we need this technology to develop that doesn’t currently exist, and you think about how you get there, a lot of times you need advocacy to change policy, and you need research to make that policy change possible.
This year, Giving Green has recommended six top groups fighting climate change. They are:
On conditional loans, China’s emissions, and primary care clinics
Current conditions: Storm Conall brought more heavy rain and flooding to sodden England • Flash floods killed at least 20 people on Indonesia’s Sumatra island • The northern Plains will be hit with an “arctic outbreak” on Thanksgiving day.
The Department of Energy yesterday agreed to loan Rivian $6.6 billion to resume construction on its factory in Georgia, where the company will produce the upcoming R2 and R3 electric pickups. The loan is conditional, meaning it hasn’t been finalized just yet. “If finalized, the loan will support construction of a 9 million square foot facility to manufacture up to 400,000 mass-market electric sport utility vehicles and crossover vehicles,” the DOE said in a statement. “At full capacity, the EVs manufactured at the facility are expected to yield an annual fuel consumption savings of approximately 146 million gallons of petroleum.” Whether the loan will be completed before the incoming Trump administration takes over – or whether Trump would try to axe the loan – remains to be seen. The Biden administration set a goal for zero-emission vehicles to make up half of new U.S. car sales by 2030.
China’s CO2 emissions will rise slightly this year due to a surge in energy demand, according to new research published today from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “The growth in energy consumption and electricity consumption is faster than in the transition pathways,” the report said. Even as China rapidly rolls out renewables and EVs, emissions will rise by 0.4% in 2024. Less than half – 44% – of the experts polled by CREA said China’s emissions have already peaked, or will peak next year. Two years ago, just 15% of experts believed that to be the case. And 36% of experts said China’s coal consumption has peaked, up from 20% who said that last year. China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and coal is its main source of emissions.
Porsche this week joined a growing list of car manufacturers that are pumping the brakes on the shift to EVs. Instead of rolling out new EV models to accompany the luxury Taycan and Macan, Porsche now plans to produce new gas and hybrid models instead as it feels the effects of a slowdown in EV sales. “We are currently looking at the possibility of the originally planned all-electric vehicles having a hybrid drive or a combustion engine,” the company’s CFO said. “What is clear is that we are sticking with the combustion engine for much longer.” Earlier this year Porsche watered down its goal for 80% of sales to be electric by 2030.
Maine is suing oil giants Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Sunoco, and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing them of knowingly deceiving the public about the role of fossil fuels in the climate crisis. It becomes the ninth state to do so. The new lawsuit claims the oil companies have long known that fossil fuels cause climate change, and that the resulting rising sea levels are especially harmful in Maine because so many of the state’s communities and industries are located near the coastline. The state wants unspecified damages from the companies as well as funds for adaptation and mitigation.
A recent study published in the journal BMC Primary Care examines how climate change is affecting primary care clinics serving “low-income and socially disadvantaged communities.” Surveys were sent to more than 400 staff members at clinics across 43 states. Nearly 85% of the staffers who responded reported that climate change – and especially extreme heat – is affecting their patients’ health. Many said extreme weather events were harming their clinic’s ability to provide care due to effects like power outages and staff shortages. About 16% of respondents said extreme weather contributed to loss or spoilage of vaccines. But just one-third of respondents said they’d spoken to patients about the increasing health risks associated with climate change, saying they had more important topics to discuss in the limited amount of time available during consultations. And 61% cited their own lack of knowledge about the connection between climate change and health. Interestingly, just 34% said politics or polarization were stopping them from bringing up climate change when discussing health risks.
BMC Primary Care
Renewables accounted for 24% of electricity generation in the first three quarters of 2024, up from 22.8% in the same period last year.
Rob talks Ford and GM with BloombergNEF’s Corey Cantor. Plus, Rob and Jesse dig into the Trump transition.
It’s been a news-filled few weeks — so it’s time for a roundup. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about what Trump’s cabinet selections might mean for his climate policy and whether permitting reform could still happen. Then Rob chats with Corey Cantor, senior EV analyst at BloombergNEF, about promising Q3 sales for U.S. automakers, General Motors’ turnaround, and how much the Trump administration might dent America’s EV uptake.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: How are you thinking about Ford and GM right now? Because they have basically totally reversed their position since the first time we started talking.
Corey Cantor: I hope I’m not too corny today, but I was thinking Missy Elliott — another New Jerseyan — “flip it and reverse it,” in terms of how people feel about Ford and GM. I think GM’s approach … don’t forget this is their second platform at the rodeo here, meaning GM had the Bolt and the Chevy Volt before it, and a good amount of experience with EVs. And really, what they were trying to do with Ultium was to build a battery and EV platform that could work with a variety of different vehicles.
And so the struggle, as we’ve outlined before, and many publications have outlined was they just couldn’t get the battery production working. They had issues with automation. They had issues with ensuring that they were setting up the necessary suppliers. And I’d say, about maybe nine months ago or so, a favorite EV journalist of mine, John Voelcker wrote in, I believe, InsideEVs, around this idea that GM had finally cracked Ultium and were finally kind of … He had got the head of Ultium at the time on record saying that they had resolved a lot of the issues, and really, you’ve seen it in the sales volume, as well as the fact that EVs like the Cadillac Lyric continue to sell pretty consistently.
Then GM ran into a software issue with the Blazer, and fixed that software issue, and that had slowed things down. And then since, really, June of this year has been off to the races. And so we’ll see how the fourth quarter goes, right? I think you don’t want to get too high on any kind of automaker, but GM is clearly in a better spot because they’re approaching making a profit on each of the EVs sold.
Now, I’ll caveat that with, we don’t know if the EV tax credit itself, you know, at the federal level, plays a role in the fact that they’ll be gross margin profitable, but that is a pretty big turning point. Because at that point, you’re no longer losing money on those EVs, and so you are kind of geared to go more high-volume. Where if you look at Ford, Ford has been losing thousands of dollars on every electric vehicle, really had not been building a platform for the current sales of the Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning, hoping to kind of just price them where they’d be losing little enough on each that they can make their bridge to that next platform.
And then earlier this fall, Ford basically announced pushing back those EV models to 2027, along with the new platform. So Ford kind of runs into the issue that we discussed on the previous conversation with Tesla, in that they’re going to have only really two EVs in the U.S. market for the next couple of years. So GM will have the Bolt back next year and some other Cadillacs. There’s a lot of exciting things on the way for GM.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.