SEASON FOUR | Time to 1.5

Inside the Anthill

OPENING TAG: Vivian Kalea

TIMMERMANS: An hour ago, my son Mark sent me a picture of my grandson Case, who's one year old. I was thinking Case will be 31 when we're in 2050.

This is Frans Timmermans, representative from the European Union at COP26—the UN Climate Conference held in Glasgow, Scotland.

TIMMERMANS: And it's quite a thought to understand that if we succeed, he'll be living in a world that's livable. He'll be living in an economy that is clean, with air that is clean, at peace with his environment. If we fail—and I mean fail now in the next couple of years—he will fight with other human beings for water and food.

MUSIC

TIMMERMANS: That's the stark reality we face. So one-point-five degrees is about avoiding a future for our children and grandchildren that is unlivable.

MUSIC

TIMMERMANS: I might not reach 2050, probably won't, but he will be there as a young man, and I want him to live a peaceful, prosperous life, like I want it for everybody's children and grandchildren in this room. This is personal. This is not about politics.

As Frans Timmermans delivered this speech, he was holding his phone up, so all the delegates in this big hall could see his young grandson's face projected onto the giant screens at the front of the room. I was in the back of the hall, behind the long rows of people sitting at microphones labeled with their countries' names. And I was wondering how these delegates from almost every nation in the world were feeling, sitting there. I came to this conference to watch, and listen, and document. But they were here to act—to do exactly what Timmermans said, preserve a livable future on this planet. How did it feel to be here with that enormous weight on your shoulders—to know that people all over the world are pinning their hopes for a pathway out of the climate crisis on you?

MUSIC

Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and it's time to return to where we started this season: the United Nations climate talks. The UN climate talks are a lot of different things. They're confusing. They're bureaucratic. They're inspiring and boring and infuriating and exhilarating. They're also the only thing we've got. Currently, this is the only existing structure for dealing with climate change at a scale that matches the problem—that is to say, globally.

There are two primary reasons why we need an international system for dealing with climate change; one is physical, the other political. The physics side is actually the easiest to understand: the atmosphere doesn't adhere to national borders. It's like a well we're all drinking from. When carbon emissions get dumped into that well, they impact everyone, no matter where they were released. So that's one problem that the UN climate talks are trying to solve: getting everyone to agree to stop polluting the well.

But the tricky thing is, dumping carbon into the atmosphere makes countries rich. So although it's in everyone's collective interest to keep that atmospheric well water clean, individually, there's a strong incentive to keep emitting. This is where the politics of the UN climate talks come into play. There's only a certain amount of carbon that we can burn before sending the climate into a catastrophic hothouse state. Some countries have used up a lot more of that carbon budget than others—countries like the United States and much of Europe that started emitting early, and built big, strong economies as a result. At the other extreme are countries that are very small, very poor, or both, that have added almost nothing to the problem. And then there's a shifting pool of emerging economies, countries like China and India, that have recently joined the carbon-burning party, and aren't eager to leave it.

So how do we manage all of these conflicting needs and desires? How can wean ourselves off of this incredibly powerful form of energy in a way that's fair—and do it quickly enough to save ourselves from catastrophe? These are the questions that make decarbonizing our world the biggest, most complicated, highest-stakes group project humanity has ever known, and the UN climate talks are the forum where that project is happening. If they succeed, we'll have a stable climate and hope for a new post climate-crisis era.

And if these talks fail...well...we simply cannot allow them to fail.

INTRO

AMY: OK, Nick and I just got our official badges. And what are we doing now, Nick?

NICK: We are walking to our first location in the actual conference. So we're inside and it feels super exciting to, like, be in the conference. We're officially official!

Producer Nick Mott and I have just arrived inside the Blue Zone, the heart of the United Nations climate conference held in Glasgow, Scotland in November, 2021

AMY: Everybody's masked, everybody's been tested for covid, everybody's walking the same direction and most people are dressed quite nice. Including us. We look stunning, if I do say so myself.

NICK: That's right, we're very fashionable.

After going through the security check-in process—basically your standard airport security routine—we get funneled into a long tented walkway leading into the main conference area. We can't see out, it's a tunnel of white canvas above us and on both sides. It feels kind of like an umbilical cord between the outside world and the highly protected pop-up city of the conference.

ERIKA: When we were coming in through the entryway I felt like I was in ET, like walking through white tunnels. That's all I was thinking about.

MUSIC

That's Erika Janik. Nick and I met up with her and other another colleague, Eva Kalea, in the main conference area.

EVA: A ton of people, just a wall of people walking toward us. A lot of suits.

ERIKA: So many suits.

EVA: I'm experiencing some confusion over which side of the hallway I'm supposed to be walking on, and it seems like a shared a confusion among everyone.

AMY: Yeah, I'm wanting to walk really fast because then it looks like I know what I'm doing. Not because I actually know what I'm doing.

EVA: Yes, I feel like it's also the energy. It's like a city, very bustling urban type of energy and you just have to match it.

Close to 40,000 people attended COP26. Representatives from almost every country on the planet are here—even the most isolated country in the world, North Korea, sent someone to this conference. The diversity of faces and languages is pretty mesmerizing, it makes me want to just sit down and watch the stream of humanity flow by. But at the same time, I'm eager to dive in and figure this conference out. Starting with understanding where I am exactly.

AMY: It's like a giant mall sort of, or an airport terminal?

NICK:... food court. Giant food court but with heads of state of presumably everywhere?

I head out to do some exploring. Ater the ET tunnel and the airport terminal/food court, I find "the pavilions,” a loud, chatty area where countries and organizations are set up like a trade show, with booths and displays advertising their climate projects. Next to that are the country offices, a warren of temporary cubicles with blank walls and people moving about talking in hushed voices, wearing serious expressions. Then I come upon the huge plenary halls, where all the highest-profile speeches get made. And radiating out from there is a big collection of meetings rooms, where a lot of the actual work of the conference gets done. Reporters are allowed into many parts of the conference, but sometimes, all of the sudden, we weren't. Especially during the first few days, the World Leaders' Summit, when more than 120 heads of state are on site, getting shepherded through the space surrounded by a phalanx of security and support staff.

ERIKA: I've been pushed aside by entourages numerous times. Yeah, just big groups of people will suddenly start pushing through.

That's Erika again, and I was having that same experience. I'd be walking along and all of the sudden, hey, there's Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, or Christiana Figueres, one of the key architects of the Paris Agreement. The presence of so many big names helps to underscore the importance of the UN climate talks. But these are not the people doing the bulk of the work here.

SALEEM: Well, I think the the main message for today is that there's going to be a whole bunch of heads of government, including the U.S. president here. They'll make speeches, they'll have a photograph with Boris Johnson and they'll fly away. Much of the global media will fly away with them and think that it's over. It is just starting. It's going to start day after tomorrow when they've gone and it's going to last for two weeks.

This is Dr. Saleemul Huq, you might remember him from our first episode this season. He's the director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University Bangladesh (BAHN-glah-desh). I interviewed Saleem remotely before the conference, and he'd agreed to let me follow his journey here at COP26.

SALEEM: Journalists and their audiences need to be educated on the complicated stuff that climate change is.

I agree with Saleem, that's why we're here. Despite the incredibly high stakes of the UN climate conferences, I think most people have only a very vague understanding of how they work. I know I did. So let's start with a quick rundown of the origin story of these talks.

In the late 1980s, as the world started waking up to the climate crisis, it became clear that there were no existing institutions or processes for dealing with this global problem. So, people decided to try to make those institutions. In 1992, at a major gathering in Brazil called the Earth Summit, more than 150 countries signed something called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNF-triple-C. You can think of it like a special wing of the United Nations devoted to working on climate. Almost every country in the world is part of the UNF-triple-C now, as well as some non-country organizations, like the European Union. When countries agree to join this effort, they become “parties to the convention,” and then they start coming to these annual gatherings we call COPs. That stands for Conference of the Parties. The overall goal of each COP is to make progress on climate; to get all countries moving in the same direction, toward a decarbonized world, in an equitable way, based on the best scientific information available. But of course, every country has a different level of commitment to that progress, and its own idea of what that looks like, and how we should get there. So they negotiate, and then formalize the results of those negotiations in the documents that come out of these conferences: the Kyoto Protocol, the Bali Action Plan, the Cancun Agreements. The first COP was held in Germany in 1995. And twenty-six years later, here we are in Glasgow at COP26. Saleem has been to every one of those COPs, including the watershed Paris conference in 2015, when the world finally coalesced around a goal: holding the global temperature rise to well below two degrees Celsisus over pre-industrial levels, aiming for no more than one-point-five.

SALEEM: They rose to the occasion and we have the Paris Agreement. It's about implementing that now. Glasgow is not a new agreement. It's about implementing what we agreed six years ago, and we are not on track to do that.

The Paris Agreement identified a goal and created a framework for acheiving it, based on something called "nationally determined contributions," or NDCs. This is a system in which countries make their own individual plans for reducing emissions and report on their progress at regular intervals. But heading into Glasgow, the NDCs were falling frighteningly short. The plans that countries had submitted, taken together, were projected to lead to two point-seven degrees Celsius of warming—almost twice the one-point-five goal. This would be utterly devastating for the whole world, and especially for island nations, and countries with a lot of people living in areas prone to deadly heat waves, droughts, and coastal flooding. Bangladesh, where Saleem lives, is one of those countries. So he was not feeling especially cheery at the start of the conference. I asked him what he thought the best possible outcome here could be.

SALEEM: Well, the best possible outcome has traditionally always been an incremental progress, and we have taken pride in having made some progress. But unfortunately, you know, this is not something that we compare ourselves with where we were last year and we did a little bit more this year. We have to compare ourselves with the climate. The climate has the sea and the climate is telling us we're not doing enough.

This, of course, is not just Saleem's opinion. It's a widely understood fact. Here's UN Secretary General António Guterres.

GUTERRES: The last published report on Nationally Determined Contributions showed that they would still condemn the world to a calamitous 2.7 degree increase. So, as we open this much anticipated climate conference, we are still heading for climate disaster.  

Young people know it. Every country sees it. Small Island Developing States — and other vulnerable ones — live it. For them, failure is not an option. Failure is a death sentence.

Guterres delivered this speech just down the hall from where Saleem and I were talking, on the same day, with leaders from around the world listening, many of them nodding along. This is one of the things that's so confusing and frustrating about this global climate process: there's broad consensus on what the problem is—we're burning too much coal, oil, and gas—and what needs to be done—transition to a renewable energy economy as quickly as possible. And yet, carbon emissions keep going up, and so do temperatures.

GUTERRES: The six years since the Paris Climate Agreement have been the six hottest years on record. Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice:  Either we stop it — or it stops us. It’s time to say: enough. Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves. 

In 1995, when the first COP was held, we had about 360 parts per million CO2 in our atmosphere. In 2021, that number had risen to 416 parts per million. The last time we had this much carbon dioxide in the air was millions of years ago, before we existed as a species. And what that means in terms of our lived experience is watching coral reefs die. Seeing the cooling, stabilizing ice around our poles shatter and melt. And it means heartbreaking stories of more and more people killed in dramatic weather-related disasters and slower-moving but no less deadly disruptions to our ability to provide for our own basic needs for food, water, and shelter. António Guterres is right, we are digging the grave of human society. And almost every one of the 40,000 people here at this conference understands that. So what is taking so long? After more than a quarter-century of these meetings, why haven't we stopped that atmospheric CO2 number from going up? What is the disconnect between the science and speeches and slogans and substantive climate action? 

We'll have more after this short break.

BREAK 1

Promo Swap: The Write Question

JOHN: We're in the one of the main COP pavilions where we have pavilions on water, on the cryosphere, on science, on the meteorology, on the IPCC. 

Welcome back to Threshold, I’m Nick Mott… and this is John Pomeroy, a professor and director of the Global Water Futures program at the University of Saskatchewan. I met him wandering around the pavilions at COP26. This is the trade show part of the conference that Amy mentioned. Booths lure in attendees with free coffee and food - and then try to keep you there with panels and guest speakers. People network and watch talks, and, more than anything, learn. 

JOHN: It's heaving with people, heaving with scientists and decision makers. And the conversations going on here are amazing, really excellent ones on what's happening to our oceans, what's happening to our forests, are they absorbing enough carbon and what's happening to our snow and ice around the world? 

So who are all the tens of thousands of people that come to COP? People come here for all kinds of reasons; they’re not all bureaucrats running around from meeting to meeting. Attendees fall into three broad categories: first is party delegates, which means the people actually doing the negotiation, building the climate agreement that forms the heart of COP  - and also all the people supporting those people. Second is media, people like me, running around the halls with microphones and cameras. And third is… everybody else. The UN calls them ‘observers.’ But if you get access to the Blue Zone as an observer, it doesn’t mean you’re one thing, or part of one kind of organization. Lots of people get in by affiliating with an NGO or an international organization. One of those people was Paul Wilson, a Klamath tribal member from Oregon who traveled here with a group called Rios To Rivers.

PAUL: It takes a lot of privilege, a lot of funding and a lot of logistical support to be able to enter the blue zone, to be able to obtain credentials and get a visa and have your travel and lodging paid for to be able to be in this space at all. Once in here, the access to decision makers is uncanny. 

When I talked with him, Paul had just presented a statement with his group pushing AGAINST one technology often advertised as a source of carbon-free energy: dams. Dams disrupt ecosystems and displace communities, especially at the expense of Indigenous people, the group argued. A representative of the UNFCCC Secretariat came out of her office to listen to their demands and officially enter the statement into the record. 

OFFICIAL: I’m very happy to see you here, thank you, and I will pass on to the COP president…

PAUL: Thank you.

Paul had been navigating back and forth between the Blue Zone and the protests and speeches organized outside. Out there, outside the conference gates, he said he felt a real energy and camaraderie with the people trying to make change.

PAUL: To see that visually and immediately in person is always inspirational because I feel less lonely. And then to have to come back into this sterile environment and and exchange with with world leaders and policymakers, that's a very radical emotional roller coaster to go through.

MUSIC

Around 11,000 people are at COP26 as observers. They come from all kinds of groups, with a wide array of causes and agendas—from nuclear energy advocates to rainforest experts to researchers from universities. Once inside, observers do typical conferencey meet-and-mingle kind of stuff. But they can also lobby, by scheduling meetings with decision-makers. They can serve as watchdogs. They can quite literally—watch as the inner works of COP unfold. I wanted to spend time with one group of observers. To see how the conference works from their perspective. 

So early on in my time at COP, I wound my way through the labyrinth of country offices, through a heavy metal door, and into a cramped, thin-walled office. Where climate activists in their teens through early 30s were filling every available space of the room. They’re members of a group called YOUNGO, dedicated specifically to making sure young people get a voice in the climate negotiations. They have more than 10 thousand members all over the world. When I first met up with them, they were wrapping up a meeting where they were coordinating the day’s activities. 

AMBI

Young people have been some of the smartest, loudest, and most passionate voices on climate in recent years. Most often, this is trying to make change from outside. Through protest and activism. Like at COP, this catchphrase from Greta Thunberg caught hold all over the city. 

GRETA and PROTESTORS: NO MORE BLAH BLAH BLAH

But in the depths of COP, THESE young folks were learning how to blah. There were people like Marie-Claire Graf, a fast-talking, strategy-minded Swiss woman who’d been working with YOUNGO for years and brought prodigious amounts of Swiss chocolate to share with the group. 

MARIE- CLAIRE: When you start to understand what's going on and if you actually can make sense of what is going on and you have the different options on the table and you can figure out yourself, OK, what? Why do certain countries do this? It's getting super interesting, and I think it's like going in a very exciting thriller movie or something like this, 

And Heeta Lakhani, who got passionate about environmental issues after seeing trees taken down to make way for a bigger highway back in her hometown in India.  She said this conference is a world of its own. But there’s something about it that grabbed her.  

HEETA: It's like an addiction. Even though you hate it, you would still be there. It's a love hate relationship where you know that there is a way to make progress, but you also know the flaws and then you're just frustrated with it. But you also like it and you also want to push it. And yeah, it's yeah, and I think I'm one of those people who are now addicted. But once you're in it, you're in it for life, I think. 

MUSIC

Youth have actually been trying to find a seat at the table at COP since the very beginning of the conferences, more than two and a half decades ago. But for years, that representation came through a variety of groups, working individually. In 2011, YOUNGO gained official ‘constituency’ status, which means essentially they serve as an umbrella group for all youth organizations, and serve as the official youth voice for all things UNFCCC.

The vast majority of observers hustling through the halls are actually broken into nine of these different constituencies, each representing the main stakeholder groups at the conference. Along with YOUNGO, There’s BINGO - for business groups, not the game. TUNGO for trade unions, not the thing in your mouth. And RINGO - which makes me think of the drummer in The Beatles - but is actually a bunch of research groups. So for YOUNGO, getting recognized as a UN constituency was a big deal. It means the UN considers young people as a group that has one of the most important perspectives on climate change.  

If you’re just one group, advocating for a specific cause, it’s easy for your voice to get lost in the swarm of activity in COP. But YOUNGO, with hundreds of members at the conference, can operate like a delegation of their own. They can strategize and coordinate, make sure members are getting in the right negotiations. They can split up to make sure their presence is known… just about everywhere.

The group is pushing for specific agenda items under discussion at COP - things like climate financing that’s fair to developing countries, a transition to clean and renewable energy focused on justice that doesn’t leave behind the most vulnerable. They participated in panels, watched negotiations, and helped spread the word about the group’s Global Youth Statement, a 70-plus page document outlining their policy demands. The statement called for prioritizing justice and inclusion of all kinds, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—focused especially on getting more young people involved. 

But at the same time that they’re pushing for change in the actual climate talks, they’re also teaching the next generation of climate leaders and activists. This is even in their mission. And part of that training means learning the language of the conference. And that takes a while.  

Heeta Lakhani has been learning the process over several years. Her first time here was COP22 - and she said even after she’d gotten a master’s in environmental studies —

HEEETA: I still had no clue what was happening at a cop. I had never studied about what a conference of bodies is. I never studied about what the negotiations are, how these international policies relate to local action. There was a so this was the biggest thing. I have a book where I used to go back after the COPS and like read the documents again and make my notes and try to understand everything that happened over the past week or two weeks because I was just so lost in two weeks. 

NICK: It's like a journal. 

HEETA: Yeah. So really, is it like, you know, write down, okay, Paris Agreement article, one article and like make my own summaries of what it was. So, I mean, I talked my way through it. I sat through negotiations with a few friends who sort of guided me through as well, part of the YOUNGO family and then the biggest motivation for me to keep coming back was, you know, if this was so new to me, despite having the privilege to be here so many times and still, you know, having so many gaps in knowledge, so many gaps in understanding, I wanted to take this back home. 

YOUNGO itself operates like a mini-COP. It’s volunteer-led, consensus based, and has a number of working groups. At COP, members convened every morning to coordinate and plan. Then, they split off - each person tracking specific issues. They jumped between their own, cramped office, negotiation rooms, and panels and talks they were involved in. 

YOUNGO members like Heeta help people newer to the conference get their feet under them and navigate all the jargon. Marie-Claire Graf has also been to several COPs. She’s actually served as a negotiator for Switzerland. While she’s focused on the intricacies of the negotiations at the conference, she says she also leads climate strikes back home. 

MARIE CLAIRE: I think it's good to kind of know both ways. And you can also play them like nicely, strategically. I think it's good to know how systems work to be able to either change them or to come up with something better. Because if you don't understand the system, you can just generally blame it. But it's hard to come up with a better solution if you don't know one, then very often, actually, the suggested solutions are exactly what is already there.

As I spent time with YOUNGO, what really interested me about the group was what the organization suggests about the future of COP. The climate crisis is a long term problem. Even if we stopped all emissions today, we’d be dealing with the effects of the damage that’s already been done for decades, if not centuries. So just like we need to build new renewable energy infrastructure, we need to invest in our human infrastructure, too. We need people with all kinds of skills: disaster managers, green builders and heat pump installers, and… climate negotiators. In the context of COP, that means people who understand the ins and outs of creating and implementing complex international agreements that help keep the hundreds of countries in COP moving in the same direction.

This is part of what YOUNGO’s doing. It’s a training ground. 

CHANDELLE: I didn't really have many expectations. It's my first time getting to COP This my first time in, like, a UNFCCC space. Like my first time trying to be a diplomat, basically. 

Chandelle O’Neil is a sustainable energy specialist and human rights advocate from Trinidad and Tobago.

CHANDELLE: It all comes together, all of it social justice, climate justice, inclusion, everything. It all comes together. 

For Chandelle, and a lot of YOUNGO members, this experience is all about learning. The conference was like a two-week crash course in international relations and climate policy—like Chandelle said, they were earning to be a diplomat. Learning how to speak this abstruse, bureaucratic language. How to lobby and advocate in the COP-environment, despite all its faults. And also learning how to work together, to respect one another, and to elevate voices that often get left out of the discussion.  

CHANDELLE: We have to work within the system that was given to us. It might not be the best, it might not be the most inclusive, but part of it is us coming in to space and trying to transform the system. Because the system wasn't designed for us, it wasn't me for us. So we tried to build something better together.

MUSIC

Chandelle is part of this training ground. And the training ground is partly about bringing in people with all kinds of backgrounds, from all parts of the world - both the global north and the global south. There’s a sentiment out there that COP is just, like Greta Thunberg said, all blah blah blah. That nothing really happens here. That these last 25-plus years have just been politicians going through the motions over and over again. And I get that. It’s something that I felt too going to the conference. And a degree of that feeling still hasn’t left me, months later. 

But I think that feeling of hopelessness might depend on how you frame what happens at COP, and where change comes from. Is the conference a silo? Is it this kind of impenetrable fortress that generates our climate goals and action - or do parts of what happens here reflect other conversations, that are happening outside its walls entirely?

If it’s just the former, the silo thing, I think, we’re pretty screwed. But I do see ways in which the conference has become more reflective of society overall. And YOUNGO is part of that. They gained a seat at the table about a decade ago. That ingrained in COP the importance of the youth voice on climate change. Other groups, including the Indigenous Peoples Organizations - the constituency for Indigenous groups all over the world - have also gained recognition. And I saw actions, events, panels, and talks at COP26 focusing on other voices that have been left out, including perspectives from the global south and an emphasis on women and gender issues.

I certainly still have questions, and I’m not saying these efforts are perfect. But compared to the technical, narrowly science-oriented climate conferences of two decades ago, this is a radical shift. 

One morning, I saw evidence of that change unfold. I was bleary-eyed, looking around for YOUNGO members. And then I saw Heeta and Marie-Claire. 

MARIE- CLAIRE: NICK!

NICK: Heyy… i was just coming to find you. 

MARIE- CLAIRE: Just come along with us….

I followed them through the crowded hallways, and just outside this big display, advertising some company’s climate initiatives, Heeta and Marie- Claire ran into somebody they knew. 

HEETA and MARIA CLAIRE: HI!

NEGOTIATOR: Am I not disturbing?

I didn’t catch his name. But what I did find out was that he used to be a YOUNGO member. But now he’s moved on. He’s a negotiator. 

NEGOTIATOR: Thank you, thank you for the two years. 

HEETA: Look at you now buddy, making decisions for us!

The negotiator told them he was grateful for the time he’d spent at YOUNGO, and for everything he’d learned. Now, he was applying it.  The three of them joked around for a while, and then parted ways, smiling. 

AWESOME - so we’ll connect

Bye!

MUSIC

Here - was YOUNGO’s mission put into practice - a member that took what he learned to go on to shape COP from the inside. Watching this quick interaction in the hall, I was left thinking: We need to get nearly 200 countries to  agree with each other, to forge a new future for the entire planet. So, this change I’m seeing in real time here is something. But is it ENOUGH? Are these things happening at the pace and scale we need? Can this result in the actual policies we need to reduce emissions and change the trajectory we’re on? 

And what are all of these YOUNGO members getting trained to do, exactly? How do you actually build a global agreement? 

Amy tries to figure that out, after the break.

BREAK 2

Promo: Story Collider

Welcome back, it's Amy again, and now that we've got a sense of the space, and who the cast of characters is here, let's dive into the work itself. What are people trying to do here, and how are they doing it. Like Dr. Saleemul Huq said earlier, the main focus of this COP is implementing the Paris Agreement. Paris laid out the path, Glasgow is about walking it. And that involves a bunch really dry, technical, but super important things, like clarifying how the system for international carbon credits works, and making the process for reporting emissions reductions—those Nationally Determined Contributions—more transparent and uniform.

And there's also old business to tend to here. Way back at the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, the world's wealthiest countries pledged to pay 100 billion dollars per year to poorer nations to be used for climate mitigation and adaption projects. This was a recognition that about 10% of countries had generated 80% of the carbon emissions, and that less developed countries deserve support as they try to deal with a problem they had a very small role in creating. But the wealthy countries have never made good on the 100 billion pledge, they keep coming up billions of dollars short. And that has led to a lot of mistrust in the climate negotiations. Here's Saleem again:

SALEEM: This is a convention to tackle pollution, pollution by emissions of greenhouse gases, which come from burning fossil fuel and have a very long history. So it's a polluter pay principle here, not charity, not rich countries helping poor countries. It's polluters paying the victims of their pollution. That's what we are demanding here. That's what the money is for. That's what they promised to give. And they're refusing to give.

So there's a bunch of thorny stuff that needs to get hashed out at this COP. Paris Agreement implementation, climate finance, and of course, mitigation: lowering emissions, decarbonizing economies, with the goal of limiting global heating to no more than one-point-five degrees over pre-industrial levels. And it all needs to happen at once.

ERIKA: This is very overwhelming but also very cool. I love hearing all these different languages. But yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot a lot a lot. It's hard to even know what is going on. (laughter)

That's my colleague Erika Janik again, I found her in the pavilion area on day two, wandering around looking slightly dazed. And I felt the same way. I mean, the first phase of any conference includes some confusion as you try to get oriented, but I've never experienced anything quite like the confusion of a UN climate conference. I had done months of research before we went. I interviewed multiple insiders, read countless news stories, and watched footage from previous conferences, and studied academic articles which described and analyzed the process. So I thought I was pretty well prepared to hit the ground running. But I wasn't prepared for this.

AMY: “Informal consultation on guidance to the GCF (COP8c, CMA8b and g, e, f, COP8d, CMA8c).”

I'm standing in front of a big blue screen listing all of the meetings happening that day, including time and location. Screens like this were scattered all throughout the conference area, ostensibly to keeping everyone informed. But when you actually stopped to read the text scrolling by, this is what you found:

AMY: “Contact group on CMP 7a report of the AFB. Contact group on CMA 8-D. matters related to the AF. Joint COP/CMA informal consultations.” I mean, give me a break.

I had come here to watch the world work together to build a climate agreement. To try to solve climate change. But where was that happening, exactly? I needed help, and I found it in Dr. Adelle Thomas.

AMY: How many COPs have you been to now?

ADELLE: This is my fourth one, so not that many, but still not a newbie. My first one was Paris. And I was completely lost then.

Adelle is a Senior Fellow at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of the Bahamas. She also works with a global think tank called Climate Analytics. She's a geographer and she's served as a lead author on multiple UN scientific reports. When I found Adelle in the very crowded lunch line, and she immediately gave me this important tip:

ADELLE: The sausage roll is terrible. The vegetarian sausage roll.

Like Saleem, Adelle was in our first episode this season. She'd also agreed to let me look over her shoulder here, as an advisor to the negotiations for the Small Island Developing States, or SIDS. But before we can talk about the details of what she hopes could be achieved at this conference, I need to ask some much more basic questions.

AMY: How does this work? Because I mean, it's not just a conference where we're supposed to come together and exchange ideas. We're supposed to actually, like, accomplish something practical. And is that primarily happening in the negotiations?

ADELLE: It's happening outside of the negotiations.

I'd spoken with Adelle a few times on Zoom before the conference, and I'd learned that she has this great half-smile that she gives when I ask her a question that has a big, complicated answer that's going to take a lot of explanation. It's a smile that says: do you really want to know? That's the smile she's giving me right now. And I do.

ADELLE: In the negotiation room, when there is agreement on something, that's been agreed already, they're just announcing it in there.

AMY: Uh-huh.

ADELLE: So that's happened already in bilaterals or the informal informals, as we call them.

AMY: Informal informals?

ADELLE: Yeah.

AMY: (laughter)

ADELLE: It's insane.

AMY: What is the what is the an informal? Informal compared to just an informal.

ADELLE: An informal is in one of the meeting rooms. Everyone is is invited and an informal informal, may be just ones that are not agreeing, may come together and try and work on a particular issue. And then just a bilateral or a huddle is even less formal. So it's nebulous, right? It's not like you can watch it being made.

Adelle and I get our food, and get settled on the floor to eat because there aren't enough seats available, and she starts to walk me through the process.

ADELLE: Yeah, so on opening day, which is on Sunday, we agreed on the agenda.

The agenda is the holy grail here. It's the list of things that are going to be included in the conversation of this COP. As with the meetings, the language of the agenda is extremely bureaucratic. For example, here's item number 15: “Second review of the adequacy of Article 4, paragraph 2, a through b, of the Convention.” The approved agenda for COP26 is two pages long, with 19 line items, and Adelle says it's pretty much impossible to track them all.

ADELLE: So there's lots going on, which is why the negotiation times, I think, are from 10 a.m. until seven p.m. And then outside of those meetings are the other meetings that I talked about.

Adelle says the best thing to do is find one or two agenda items to follow. Her primary focus is item number seven, which reads “Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts.” For our purposes, you can ignore everything but three key words in the middle there: loss and damage. These are climate change impacts that are irreversible. Damage that can't be undone—like if one of the islands that's part of your country becomes permanently uninhabitable. We're going to be talking more about loss and damage in our next episode, but as we try to just learn the mechanics here, the key thing to know is that the group of small island developing states and many other countries want the rich countries to recognize loss and damage, and pay for it. And the rich countries mostly don't want to.

ADELLE: So for loss and damage, which is what I'm following, we have three official negotiating sessions. We had one on Monday. We had one yesterday. And we have one on Thursday, and we have to come to some type of agreement by Friday. So those three meetings are the official informal meetings, but most of the negotiation takes place outside of that.

This is where those informal informals and bilaterals and huddles that Adelle mentioned come in—conversations and debates happening in nooks and crannies throughout the conference area, all aimed at moving the ball forward, line by line, word by word. And what makes it really complicated is that there are many issues being negotiated at the same time, and they're often interrelated. I asked Adelle how the different negotiators from a particular country or group of countries keep each other up to date on their progress.

AMY: Do they just rush in with like, I came from an informal informal with breaking news or what?

ADELLE: (laughter) So there's a lot of coordination that needs to go on between the different agenda items, so for instance, what we're looking at in loss and damage is affected by what's going on in finance, and both of those are happening at the same time. And so you have to have communication between your negotiators to make sure that you're staying on the same page. There's a lot of WhatsApp, which has been a savior, And so you point to some of the challenges so far a small delegations, it's hard to be caught up on everything that's happening everywhere, whereas people, countries with big delegations, you know, they have tons of people and they can have people even specifically dedicated to making sure that there is communication and seeing how the different pieces fit together.

AMY: So if you're from a smaller country, maybe you have what like three to five people and like somebody is in, they might all be in actual negotiations. And then there's nobody out working side channels or the back doors as much.

ADELLE: Correct. Or they may be following different things and not being able to put the pieces together in real time. And, you know, like having to, at the end of the day, reassess. Which may be too late.

Just to give you a range of the delegation sizes: Brazil had the largest group at this COP, with 479 delegates. The United States had 165, South Sudan had 34, and the Bahamas had 14. To amplify their voices and boost their chances of having some influence at the COP talks, a lot of the smaller or less wealthy countries have formed blocks that negotiate together. There's the Alliance of Small Island Developing States, or AOSIS. There's the LDC group—the 46 nations defined by the UN as “least developed countries.” But the rich and powerful nations have formed blocks too. The U.S., Canada, Japan, and some other big emitters are part of the Umbrella Group. And Brazil, South Africa, China, and India have banded together as the BASIC group. So there are elements of the process here that are reminiscent of what happens in congresses and parliaments all over the world: people form coalitions and map out strategies for trying to advance their agendas.

And at the center of it all is a piece of paper—or many pieces of paper, really. This document that we call a climate agreement. All throughout the conference, draft text is getting passed around behind the scenes, as the various coalitions try to unify their messages. Every single word ultimately gets scrutinized and haggled over. It's a little bit like how legislation gets written in a democracy, but in this case, people aren't just collaborating and arguing with members of their own congress or parliament. Climate agreements involve thousands of people from every country on the globe. And when you really think about that—what they're trying to pull off here—it's pretty stunning. These delegates are trying to write a document that meets the approval of representatives from all of the planet's human societies. I can't decide if it's an inspiring testament to our species' ability to cooperate, an exercise in human hubris and folly, or just the hardest group writing assignment ever given. Maybe it's all of the above.

AMY: Pulling back out to the thirty thousand foot level, just in terms of process, it's hard to understand how a bunch of people in this room are doing something that actually ends up leading to progress. Have you had negotiations that you've observed or been part of where you're like, we actually accomplished something here that that's something was moved forward, even if it was a small thing?

ADELLE: So it's a very long process, and it seems like you're just spinning your wheels, but eventually something comes out of it. Now, whether it's worth all of that effort, right, do we need to go through all of this long thing to get to that point—I don't agree with that, the long process. But I have seen that, you know, some things do make a difference.

AMY: I'm looking for analogies for what this is and what you were just saying almost made me think of like an anthill. Like where there's it's sort of impenetrable from the outside. But there's all this like busy activity in the ants are actually at the end of the day that anthill can get really big like they are doing something. Is that am I on the right track at all?

ADELLE: Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it. And just even thinking of us as ants, which is what I feel like in this conflict. We're all running around trying to figure out where we can be helpful, what we can do. But at the end of the day, we are contributing to something that's bigger than each of our individual inputs. So I think that's a helpful framing.

I said a minute ago that there are parts of the process of building these international climate agreements that are kind of like crafting legislation. But there are significant differences too. To start with, the United Nations is not a government, it's a voluntary organization. It can't make laws like countries can. Even the crown jewel of the COP process—the Paris Agreement—is a blend of legally binding and nonbinding rules, and not all signatories agree on whether or not it is an international treaty or...something else. The question of how enforceable these climate agreements are, and should be, is a matter of intense debate. That's another issue that has to be worked out here.

Another big difference between the COP process and how legislative bodies work is that there's no voting here. COP is consensus-based, which means everyone has to agree in order for something to move forward. So it's not like an agenda item can be approved if 60 percent or even 99 percent of the countries agree to it. If one party objects, than the negotiations stall. And that happens all the time. That's a big reason why progress at these talks has been so slow. It's an incredibly frustrating thing to watch one country ruin it for everybody else, but especially so for people like Adelle and Saleem who are inside this system, trying to make it go faster. I spoke with Adelle a few times before COP26, and in our last conversation, a few months before the conference, she was pretty down.

AMY: And I guess when you're an ant, it can also feel kind of demoralizing because you know you're tiny. And I mean, how is your ant self right now?

ADELLE My ant self is... I'm feeling OK. I know the last time we spoke, I was feeling sad and, you know, as if there wasn't much hope. But I mean, it's cyclical, so sometimes it can be overwhelming. Other times you can feel like, OK, even though the role that I play may be small in the grand scheme of things it's important and it's helping towards this overall goal of where we want to get to. So at this point in time, I'm feeling a bit more hopeful.

AMY: What do you think is the most we could hope to get out of this?

ADELLE: The most, I think that we can get out of this...I'm going to be optimistic. I think that we will have a pathway forward for getting the 100 billion per year in finance before 2023, which is what they're currently projecting. I'm going to hope that we get recognition and a commitment for new and additional finance for loss and damage. And I'm going to hope that we get a commitment on the mitigation side to keep temperatures to one-point-five through countries coming back with better national plans, nationally determined contributions on meeting one-point-five. So I hope that this COP will keep one-point-five alive, finance, and loss and damage.

We'll be checking back in with Adelle in our next episode, to see if her hopes are realized.

MUSIC

At this point, I imagine some of you listening might be having a thought that I had, and probably everybody has as they learn about how the UN climate talks work: we have to get rid of this consensus model. It's too slow and cumbersome—the very best it can do is deliver incremental change. That's a huge mismatch with what the climate crisis demands, which is quick, nimble, strategic responses. But then, if you take the thought of abandoning the consensus model one step further, you have to answer, OK, so what are we going to replace it with? And that opens a huge can of worms. Are we going to make the UNF-triple-C more like a legislative body, with elected representatives and bills that get voted up or own? How would that work? What powers should this climate congress have, and what are the checks and balances on it? Tabling the question of whether or not this is even a good idea, and the fact that most if not all countries would be opposed to it, just figuring something like this out would also take decades of global meetings.

There are other ways to make climate action happen, of course. Individual nations and groups of like-minded countries can and do push forward on their own. Companies, like the ones we profiled in our last episode, can decide to lead instead of resisting the changes we need. But alongside all of these efforts, we still need the global architecture that's emerging—slowly—through this UN process. We need coordinated planetary action because Earth's atmosphere is the ultimate global commons. It can't be chopped up into mine and yours; it's one contiguous, amorphous, crucial thing. So although UN climate talks are full of flaws, this is the process we have, and we don't have time to create another one.

ALOK: We know that the window to keep 1.5 degrees within reach is closing.

This is Alok Sharma, president of COP26, speaking on the opening day of the conference. He's looking out a room full of faces, people who have traveled to Glasgow from all around the world. Many of them have devoted their lives to trying to make this process work, and make it better.

ALOK: Friends in each of our countries, we are seeing the devastating impact of a changing climate. And we can only address that together through this international system.The rapidly changing climate is sounding an alarm to the world to step up on adaptation, to address loss and damage, and to act now to keep 1.5 alive. I believe that this international system can deliver. It must deliver. I believe that we can resolve the outstanding issues. We can move the negotiations forward. And we can launch a decade of ever-increasing ambition and action. And together we can seize the enormous opportunities for green growth, for good green jobs, for cheaper, cleaner power. But we need to hit the ground running to develop the solutions that we need. And that work, my friends, starts today, and we will succeed or fail as one.

In many ways, the UN climate talks are an audaciously optimistic endeavor. We're trying to do something remarkable: work together as a species at a scale we've never done before. That's what the climate crisis requires of us—a new level of species-wide thinking, planning, and action. The question is: can we do it.

We're going to continue our coverage of COP26 in our next episode. Stay tuned.

CREDITS: Emily Moore

This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by Nick Mott and me, Amy Martin, with help from Erika Janik and Sam Moore. The music is by Todd Sickafoose. The rest of the Threshold team is Caysi Simpson, Deneen Wiske, Eva Kalea and Shola Lawal. Our intern is Emery Veilleux. Thanks to Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. Special thanks to Eva Knekta, Vivian Kalea, Emily Moore, Christopher Preston, Leslie Scott, Katy Scott, Joseph Harvey, and Abe.