This year’s United Nations climate summit arrives at the end of what will be the warmest year in recorded history, possibly the warmest year in the history of human civilization. The atmosphere around COP28 might be as heated as the actual atmosphere. The summit is being held in a major oil producing nation, and is being chaired by the head of the state oil company, who reportedly had been planning to use COP28 to discuss oil and gas deals.

What will happen inside the negotiations themselves? Here are the eight issues I’m watching closely:

1. Calls for transformational vs. incremental change in the final text

Under the Paris Agreement, a global assessment of existing mitigation, adaptation and other efforts must be done every five years. The gathering of information and technical analysis stages for the first “global stocktake” are now over. The final stage, to be completed at COP28, is the “consideration of outputs”, essentially the collective reaction of the world’s governments to the data showing we are not on track to avoid 1.5 or 2 °C of warming. Will the final text focus on the big picture transformational actions being proposed, like phasing down/out fossil fuels (issue #3), tripling renewable energy (issue #4), doubling energy efficiency, and addressing loss and damage? Or will it become a laundry list of weaker statements, based the individual concerns of squabbling nations? To use a skiing analogy, will the stocktake stick to the bunny slopes, or tackle a black diamond?

2. Word of the conference: Unabated

Much of the conversation at and about COP28 will focus on whether the global stocktake text calls for a phaseout or a phasedown of fossil fuels. As or more important is whether the word “unabated” appears before fossil fuels. Abatement implies that a fossil fuel facility, like a coal- or gas-fired power plant, uses carbon capture technology to capture and bury some of the emissions. If the agreement settles on “unabated fossil fuels”, as most fossil fuel producing nations have argued (hello Canada! privet Russia!), it will undermine the deal. It would mean that coal and gas plants can continue to operate and expand provided there is some carbon capture and storage involved.

The danger is that this could be a slippery slope. First, as the carbon capture technology is expensive and in its infancy, some countries will likely argue, as they did at COP27, that plans to later install such technology are sufficient. Second, what level of capture would constitute “abatement” is unclear. Carbon capture and storage technology does not capture 100% of emitted carbon dioxide, often far below.

Tack on the enormous costs and energy demand involved, and even the International Energy Agency, which for years was bullish about future oil and gas demand, gives this warning to the oil and gas industry:

Carbon capture, utilisation and storage is an essential technology for achieving net zero emissions in certain sectors and circumstances, but it is not a way to retain the status quo. If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as projected under today’s policy settings, this would require an inconceivable 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilisation or storage by 2050, including 23 billion tonnes via direct air capture to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 °C. The necessary carbon capture technologies would require 26 000 terawatt hours of electricity generation to operate in 2050, which is more than global electricity demand in 2022. And it would require over USD 3.5 trillion in annual investments all the way from today through to mid-century, which is an amount equal to the entire industry’s annual average revenue in recent years.

3. Tripling renewable energy capacity

Building on recommendations from the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, the G20, including the US and China, have supported a call to triple renewable energy capacity by the year 2030 in order to “‘accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation” and reduce electricity emissions. As mentioned, this call could be in the final text of the global stocktake. It seems like a potentially easy win for COP28. One key question is whether the term “renewable energy capacity” gets watered down, for example, to include gas plants equipped with carbon capture and storage technology.

4. Filling the implementation gap

The global stocktake text is also an opportunity to signal what countries need to include in their next round of national pledges under the Paris Agreement, which are due in 2025. I’m looking to see the degree to which countries are “urged” or “encouraged” — approved UN legal speak — to include not only more ambitious emissions reductions targets, but also detailed, costed plans for transitioning each sector of the economy onto a net-zero emissions path.

5. Advance on other cooperative agreements

There are all sorts of other promising agreements between countries that have developed and are continuing to develop outside the UN process, like the Global Methane Pledge. For now, most of these lack detail. Will any emerge with concrete implementation and enforcement plans?

6. Small loopholes or gaping Grand Canyon scale chasms in the carbon market

The implementation of the voluntary carbon trading mechanism in the Paris Agreement (Article 6) has been mired in debate for years. The key issue is precisely what “emissions avoidances” or carbon offsets countries will be allowed to sell via the market. A lack of restrictions around offsets threaten to undermine the market, and encourage projects that do not achieve permanent emissions removals (e.g., poorly managed forest projects) and/or hurt local communities. On this, I am not optimistic.

7. Progress on a new climate finance goal

The world agrees on one thing around climate finance. Countries of all sizes and levels of wealth are disappointed by the Paris Agreement pledge that developed countries would mobilize >$100 billion/year of financing by the year 2020 to help the developing world response to climate change. The number was arbitrary, the details were fuzzy, and by all accounting, the goal has yet to be met.

Amid reports that the costs of adaptation alone in the developing world are 10-18 times that of available public climate finance, countries are charged with established on a new collective long-term finance goal by 2025. The COP28 negotiations will be less about the numerical goal, and more about what counts. Key considerations include whether it will be based on needs and priorities of developing countries, whether there be specific goals for adaptation vs. mitigation finance, and how to better consider and incorporate private finance. The precise definitions matter too. Will this be evaluated annually of cumulatively? By dollars, or some % of GDP? Will it be properly indexed to inflation? (an issue we ran into in while trying to evaluate the original $100 billion proposal more than a decade ago!)

8. Will the Loss and Damage fund be more than a symbolic gesture?

COP28 began with a splash: the launch of a voluntary loss and damage fund, and initial pledges of US$280 million from UAE, Germany and other nations. After thirty years of lobbying by vulnerable nations and civil society, the existence of this fund alone is a success. If only Saleemul Huq, the great Bangladeshi researcher and champion of international climate action, could have been here it happen.

The question now is if countries will learn from the failures of the $100 billion climate finance goal and create something truly transformative which helps Small Island Developing States and other less developed countries most heavily impacted by climate change. The dollar amounts pledged so far are tiny — equivalent to the costs of Cyclone Winston to Fiji, a single event among many that have struck the Global South over the past few years.

Keep an eye on which countries do and don’t pledge funds, the specifics of those pledges (annual or cumulative amounts; new and additional to other climate finance), the level of agreement on which countries can receive funding, and the precise language used in the text. For example, the launch text states that contributions can come from “a wide variety of sources of funding, including grants and concessional loans from public, private and innovative sources, as appropriate.”

I spent much of the past three weeks immersed in informal conversations with friends, family and colleagues about either carbon pricing or the Middle East, subjects which are somehow both deeply contentious, such that the simple act of posting this sentence makes me nervous both as a Jewish person and as a climate scientist.

This former was brought on by the recent Canadian government decision to create a three-year exemption to the federal carbon pricing system for home heating oil. Since that decision, much of the chatter has focused on politics and the fate of Canada’s carbon pricing system.

I’ve noticed three things missing from many of the carbon pricing discussions. Politics aside, I suspect these have interacted to lead the country into this bind, where the carbon pricing is unpopular, and even policy experts are becoming more divided on the subject:

1. Carbon pricing is a gradual solution to a transformational challenge

The Paris Climate Agreement marked a significant shift in the objectives of international and domestic climate policy. Previously, the focus was often on halting the growth of greenhouse gas emissions or achieving marginal reductions based on short-term targets. Now, the world acknowledges that halting global warming requires achieving net-zero emissions. That means concentrating on transformative actions that can eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, rather than incremental measures that can achieve marginal reductions. To use a skiing analogy, we need to get off the bunny slopes to over to a double black diamond.

Carbon pricing is a foundational climate policy tool. An increasing carbon price should incentivize shifts and household and corporate behavior. On its own, however, a carbon price may not be sufficient to motivate transformational actions necessary to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from many activities. Instead, it may incentivize more marginal shifts in behaviour over time, e.g., turn the heat down at night, rather than switch from a gas furnace to a heat pump. In that sense, carbon pricing is somewhat of a legacy of the older emissions reduction paradigm.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the argument for pricing comes from economy/energy models, which excel at representing the behavior of existing markets but may not capture the transformative effects of new technologies or systems. In the model world, the price alone may suffice, but in the real world, where a transformation in energy sources and systems is needed, a price may not, on its own, encourage optimal long-term decarbonization decisions.

One risk is what our Net Zero Advisory Body refers to as “dead ends”. Actions encouraged at the low initial price might be well suited for emissions reduction, not necessarily emissions elimination. Those actions then risk locking us in to a system or technology (e.g., blending ethanol into gasoline for passenger vehicles) that will eventually need to be replaced (e.g., replacing gas vehicles with EVs), often at great cost to all taxpayers and to workers dependent on the old technology or system.

2. Perceived policy uncertainty causes a feedback loop  

As I mentioned, many of the choices that people and companies must make to eliminate emissions are binary (e.g., EV vs. gas car, or gas furnace vs. electric heat pump), with costs often also front-loaded, and savings accruing over time. Those are hard decisions!

For a carbon price to incentivize such transformational actions, the price has to be high. However, the government cannot start with a very high price, as it would be an unfair shock to the average person and the economy as a whole.  

The solution is to increase the price over time. The Canadian government’s announcement that the carbon price would gradually increase to $170 in 2030 was a smart policy move. The announcement itself signaled that even though the current price might be too low to spur transformative action, the knowledge that the cost of high-emitting systems will continue to rise over time should encourage the adoption of low or zero-carbon options.

The problem is that people and companies need to trust that the price increase will happen. Given that Canada is a democracy, and the main opposition party and several provincial premiers have spent more than a decade railing against carbon pricing and confusing the public, many people and companies do not trust that the carbon price will continue to increase, or survive at all. The low perceived policy certainty creates a vicious feedback loop where the suggestion that the price may not survive further encourages people to lobby to stop the price increase or to create more exceptions. Climate policy experts playing political pundit and predicting the carbon price will not survive only play into this dynamic.

3. We are not economically rational decision makers

Even in a scenario in which the carbon price is scheduled to increase, and people trust but that increase will occur, models may overestimate people’s willingness to change behaviour.

Traditional economics and economic modelling assume that people are rational actors, meaning they will act out of self-interest in order to maximize personal gain and minimize losses. However, in reality, many other factors, from culture and identity to distributional obstacles (e.g., not enough trained heat pump installers), which influence our ability to make economically rational decisions.

Even if the math shows that buying an EV or a heat pump is clearly the cheapest option over the long term, people may be reluctant to do so because changing behaviour is hard. As systems theorists would say, it takes a lot of energy or resources to change from one state to another. This reluctance can lead to cognitive dissonance – not wanting take the action (switch to an electric vehicle), prompts questioning of the evidence that the action works (distrust lifetime cost savings and life cycle emissions analyses).

Adding this to the previous two points, even with the ‘right’ C price according to a model, people may not make the ‘right’ low- or zero-carbon decision. And if progress happens slower than expected, that further accelerates the positive feedback loop of lobbying to pause, reduce or kill the carbon price.

The solution recommended by behavioural economists and others to fix the non-rational actor problem is to change how the choices are offered and/or the market is structured. Instead, of relying on the economic inventive alone, present the options in a way to highlight the benefits of the economically rational solution (sometimes called “nudges”) and/or create additional measures to increase the availability of the alternatives.

Take-home message

Pricing carbon is still good foundational policy. However, it requires complimentary regulations, investments and industrial strategies to steer decisions in the right long-term direction. It may seem crazy that the Canadian government, for example, has so many different climate policies, from zero-emission vehicle mandates to heat pump rebates to targeted investments, layered on top of the carbon pricing system. It may also be the correct approach.

I have been working on a book, loosely related to a TEDx talk I gave last year.

Shortly after the talk, an Antarctic ice shelf about the size of Los Angeles broke into pieces and drifted off to sea. While the two events are unrelated – I don’t think I can be personally blamed for what transpired on the coast of East Antarctica – they were similar in one way.

When an ice shelf collapses, it appears sudden. That is because we see what happens on the surface. Like any iceberg, most of the mass of an ice shelf – the floating extension of a land-based ice sheet – is hidden below the surface. Down there, warming ocean waters have been slowly melting ice, chipping away at the foundation of the structure, and setting the stage for the collapse.

The book I’m trying to write, like the TEDx talk, is also about what lies beneath.

The message in that talk is that climate change is a failure of the imagination. Ancient ways of thinking and outdated systems, things rooted so deep in our collective psyche that we don’t even notice them, have been holding us back. To solve climate change, we need the guts to imagine a different future and to chart the path there.

Why am I writing this now? I’m exploring these ideas further while working on the book. The process has me thinking of the gap between what we experience every day, especially in today’s social media obsessed world, and what lies beneath.

Any packaged product of one’s labour, be it a simple tweet, a Tik Tok video, a scientific paper, a TEDx talk, or a Marvel movie, is the tip of the iceberg of the actual work. Without a “making of” story, the audience only receives a small representation of the immense work required to create that product. Imagine if you access the full background of the information and images you consume. Granted, even those “making of” stories, posts, and videos often have an unreal, glossy finish.

In the case of the TEDx talk, getting to the day of the talk required preparation that was visible only to my immediate family, my fellow speakers, and our coaches. Viewers at home see the final 12 minutes of this work. They don’t see all the self-doubt, the coaching sessions, the rebelling against the coaching sessions because I can be a stubborn and uncoachable person, or the early mornings wandering the neighbourhood muttering my script to myself.

With a talk, a book, or a film, that might be OK. The invisibility of the work is part of the point. The objective is to tell an efficient and well-crafted story in hopes of engaging new people in a subject, without burying them in the subsurface technical details.

Swimming among icebergs, however, can often be dangerous. They can tip over, and take people down with them.*

Libraries and classrooms could, and should, be filled with treatises on the dangerous effects of only seeing the polished finished product, from Instagram’s and Tik Tok’s contribution to body image issues and depression among teens, to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with Amazon’s just-in-time package delivery system, to the misinformation and disinformation jeopardizing the democratic process.

At some fundamental level, rising anxiety, mistrust of expertise, embrace of conspiratorial thinking, and threats to western democracies may come from living in and relying on systems more vast and complex than anything in the history of human existence. When systems we don’t understand break or don’t work to our expectations – the package doesn’t arrive, the social media post doesn’t get attention, the candidate my neighbours and I voted for doesn’t win – we don’t know who to blame. That can make it tempting for some to believe that a few bad faith actors are pulling the strings on a puppet show, rather than the reality that the world is so complex that linear cause and effect relationships cannot explain your daily experiences.

The invisibility of the subsurface processes is also accelerating the consumption of information and material stuff, creating its own runaway feedback process. We could not buy, watch, or listen to as much stuff if buying, watching, and listening required physically and mentally engaging with the processes required to produce and deliver the stuff you are buying, watching, and listening.

Understanding what lies beneath the surface is necessary to tackle massive collective action problems like climate change. As I discuss in the TEDx talk, research indicates that slowing climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions can be a net winner, in terms of human health, jobs, the economy, and the environment. To get there, we need transformational change in how we generate electricity, power our vehicles, and heat and cool our homes.

Such change can’t happen if we only grapple with what we see on the surface, the daily back-and-forth that dominates social media, rather than all the deeply rooted systems and ways of thinking which need to evolve.

I won’t claim to have an easy solution. For now, I’m diving into deep cold waters and studying what’s down there, in hope of being able to report back on what I see.

^* Shout out and apologies to everyone that knows me well enough to think this post would be about me literally swimming among icebergs as part of some charitable event. That does sound like something I would do.

United Nations climate summits are dizzying affairs. At the core are the diplomatic negotiations between the official country delegations about an evolving and increasingly complex international framework for addressing climate change. Surrounding that core is the world’s largest climate change trade show: a circus of side events, pavilions, announcements, deal making, protests and press briefings, (almost) all about actions to address climate change.

To capture it all, I present to you the COP27 Awards.

These awards recognizing highlights and lowlights of this year’s conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Like the Oscars, the Coppies (still work-shopping that) included awards for overall achievement, individual performances and technical merit. Also like the Oscars, the Coppies are highly biased, as without human cloning and an all-access pass to closed negotiating rooms, no one person could possibly track even a tenth of what transpired.

The envelopes please…

Best part of COP27: the climate solutions “trade show”

We’ll start with a big award. In contrast to the ever-frustrating and underwhelming diplomatic negotiations, the surrounding events featured detailed discussions of ongoing and planned efforts to reduce emissions, adapt to climate change, develop early warning systems, invest in a just transition and address systemic inequalities. Yes, it was chaotic and crowded, but maybe it should be! Climate change is, after all, the largest collective action problem in the history of the humanity.

Best moral victory: A loss and damage funding mechanism

After years of the United States and many other developed countries resisting calls to provide compensation for climate change impacts in the developing world, the parties agreed to establish a system for providing “new and additional” funding for countries that are “particularly vulnerable to climate change, with a focus on “addressing loss and damage”. This award is for a moral victory because the details on the operation of the funding mechanism, and which countries will contribute, has been delayed until next year’s summit in the United Arab Emirates (more on that to come).

Worst omission from the final text: phase down of fossil fuels

The final text emerging from Sharm el-Sheikh calls for the phased own of “unabated coal power” rather than all fossil fuels, due to objections from the oil and gas producing nations of Saudi Arabia, Russia and other nations.

Best motivator for climate activists: COP2028 is in the United Arab Emirates

If you thought getting agreement on a phase down of fossil fuels was difficult this year, the incoming COP presidency is the United Arab Emirates. It will take a lot of work to change that next year.

Best conspiracy: It is all Saudi Arabia’s fault

Rumours swirled in the hallways that Saudi Arabia was behind the Egyptian presidency’s odd management of the cover text, including the strange choice to delay work on that text until the very end and resistance to mention of a fossil fuel phase down. This wins “best” conspiracy in that it was the most repeated (to me) not necessarily the most correct.

Most consequential term (tie): “unabated coal” and “clean energy”

The use of these deceptive terms in the final cover text opens the door for expansion of fossil fuel production, particularly coal and gas. They imply that a country can invest in coal or gas plants provided those plants use carbon capture and storage technology or have plans to later install such technology. Even if installed, and with advances in technology, carbon capture and burial does not capture 100% of emitted carbon dioxide, often far below. The consensus of experts is that such technology is best reserved for emissions sources that cannot be realistically eliminated, not to allow expansion of fossil fuel electricity when zero-emissions options exists (and are cheaper).

Michael Myers from Halloween award for the debate that will never die: Apportioning responsibility

At the heart of virtually all COP27 debates is the same issue that has plagued UN climate summits for decades: how to apportion responsibility for climate change. Thirty years after the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” was enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, we are still fighting about which countries should be considered developing, who should give and receive finance, and when different countries should achieve deep emissions cuts.

Most quietly important text: Reforming multilateral development banks

Deep in the finance section of the cover text is a call for the shareholders of entities like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and others to “define a new vision and commensurate operational model, channels and instruments that fit for the purpose of adequately addressing the global climate emergency”. Countries all recognizes that reform of the multilateral development banks is necessary to scale up climate finance without saddling the developing world with more debt.

Best area of agreement: Failure of $100 billion/year climate finance pledge

During the negotiations, I heard to countries of all sizes and levels of wealth agree that the pledge of $100 billion per year to the developing world was poorly conceived, planned and executed. For more, see here.

Worst lie: “I am following the Article 6 negotiations”

Article 6 refers to the provision in the Paris Agreement to create a carbon credit trading system. Given the potential pitfalls of such a system, including accurate measurement and double-counting, it is of great interest to countries, companies and activists alike. However, the task at COP27 was to determine some of the technical details of how the system will work. Unless you devote your career to this subject and/or are a lawyer at an emissions trading organization, good luck following most of what is said during the negotiations. For a summary of what was comprehensible to outsiders, read Simon Evan’s summary for Carbon Brief.

Best new word: “predictable”

The loss and damage text recognized the need for “new, additional, predictable and adequate” funding. The unpredictable and project-based nature of climate aid makes it hard to maintain effective early warning systems, disaster relief and adaptation programs in vulnerable nations (see this paper for an in-depth case study of a small island states).

Worst complaint from delegates: It is hard to get lunch

(this may not win me friends) It was difficult get lunch and even water at the meeting, especially in week one. The food that was available was very overpriced. I only had a proper lunch on two out of my nine days at the conference centre. Regardless, climate change has contributed devastating droughts and floods around the world, leaving families struggling to feed themselves. While I am sympathetic to those at the conference who had serious health concerns, for the rest of us, scrounging for lunch at a conference for a few days is an object lesson, not a hardship.

Most bold adaptation plans: Pacific atoll nations

All three Pacific atoll nations (Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu) released long-term adaptation plans that involve building higher islands. This is less crazy than it sounds – the Chinese government has done the same on reefs in the South China Sea, as has the Maldives. The question is less whether it is physically possible, and more whether the countries will receive the support necessary to make this happen.

Best trend to eliminate: each host country creating a new program

Each year, the host country creates some international climate mechanism that bears the name of the host city. While some are certainly critical, like the Paris Agreement, the proliferation of new mechanisms makes the COPs and pre-COP work increasingly unmanageable, especially for small countries. It also scatters the attention at COPs. I wonder if it would be better to keep new negotiating items underneath existing frameworks and limit the number of different concurrent work items at the COPs.

Best line during a speech: “red or brown life raft”

An i-Kiribati delegate spoke of his country being asked whether it wants a “red or brown life raft”, alluding to how the COPs focus on modalities and technical issues rather than concrete solutions.

Best attempt at a grand deal: European Union offering loss and damage money in exchange for agreement to peak global emissions by 2025.

This late offer essentially aimed at getting China to advance its target of peaking emissions by the year 2030.  Didn’t work, but nice try.

Best lesson for climate scientists: Be careful making more greenhouse gas metrics

One area of negotiation was the common metrics for emissions reporting. The issue is how to sum all gases in the same units, given that they have different radiative effects and different lifetimes in the atmosphere. The common method is to use the global warming potential (GWP) of each gas, which compares radiative effect of each gas to that of carbon dioxide. Here’s where it gets political. Advances in science have led to a higher GWP for methane in recent IPCC reports. Countries with a lot of cattle have pushed to keep the older value for methane and to use another metric entirely, called global temperature potential, which would give an even lower value for methane. The compromise proposal was to keep GWP, but let countries report using GTP too if they want, as long as they document the methods. The proliferation of new metrics in the scientific literature is likely only to further feed what has become a political debate.

Most crowded negotiating rooms: Loss and damage negotiations

Civil society observers came out in droves for these negotiations. Several dozen of us were thrown out of one because security was uncomfortable with people sitting on the floor.

Best speech: Nakeeyat Dramani

This 10-year Ghanaian poet and Climate Vulnerable Forum ambassador received a standing ovation for her moving speech to the plenary on the final official day of the meeting.

Worst effort to learn from the past: The Energy Transition Accelerator

This U.S. initiative announced by climate envoy John Kerry would encourage investment in emission reducing activities in developing nations in exchange for voluntary carbon credits. Countries keep trying these systems, despite ample evidence that they do not contribute to net decrease in emissions, as companies end up getting credit for emissions reductions which would have occurred anyway.

Worst reaction to a protest: Oil Sands Pathways to Net-Zero panel discussion

Five minutes into this panel discussion, a group of activists raised protest signs, and walked out of the small, crowded Canadian pavilion. After they left, people filed in to take the open seats, and the conversation continued on stage. The protest and reaction was, as the person next to me whispered, very “respectful” and very “Canadian”. It was also strange. There was no recognition from the panel that the protest even happened, let alone that the companies and their plans do not have the support of a large proportion of people, young and old, at the conference. Even a quick “we hear you” might have sufficed!

Best unintentional comedy: Egyptian security contractors standing alone in the desert

It seemed like every time the bus turned a corner, you could spot a fit Egyptian man in a suit standing 20 metres off in the desert, guarding the rocks and sand. I was told not to approach them. I just hope someone was bringing them water.

(In all seriousness: security was omnipresent in Sharm el-Sheikh. Guards, passport checks, metal detectors, police checks, and gun-shaped bulges under suit jackets abounded, a reminder of the value of tourism to the Egyptian economy, the number of foreign dignitaries in town, and the ongoing terrorist threat on the Sinai peninsula)

Best presentation of a nationally determined contribution: Kiribati

In true Micronesian style, the Kiribati delegation had a woman in traditional dress dance to the stage carrying a hard copy of the NDC. President Maumau danced along, then received the document, and then presented it to a very uncomfortable looking representative of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Best corporate presentation: Uber

There were only ten people at a presentation in the “Pathways to 1.5 C” pavilion about the company’s plans to shift to entirely zero emissions vehicles in North America and Europe by the year 2030. Most interesting was how a new program that rents Teslas to carless drivers was unintentionally leading to greater electric vehicle use in lower income neighbourhoods where affordability has been a central concern.

Best recommendations: High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments [of Non-State Entities]

This expert group released ten recommendations for companies and other folks setting net-zero commitments, including not continuing to build or invest in new fossil fuel supplies. If widely adopted, these recommendations will eliminate the greenwashing present in many supposed net-zero commitments.

Best patience: The oil company representative that politely nodded while I argued that his company’s net-zero goal must include producing oil only for uses other than combustion (e.g. plastics, solvents and other products that keep the carbon out of the atmosphere)

Best line in the text: “stressing that the severity of impacts will be reduced with every increment of global warming avoided”

This line in the “second periodic review of the long-term global goal” made my scientist’s heart sing. It is an important reminder that the Paris temperature limits like 1.5°C are as much a product of geopolitics as of science, and that the true message of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that the more we reduce emissions, the less the planet warms, and the less people suffer.

Best commitment to a protest: The person walking around in what has to be an uncomfortably hot and heavy dinosaur costume

Best slogan: “Show me the money,” from African youth activists calling for loss and damage support

Best Egyptian impersonation of a celebrity: The Egyptian Lionel Ritchie

Some of the local shops go to extraordinary measures to stand out. Near my hotel was a local store called the “Egyptian Lionel Ritchie Supermarket”, run by a friendly chap who claims to be the “Stuck on you” singer’s North African doppelganger. There was some resemblance. Honourable mention goes to the Egyptian George Clooney, whose store I spotted from the bus, but, alas, I did not get to meet.

Best memories: different perspectives on climate issues

My personal highlights of COP27 were one-on-one conversations with delegates from different countries. Given the location of the conference, I made a point of meeting delegates from across Africa in particular and asking their impressions. I heard about the lack of trust in financial promises from the developing world, the mismatch between donor desires and recipient needs, the unintended consequences of seemingly progressive decisions around international aid in North America, the trade-offs between increasing energy access and reducing electricity emissions, and the brain drain to western universities and institutions. I appreciate how much people were willing to share, and hope to incorporate those perspectives in my teaching, research and advisory work.