Image showing at least 20 drums of pure chemical bromoform imported into Australia by Sea Forest, including “hazardous materials” stickers.

An Australian company that pioneered the cultivation of seaweed as an all-natural way to reduce methane emissions from livestock quietly imported 4000kg of synthetic bromoform marked “for industrial use only” during the critical early years of its development – enough to feed 34 million cows the methane-busting dietary supplement.

For years Sea Forest has served as the quintessential example of Australian green capitalism. The $139.58m (USD $91.33m) company was founded in 2018 by fashion entrepreneur Sam Elsom and mining industry executive Stephen Turner to cultivate Asparagopsis, a species of Australian seaweed that produces a chemical which inhibits methane production in livestock when fed to them. The seaweed’s methane-busting properties were first identified in research by Australia’s peak scientific agency, CSIRO, that found it to be a naturally-occurring source of bromoform. Bromoform blocks the creation of methane in the digestive system of livestock and is administered either by directly feeding cows seaweed in addition to their regular diet or by processing seaweed to extract the chemical to manufacture a feed supplement or related product. These manufactured products can take the form of an oil that is added to livestock feed or lickblocks that better able doses to be delivered.

According to the CSIRO’s early work, around 5 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions originate in the digestive systems of livestock and in Australia this process is considered to contribute 11 percent to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions – although local industry has challenged the methods used to attain those numbers. Over a 20-year period methane is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

A Drilled investigation has raised questions about how the company represented some of its activities in its earlier years as it was developing its core product range. Images shared with Drilled show two tonnes of pure chemical bromoform stored in a shipping container bearing the Sea Forest logo at the company’s Swansea site in Tasmania sometime around December 2020. Other images taken inside the container appear to show smaller vials of Bromofom bearing the name “Elsom” on the label and labels on the side of barrels that specify the chemicals were “only for industrial use”. Customs information obtained by Drilled shows that the company also imported another two tonne shipment of pure chemical bromoform from Chinese manufacturer Henan Tianfu Chemical Company in 2021 weighing 2154kg and held in 20 drums. This represents enough chemical bromoform to produce an equivalent of 200,000kg of methane inhibitor. The company repeated the order the following year.

Around this period, Sea Forest was offering dried seaweed that could be added to livestock feed, and working to develop other methods of delivery such as extracting bromoform from seaweed and suspending it in canola oil so it could be administered in a more controlled manner. How its substantial chemical stock eventuated, who ordered it, or its intended use – for example, whether an honest mistake was made in ordering inventory for research purposes, in primary manufacture, to add to products to ensure a consistent concentration of bromoform was achieved, or as an emergency back-up to meet contractual obligations if the need ever arose – remains unclear.

So far the company has not offered specifics. Drilled contacted Sea Forest multiple times to ask about the shipment and ask how it was used. Though company representatives were forthcoming and transparent on some questions, they offered generic or contradictory statements in response to others. Sea Forest director Stephen Turner confirmed the company had imported 4000kg of pure chemical bromoform in two shipments, saying the chemical was used as part of the company’s research and development program. Turner said the company had also bought four smaller quantities from within Australia, amounting to two shipments of 1kg, one shipment of 2kg and one shipment of 10kg. Half Sea Forest’s stock of pure chemical Bromoform purchased from China was stored at its 30 hectare Swansea facility, a former abalone farm the company bought and eventually redeveloped to enable the land-based cultivation of Asparagopsis, with the second shipment stored at a facility in Melbourne, he said.

“They were later delivered to the Swansea facility, and then when facilities were established, transferred to the Triabunna facility,” he said.

Asked repeatedly to clarify whether Sea Forest used its stock of pure chemical bromoform to augment or manufacture its products, Turner said: “Sea Forest produces SeaFeedTM containing bioactives extracted from seaweed and also produces SeaFeedTM containing manufactured bioactives. These compositions, although chemically identical, are each clearly labelled and described in the product disclosure documentation.”

“So Sea Forest has used manufactured products and this has been fully disclosed,” he said.

He added that Sea Forest still held 80% of its pure chemical bromoform stock and that the two quantities had been “imported for the purpose of Research and Development at a time when we were aiming to grow bromoform and iodoform in tobacco plants utilising 

”, but that “this did not eventuate.” In response to follow-up questions about how the other 20% – equivalent to some 800kg of chemical – was used during research employing the CRISPR technique, Turner said that he had only pointed to the CRISPR technique as “one example of the wide scope of alternatives Sea Forest has explored.”

“With hindsight [we] should not have purchased this much,” he said.

Claims that the chemical stock was intended for the company’s research program, however, were contradicted by Sea Forest’s chief scientist Rocky de Nys who, in an interview with Turner present, said he was aware the company had purchased stocks of chemical bromoform as part of its broader research program, but was not aware that it purchased two separate 2000kg shipments, a year apart, until “after arrival”. Asked about how much bromoform Sea Forest would use as part of the company’s research program generally, he said the amounts would normally be measured in “millilitres, grams”. The company’s head of research and development, Masayuki Tatsumi said he could not recall any specific purchase but would have been “definitely aware” of any orders placed after he joined the company. Asked about the company’s past research efforts using CRISPR gene editing technology to modify tobacco plants, Nys said the company’s efforts in the area were limited.

“We never did anything in that space other than read a couple of publications and think, ‘Wow, that’s an interesting idea,’ but we never pursued that. We always had a marine focus with Asparagopsis,” he said.

Turner sought to clarify that he had only suggested CRISPR as “one example” of the research pathways the company pursued during development to illustrate the depth of its efforts, but did not provide any further information about what activity or application might require the purchase of four tonnes of pure chemical bromoform.

Bromoform is related to iodoform, a chemical sometimes used in labs as a disinfectant and for veterinary purposes, and chloroform, a chemical commonly depicted in popular culture. When directly exposed to air, it evaporates similar to hand sanitiser. It is considered toxic in high concentrations, and is a suspected carcinogen. Australia has no specific rules or regulations around the handling or storage of the material beyond requiring the chemical to be stored in a well-ventilated space, the use of proper protective equipment, ventilation hoods and extractors as directed in standard 

Professor Fran Cowley, a ruminant nutritionist at the University of New England, said that as a methane inhibitor, there is very little difference in outcome between feeding cows dried seaweed or products made from synthetic bromoform, a chemical that can occur naturally and as a common byproduct in industrial processes such as chlorination in water treatment. Broadly speaking, Cowley compared any wider industry shift from farming Asparagopsis in the ocean to synthetic manufacture, to the production of aspirin; once the painkiller was made from stripping bark from willow trees but today it is produced synthetically in large volumes and sold cheaply. Her own research, some of which has been undertaken in collaboration with Meat and Livestock Australia and Future Feed, and has involved Sea Forest products, showed that bromoform consistently worked to inhibit methane, that there was no noticeable differences between the source of bromoform and that it safely passed through a cows digestive system.

“It’s incredibly effective at inhibiting methane; depending on the dose, the completion rate, you can inhibit methane emissions, using the whole seaweed or bioactives in oil,” she said. “There’s no sign of residue of bromoform in meat.”

Cowley noted that Sea Forest’s Asparagopsis-derived products face stiff competition from existing products such as Bovaer. Produced by Swiss company DSM-Firmenich, Cowley said Bovaer is cheap to produce, buy and is associated with a body of peer-reviewed research making it the “gold standard” for methane-inhibitors. Bovaer is a separate feed additive developed by Dutch chemical company DSM-Firmenich, and made from a synthetic chemical compound known as 3-Nitrooxypropanol that acts as a methane inhibitor. Though Bovaer has been targeted in 

 overseas, it is used worldwide. In Australia, however, she says it is little known outside of livestock producers. Asparagopsis-derived products have captured the public imagination thanks in part to the Australian-connection with early research, she said.

Drilled contacted multiple former Sea Forest employees, most of whom declined to comment on the record, saying they had been made to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and non-compete clauses as part of their employment contract, or that they might face personal or professional retaliation in some capacity. Turner said Sea Forest’s use of non-disclosure agreements and “tiered non-competes to protect its IP” was “normal practice for science and other innovation companies”.

One former Sea Forest employee, Margie Rule, who currently works as a consultant for seaweed producers in Australia and did not sign an NDA as part of her work with the company. She left Sea Forest in April 2021 after company management did not respond to two requests to formalise her employment contract and she successfully sought a job with a rival seaweed farmer founded by Australian iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest. Rule said she was unaware that Sea Forest had imported such large quantities of pure chemical Bromoform from overseas during her time with it, adding that, in her experience as a consultant, this was unusual among seaweed growers and out of step with broader industry practice.

“My god!” She said. “That’s massive. According to the 

, the seaweed there contained 6.55mg of bromoform per gram, and when they fed the cows approximately 18g, they found a 98% reduction in methane.”

“If Seaforest has four tonnes of pure bromoform, that could produce 34 million doses. Even if they only used 20%, this would still feed 6.8 million cows according to that original feed rate. This would be the equivalent of 122 tonnes of Asparagopsis.”

“I don’t know why you would buy that amount of chemical bromoform if you were growing enough seaweed.”

Rule, whose PhD involved the propagation of seaweed, worked with early Sea Forest teams that pioneered the use of rope to help grow Asparagopsis in the ocean. She said that despite hope that the leafy-stage of the Asaparagopsis lifecycle could be grown all year round, and that its high growth rate would sustain rapid cultivation, it proved too sensitive to environmental conditions outside a controlled environment, including temperature, light, nutrient load, depth, wave action, salinity and time of year. Rule recalled that early attempts to grow Asparagopsis were “timed perfectly” and a success, but other attempts failed owing to variations in timing or conditions in the marine environment that could not be controlled for.

In one incident in December 2020, Rule said she was called into a meeting after an Aparagopsis crop failed where she was grilled by company leadership who, she says, suggested she was to blame for the die off. Rule – who compared the current state of knowledge in cultivation of Asparagopsis to the early stages of rice or wheat cultivation in earlier periods of human history – said that research work had not yet pinned down the seaweed’s growing period, but was ignored when she tried to point this out for company leadership. In an email dated January 2021 and seen by Drilled, the company’s science team acknowledged internally that 

growing season had yet to be established. Other former employees recalled that at this time, the company struggled to produce enough seaweed to match its ambitious production targets – a claim Sea Forest has repeatedly and strongly denied. The company does, however, acknowledge that 

frequent marine heatwaves along Australia’s southern coast

 made ocean-cultivation of Asparagopsis increasingly difficult in later years.

During this early period, the company was firmly focussed on brand building, Rule said. In one example, she described how production staff and technicians were asked to wear specially-embroidered long white lab coats when participating in photo shoots and other public appearances. She also recalled that she and others were given pens to wear in their pockets during photoshoots to “make us look more sciencey”. In another example, Rule recalled the company sought to collect samples of wild Asparagopsis that could be clipped and re-grown in a controlled environment to build up its stocks. At this time, the company sought to collect wild samples of Asparagopsis tetrasporophyte, an intermediate life stage of the plant commonly referred to as “pom poms” that present as fluffy red buds. These pom poms are considered to contain a higher percentage of bromoform than the leafy-stage of the seaweed lifecycle. However, the wild pom pom samples were frequently contaminated by Polysyphonia pom poms, another species of red, leafy seaweed that look similar to Asparagopsis.

“A good comparison is the difference between gold and 

. It’s really easy to confuse them if you don’t know what you’re looking for and don’t have a microscope,” Rule says. “The same is true for these seaweeds.”

At one point, the team sought to identify and remove this Polysyphonia, temporarily storing it into a separate tank as a step towards disposing of it. Rule said she and other staff were then asked by Sea Forest management to maintain the tank for testing purposes.

The tank containing Polysyphonia was later shown to media and other visitors to the facility, Rule said. One article published by 

 on 28 April 2021 included a photo of Sam Elsom standing next to a land-based tank. The caption read: “Sam Elsom with on-land tanks where growing asparagopsis [sic] seaweed is being trialled. Harvesting the seaweed (below, left) offshore”. Rule said this tank held Polysyphonia at that time, that she had helped place the other seaweed in the tank, and that she was later tasked with providing samples of wild Asparagopsis from another part of the operation for use in close-up photos.

“The company always did collections from wild populations before photo shoots,” Rule said.

Rule also pointed to social media posts from 

 2021 that depicted similar scenes, and another post from 

 that year which appeared to show Elsom viewing the same tank while on a tour with a potential investor.

Sea Forest director Stephen Turner rejected this version of events, saying Sea Forest “never showed members of the media, investors or other third parties tanks holding Polysyphonia while representing it as Asparagopsis”. He also rejected any suggestion the company’s activities had created a “false perception” about the nature of its operations.

“The company has not created a false perception of what its actual activities entail, and has aimed for clear communication of its journey from closing the asparagopsis life cycle, establishing commercial farming in both the marine and then the land based environments, extracting the seaweeds bioactives, experimenting with edible and nutraceutical seaweeds, growing at scale macrocystis for giant kelp establishment, stabilizing the bioactives in oil and water (water is still in R&D at trial stage) and replicating those bioactives,” Turner said.

However, Turner said that Polysiphonia was “used in inoculating” tanks “prior to stocking them with Asparagopsis,” noting that the tanks at its Triabunna facility were stocked with Asparagopsis “from 5 October 2021 onward”. This occurred after the publication of the article and other social media posts showing site visitations where tanks of Polysiphonia were viewed by visitors.

Sea Forest later shifted its operations from ocean-based cultivation to growing seaweed in land-based tanks that offered better control over conditions. Built on the site of an old abalone farm, its Swansea facility repurposed existing infrastructure that enabled it to draw in water from the ocean, circulate it through the pens to cultivate the seaweed, and then release it back into the wild. This process enabled closer control of environmental conditions and by all accounts the company was successful in mastering the process.

Current and former employees who were involved with the company around this time described how, by 2023, a new problem had emerged: oversupply. At that time the company publicly 

expressed frustration about a lack of demand for its products

 – one news story described its offering as a “golden elixir” – saying it had ten months to move its stock before they reached the end of its shelf life. This formed part of a broader call for the government to establish programs that pushed livestock producers and the dairy industry to cut methane emissions.

In January this year, however, it began to pivot its operations. Sea Forest formally stopped operating its Asparagopsis marine farm “to fully concentrate on land-based production” of pom poms, partly as a result of recurring marine heatwaves driven by climate change. By April 2025, staff working in the marine cultivation of the business were made redundant. The company has since sold one of three boats used to hang its grow-ropes, with another one currently for sale.

Company documents published on the Australian Stock Exchange when Sea Forest went public in late November suggest its hand may have been forced. Over its lifetime, the company has been privately backed by Australian investment bank Macquaire, billionaire Peter Gunn and entrepreneur Zoe Foster Blake and her husband, but over the last two financial years, the company booked a combined loss after tax of $15,975,720 (USD $10,453,712). In promoting its public offering, the company said it now planned an expansion, with new blending and distribution facilities to be built in the Australian states of Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia and South Africa. According to its 2024 and 2025 annual reports, however, Sea Forest sold as much oyster spat as methane inhibitor. The company reported that it was working to resolve this lack of a market, saying it had made “substantial progress towards commercialisation” but warned that “its ongoing ability to continue as a going concern, recover the carrying value of its assets and meet its commitments as and when they fall due is dependent upon securing additional funding.”

This dynamic raises certain questions about the underlying business model Sea Forest has pursued, and by extension pioneered for other seaweed producers. An easier, less risky and possibly more profitable path to growth might have been to import and repurpose bromoform, an industrial byproduct, into a methane-inhibitor from the outset–but then the initial vision for Sea Forest was not to become an Australian Monsanto. With a corporate identity built around seaweed cultivation, the promise of an all-natural climate solution differentiates its product from competitors and has allowed the company to secure millions in competitive venture capital and government grants to support its growth. With unanswered questions about its practices and clear financial pressures, Sea Forest shows the extent to which green business remains business – and perhaps how easy it can be to become trapped by expectations.

Selling Seaweed: An Australian Green Startup’s Chemical Insurance Policy

 [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt In a little under a week, the Annual UN Climate Summit, the conference of the parties-- it's called that because these are all of the people who are party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or the UNFCCC and they meet every year to talk about what their governments are gonna do about climate change.

This is year 30, and I think it's fair to say that this process is facing a real crisis of legitimacy at the moment. This year, the US government has barred any of its officials from attending to negotiate, so that should be interesting. For the last couple years, the gloves have been completely off when it comes to fossil fuel executives being involved in this process, we had first COP 28 in Abu Dhabi where the president of the national oil company was also the president of the Climate Summit. And then last year in Baku, in Azerbaijan, where similarly loads of folks involved in the petroleum business were part of the COP organizing committee, and there were just blatant oil deals happening all over the conference.

This year's COP is being held in the Brazilian Amazon, which is quite interesting. And the Brazilian government and the conference organizing committee have really made a commitment to information integrity around climate. They wanna highlight this issue. They would like to see something around information integrity actually being adopted into the final commitments coming out of this COP, and they have made a big commitment to keeping things like climate denial out of this conference.

However, as we know on this show, there are lots of different ways that disinformation can make its way into climate conversations. And what we're gonna talk about today is the way that climate obstruction makes its way into international negotiations. So not just the COP, but also the intergovernmental panel on climate change.

These are not, you know, super objective uncorrupted and uncorruptible processes as much as they're often described that way. And as much as we might like for them to be. So today a very interesting conversation with Carrie Derick from University of Geneva and Eduardo Viola from the Institute of International Relations in Brazil, about how climate obstruction shows up in international negotiations.

That conversation is coming up after this quick break.

 I'm gonna start with the very, very basics, which is to have you guys define for people what is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and why are we looking at these bodies for climate obstruction?

 The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the basic document, the foundational document of the climate regime. Okay? And the most important thing is it's settled the goal that humanity should, reduce emissions for avoiding dangerous climate change.

This was very important document sudden in 1992, was very important example of multilateral limbs at the end of the Cold War and with the optimistic spirit, let's say, of great potential of human collaboration. Okay?

 Yep. And We have the UN FCC because the [00:04:00] IPCC, uh, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988, before the UN FCC was established to build the case scientifically for an international climate negotiations.

Since the nineties, the IPCC has been producing main assessment reports. So now we are entering the seventh assessment cycle. And all those reports and assessments have been the scientific basis of the, the negotiations. That's why the IPCC does play a key role in how we understand the climate problems as well as the solutions that's being discussed a lot in the negotiations. And that's why we also wanted to include it because it's quite related. And we often see that many of the experts, the government representatives, they actually [00:05:00] travel from IPCC to UNFCCC meetings. So there is a, a clear connection and links between those two institutions.

 Great. Okay. And you mentioned in the chapter that there's only kind of recently been research that's laid out a framework for looking at obstruction in the UNFCCC. Can you say a little bit more about that? What is that research and what is the framework for looking at obstruction??

 So there has been already quite some research on climate obstruction in the UNFCCC. By Joanna Deplage, for instance, but they were focusing on some specific countries. And what we've seen with the publication recently by Danielle Falzon and her colleagues is this kind of first attempts at having a comprehensive framework of what climate obstruction means in the UNFCCC and in their paper published in Global Environmental Politic, They do [00:06:00] identify four different main ways to to do obstruction. One being limiting the scope of an issue. Whether it's being only discussed within a dialogue, whether it is going to lead to some decisions that parties are supposed to take into account. We have also the question of reducing transparency in terms of how much data is available to understand a specific problem, knowing that the authors actually use the case of loss and damage in their study. We have also questions around manipulating language. How are we going to, to define and speak about loss and damage? And for instance, there is this interesting case in the negotiations where the negotiations with use and speak of loss and damage in the singular and with capital letters, whereas in the [00:07:00] IPCC and in some of the technical discussions in the UNFCCC, they will mention losses and damages.

So using the plural and lower cases. And the final element is the question of promoting non transformative solutions. So solutions that do not necessarily question the structural aspects and reasons that are responsible for the climate crisis we are in.

 Yeah, I would like to add a kind of more structural dimension of obstruction, that is what are the, the basis of the behavior of states. And it's a lot related to some str structural dimension. Like for example the carbon intensity of their economies. The level, the share of global carbon emissions the per [00:08:00] capita emissions, the dependence of their economies on fossil fuels.

So those are I mean, those, those issues are not matter of negotiation, but they shape the the behavior of most states. Not all the states, but most states. And so the, there is this always present in the negotiation. This, that the states don't don't want to, to do, for example, to if they have high carbon intensity in their economy, don't want to reduce the carbon intensity, or if they have a trajectory of growing carbon emission, they don't want to diminish the growing trajectory of their carbon emission and so on.

 Right. And that comes up in the IPCC as well, right? That they, the higher, well, at least the [00:09:00] fossil fuel producers or the bigger AG producers tend to bring those issues in at the IPCC level as well.

 Yes, totally. And maybe to name a few. What we have seen from different studies is, I mean, we have the usual suspects like Saudi Arabia for instance. There has been a lot of work on how the Saudi is trying to obstruct the deliberations within UNFCCC and the IPCC. But we have also seen not heavily around questions of loss and damage equity issues at the United States as well. European countries also being more and more critical about acknowledging what it means to take seriously, especially financially, what it means to take loss and damage and compensation seriously. But we have also seen global south countries as well, and Eduardo probably knows better, but [00:10:00] also countries like China, Brazil, India also tend to try to put more emphasis on their right to development. Not acknowledging that today they also are big economies and also pollute far more than they did 10 years ago.

 Mm-hmm. Yeah. Actually, I wanted to ask you to define the principle of common, but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities. Can you define what that means and, and how it gets leveraged in these negotiations

 well in, I mean, this is a key pillar of the Rio Convention, but at the Rio it is,

 Big. Okay. So, and so, and apart from dividing the world in a very simplified world. Developed countries and developing countries. Okay. And so. [00:11:00] It doesn't consider that developing countries are extremely stratified.

I mean, in terms of per capita income. So, and what, this is one of the problems of the Rio convention that this has not used, it, the classification of countries of the world Bank that is much better, more sophisticated, and classify the countries in four levels. High income, high middle income, low middle income, and low income.

Okay, so one problem with this principle is how high middle income countries use being in the category of developing countries for avoiding taking significant responsibility. Okay, but the principle say that everybody is responsible. For climate change, but some countries are more responsible and some countries have the [00:12:00] obligation, the countries that are more responsible, that have produced it historically, the idea historically is, is debatable.

A lot of things remain vague. So\, the interpretation of the principle became a major problem in the dynamic of the convention. In my view, this is one of the weakest, not, not the principle, but the fact that there was not a more complex classification of developing countries.

 Maybe what we can also add is that the signature of the Paris Agreement in 2015 kind of changed a bit how CBDRRC is being interpreted and discussed because it adds in the light of national circumstances. And that's kind of supposed, it's another of those very vague expressions that you find in the Paris Agreement and in the UNFCCC. But [00:13:00] it, it is supposed to highlight the fact that some economies now in some countries do play a bigger role in how much they, they emit and especially emerging countries. And that's supposed to be assigned to bring them on board also to, to take ambitious actions. So it's an an attempt to try to add another layer of differentiation in the UNFCCC but knowing that it's still very contested and still today being discussed a lot in the negotiations.

 I wanted to ask you more about that as well, because there was that change and there were a few other kind of key changes in the Paris Agreement that shifted things a little bit. So I was hoping you could talk about that. You mentioned you know, a, like this, this difference around developing countries, but I know there was also the hybrid multilateralism thing introduced and, and kind of bringing non-state [00:14:00] actors in more.

So. I, I wonder if you could talk a bit about how Paris changed the negotiations and also the pathways to obstruction a little bit.

 The Paris Agreement is a product of the failure of the reform of the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol set a kind of mandatory, goals of reduction emission for developed countries. Okay. So the, the, the Kyoto Protocol was based in the idea of precision in relation to the obligations of developed countries but not in relation to developing country, of course.

So what happened is that at the time of the reform of the Kyoto Protocol, there was an idea that the principle of mandatory the principle of having mandatory goals should be extended to all countries. of course, very different kind of [00:15:00] mandatory according to their, to the per capita income and cap and, and capabilities, let's say.

But this failed Okay. For many reasons. Yeah. And so the Paris Agreement was kind of, second best in relation to something and stronger agree at the same time. It is a principle that bottom up each country say what I can do and and I'll implement. And there is no idea of any punishment if you don't implement significant punishment, let's say. Okay, that it wasn't the Kyoto Protocol, but was for, didn't have enough teeth anyway. So, from this point of view, this is a major change. It's universal that any country has obligations, but the obligations are defined by each country according to.

Whatever criteria. [00:16:00] Okay. And there is, and there is no let's say there is no, these obligations are not mandatory. were attempts of saying, okay, these are the, the goals should be mandatory should be legally binding. Okay. But there was the strong opposition of the United States and India to this kind of in, well, India is more complex, okay?

But the, the, the United States, not because of the, not necessarily the Obama administration. Was the case, but the Obama administration was saying, knew that the to pass in the American Senate, any treat that had legally binding goals of reduction emissions would not pass that this, the American Senate that is very difficult to pass any international treaty in the American Senate historically.[00:17:00]

 On your point on the role of non-state actors I think that's also an important shift that we saw with the signature of the, the Paris agreement, where we knew while negotiating the, the treaty that adding up the voluntary commitments by countries wouldn't lead us to limit the the global warming to two degree or 1.5. And that's what, what is being called the emission gap and the, the idea. Was that this emission gap could be reduced by giving non-state actors, and especially obviously the, the private sector a bigger role in the, in the transition. So that's why with the Paris Agreement, we have this whole discussions around hybrid multilateralism, about orchestration of the action [00:18:00] of non-state actors to try to reduce this emissions gap in a context in which in the past the private sector was kind of more like either opposed or in favor of of a treaty of the Kyoto Protocol, notably. But then we saw really changes around the Paris Agreement with the private sectors and the industry wanting to play also a bigger role and also not only at the national level, but also internationally to bring up and to, to have this kind of bigger dialogue and initiatives being also discussed at the multilateral level.

 So you mentioned in this chapter, and we talked a little bit about it already, but the sort of operations of the UNFCCC and the IPCC and how those enable or empower obstruction. And I was hoping you could talk about that a little bit, just what are some of the ways that, these organizations [00:19:00] are set up to allow obstruction.

 I can start and mention two and then Eduardo can, can jump in anytime. I I think first there is the question of access and participation to both the IPCC and UNFCCC in the sense that even though everyone, like every representative of a country is welcome to participate and be part of those institutions.

It does require quite a lot of resources, human resources, but also financial resources. For the IPCC, it also mean quite a lot of epistemic resources, being able to understand the very technical discussions that go on in the IPCC and that that does mean-- because they are huge asymmetries and structural asymmetries between countries-- that does mean that often those who have the most capacities are also the most represented [00:20:00] in those institutions because they can send more delegates. They can also stay overnight. They can stay longer if the negotiations do not finish on time. And so ab obviously that makes them have bigger influence on what's going on in those institutions.

And and the second I think is, and that's also similar and it's a practice and procedure in both institution, is the fact that decisions are taken by consensus, which means that, every country has a say and a voice, and can at any time oppose a decision, oppose an agreement, which means that everything has to be made to try to find a compromise to get them on board.

And that gives some countries, and especially those countries who wants to do obstruction also a big leeway and a big way to kind of really try to to slow down the debate or have their views reflected.

 Yeah, this is actually the, the [00:21:00] idea of the consensus is one of the major vulnerabilities of con the convention of, and the whole history of the, the regime. Okay? So that is that the just one country, and particularly if it, if it is a country with some power, again, it doesn't even, not, doesn't need to be the strongest power.

You can you can diminish. The, the what is the agreement? And so this is the idea that the consensus give the negotiation to the final decision of minimum common denominator, meaning the minimal ambition for fighting global warming.

 When I was reading this chapter, especially this part about how I don't know, access and resources really come to play in the IPCC and the UNFCCC, it also made me think about the academic [00:22:00] research and the funding of it and how much more industry funding there is for that research in some countries than others.

And I wonder I guess, yeah, just how much that comes into play as an obstruction tactic as well.

 I think yeah, that's a difficult question because yeah, the IPCC is not being funded by the, the private sector, it's being funded by the governments on a voluntary basis. But it's true that in the selection of the authors, it's possible because it's being done based on the list provided by governments.

It's possible to have authors who have been working for fossil fuel companies. We know, for instance, of authors from ExxonMobil or Saudi Aram Aramco, who have been authors in some of the IPCC assessments. But I, and I wouldn't say it's necessarily [00:23:00] because of them that we have this kind of openness to carbon capture and storage or carbon dioxide removal, which, which has been documented in the last reports. I think it, in general, the IPCC also wants to work very closely with the private sector and also wants, and it's part of a bigger narrative in which non-state actors and the private sector does play a big role in providing the solutions.

So it's, it's really part of a bigger change. And that's, that's what the, I think the interesting point. Yeah. IPCC was kind of said, okay, let's, let's have closer links. And we know from the previous president, Hoesung Lee, for instance, was really open to having greater dialogues and input from from the, the big business industry. And so that might be one of the reasons through the leadership of the [00:24:00] IPCC, through the authors who are being part of the, the report that we tend to give those technologies big roles in, in the transition. Even though it's been criticized a lot, IPCC is aware of that. They, they have been discussions about how to also show some of the negative impacts that those, those technologies can have not on, on biodiversity for instance or water security.

 Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Can we talk about which countries are the biggest problem? Which countries are the big obstructors? We know the United States so we can talk about the United States more for sure. But what are, the big obstructors, you, you mentioned them in this chapter, and I'd like to have you kind of list them and then give some examples of the kinds of things that they do to [00:25:00] obstruct at at the international level.

 Yeah, so I guess the most obvious one, the most that has been discussed a lot in the literature, also in media reporting is, is Saudi Arabia. Because Saudi Arabia is very open and in a way, and very, like, not deranged or it's not posing Saudi Arabia problem of being finger pointed as obstructing the negotiations and putting its, its video.

I think it's even part of the DNA, it's part of the identity of the Saudi delegation to be, to have this very kind of aggressive very forthcoming position and in the negotiations. So that's the kind of obvious one. I, I would say, but in a way, in a way, extremely well done. I [00:26:00] mean, it's, it's impressive to see the Saudi navigate the different rooms and have their point of view being presented and listed in the discussion.

So it's, it's very effective and it's, it's not something they, they are not, they are really thinking, I think, very clearly about how to organize themselves and how to, to influence the negotiations. The second one probably the biggest in a, in a way, but it's the United States, United States-- I think the difference with the Saudi is that United States cares about its about the public opinion. It cares about what. What people are going to say and see of, of the United States within the negotiations, but also outside as, as wanting to have this kind of leadership role in the negotiations.

Even though in practice we know the United States has left and withdrew from the Kyoto protocol, from the Paris Agreement. Is [00:27:00] a big opposer of historical responsibilities, which I think is obviously a very big problem given that we need to have ambitious, but also just action. The United States also has been really opposing a lot the loss and damage discussions in the negotiations really opposing any discussions in terms of reparation and compensation. And that's why it took so many decades to have the loss and damage fund

 There is a significant di difference between Republican and democratic administration. So in general speaking it's a country that produce a lot of obstruction even in Democratic administration. But I mean the, particularly the, the Biden administration was the, the first time that the United States has really a, a climate policy because Obama didn't have. [00:28:00] It was take some measures by executive order, but didn't have a climate policy. So we have a climate policy in United States for the first time that is basic in promoting renewable energy and nuclear energy, not in reducing because this, this, this is wouldn't have support in Congress.

But anyway, the difference between the Biden administration and the second Trump administration in terms of the impacting the global climate policy is giant, giant. I mean, the impact of, and this is one problem that is very important. We are now living in a world that's extremely conflicted, extremely based in the priority of hard geopolitics considerations. Okay. In a, a well in which the military spending is growing a lot, most countries, eh, and so the world in which we are now is somehow [00:29:00] the opposite of the world of 92 when the climate regime was born, and even the world of 2015 when the Paris Agreement was signed.

Okay? So the negotiations were always difficult for the reasons we have mentioned and are in the chapter. And now the, the negotiations have a much more obstacle because of the, this news geopolitical and particularly now with the Trump administration, that is not, even, not being, not being in the, in the agreement it is impacting, he's impacting a lot, many countries.

Okay? So openly or not. So, this is a consideration by United States, and I will say that another obstacle that has be, that is, has been important is the position of China until 2014. Previous to Paris agreement, [00:30:00] China was has a non-cooperative policy at all. Okay? In 2014, after the negotiation between Obama and Xi Jinping there was, it moved from a non-cooperative to partially cooperative position in the negotiations. So this was very important for sure, and risky, the Paris Agreement would not happen without this change in the Chinese position. But still so until now, see China, China has become right. A continued building coal feed the thermopower thermopower plants but at the same time is a superpower of of renewables.

Okay? And this is very important for China and for the world. But still, China continues, consider itself as a developing country, and this is a major problem for the advance of the negotiations.

 Can I have you guys define [00:31:00] the difference between procedural and substantive obstruction, and then maybe give some examples of those both in the UNFCCC and the IPCC.

 Yeah, so I can give you broadly a, a kind of overview and then we can discuss examples. So we, we wanted in this chapter to have a easy way to, look at obstruction in a way and that's why we differentiated between procedural obstruction and substantial obstruction, knowing that obviously they are also clearly related. So looking at procedural obstruction is more when when a country tried to delay the deliberation when it puts its veto on some decisions. As, as we mentioned, that it's very important to, for [00:32:00] decisions to be taken by consensus. So some countries do use a lot. Their veto to have the views reflected in in the documents.

And those can be UNFCCC policy decisions, but also IPCC Summaries for Policymakers. It can be also about taking the floor a lot to delay the deliberations that can then, then will be extended over the day. Sometimes will be also extended overnight, which makes it very difficult for small delegations to be part of the, of the negotiations. And substantial obstruction is then more about being obstructive on how a specific thematic area is going to be addressed and object. This can be done by delaying the discussions. And this can be for instance when, discussing fossil fuel phase out in the negotiations. And [00:33:00] that took so many years and decades even to, to finally have a, a proper discussion about fossil fuel phase out. But there are other examples in the chapter about yeah, loss and damage discussions and how for a long time it has been kind of framed around the question of adaptation.

And that only recently some negotiations have been allowed also to develop independently on loss and damage.

 Something I thought was really interesting in this chapter, and maybe surprising for people who don't follow this so closely, is that there's almost never is energy being discussed explicitly in these negotiations. So I, I wonder if you could talk about that and, and sort of why it was a big deal that in you know, at, at the wrap up of, I think it was COP 28, that they [00:34:00] actually mentioned fossil fuels in in those negotiations. But yeah, why is energy not being talked about in, in explicit terms in these negotiations?

 I mean, I would say that there was, at the moment of the Rio Convention, there was, this, is all these things are related to the limitations and vulnerabilities of the Rio Convention. Okay? So what happened at that time countries that were leading like the European Union. They were expecting that the most important was to reach a consensus to reach a treaty. Okay? So then, for example, if United States was against introducing energy openly in, in the discussion. Also, obviously all the oil exported, for example. Okay. At that. So it is amazing that [00:35:00] energy is not discussed.

It's amazing that just in 28 there was a mention to going transition away from fossil years. Really, really is, and this is kind of say in my view the general limitations of the convention, eh, that anyway has produced global public awareness about the issue because imagine without the convention, the world, without the convention, without a, an, the annual discussions about this.

So the public awareness in the world about climate change would be dramatically lower. Okay. So the convention has been very important. The negotiations sometimes have been not useful, but generally there is a trajectory of progress, but with all these limitations, so I would say energy is very, is not discussed [00:36:00] because all the countries that are carbon intensive in the production of energy are against.

 And there is this famous statement by Saudi Arabia which, which was that the UNFCCC is not an energy treaty. So we should discuss, we can discuss emissions but we shouldn't go too much into the details of how we can reduce those emissions and how we can also think about fossil fuel phase outs.

But what is, what is interesting is, and that's part of the, chapter as well, and that's work that has been done by a colleague of ours, Stefan Aku, which is that. In a way, fossil fuels have been discussed in in the UNFCCC policy meetings, but through the impact of climate policy on fossil fuel economies, and that's [00:37:00] what is being called response measures.

And it's, it's agenda item in the negotiations that has been there for several decades. And that's where the consequences of the response measures are being discussed and what can be done to help countries that are heavily dependent on fossil fuel for the economy, what can be done, done to support their transition.

That's obviously a agenda item and, and thematic area where Saudi Arabia has been pushing a lot to consider those very important, obviously consequences. And today we discussed that as well on the just transition agenda item.

 Yeah, that's super, super interesting. Kind of related to this I wanted to talk about this phrase "unabated emissions" and why it's important for, for people to understand [00:38:00] what that means and how it gets used as a loophole.

 Yeah. Well, it's a bit related to to, to the previous question on the role of some of the technologies like carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and storage in, in the IPCC And it's true that this, this "unabated emission" statement became very important, very much discussed because it was mentioned in the Glasgow Pact at cop 26. And the idea was that they was supposed to have a phase down of in abated emissions from coal. Notably, and, it's part of those terms that allow for consensus to be found. And because "unabated" is supposed [00:39:00] to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, because there is this, yeah, this expectations that by deploying at large scale carbon dioxide capture and, and storage we can continue to to extract fossil fuel from the ground. But then capture the emissions at the source and store them underground. And this is a technology that has been discussed for several decades. There was actually a special report produced by the IPCC in 2005, if I remember correctly, which was expected to assess the role that CCS could play in the transition. It's still, it hasn't scaled up as expected. There are still a lot of uncertainties, a lot of debate, but we can see that it came back in the discussions because some countries and economies [00:40:00] really hope very strongly that those technologies can help them continue extract for fossil fuel. And there is not very interesting discussion going on in, in the IPCC about how do we define unabated emissions what is unabated infrastructure?

And it's very, it's been going on because the IPCC obviously after COP 26 became involved in the discussions about this, this definition. So there have been authors IPCC authors trying to find some kind of definition to assess whether an infrastructure is really producing unabated emissions or, or not.

 Interesting. Okay. We've talked about non-state actors a little bit and how they've been increasingly welcomed and active in this process. Can you talk a little bit about [00:41:00] specifically, what types of non-state actors are getting involved, and where do they play a role in obstruction? obstruction?

 There are, a lot of non-state actors, but we can classify them in, in in say, NGOs and business players. And also there is more recently another non-state actor that is non-national, state actor, but in some countries are important, particularly in democratic federative countries, eh that is the subnational government.

But the most important are the business and the NGOs. At the beginning of the COPs the idea or not of non-state actors were much more NGOs because the business community was reluctant to the whole idea of the convention, okay? When there, there were some changes in perception in the business community, [00:42:00] particularly promoted by the World Economic Forum since 2014, 15, and so on.

So the business participation became very, very strong and particularly increased dramatically the, the participation of business that are related to fossil fuels corporation. So we have today this worlds of the business community and the NGOs community. And there are some NGOs that are not independent NGOs representing civil society, more public good like in the past, but that represent business interests and sometimes carbon intensive business interests.

And we can say that there are some business non-state actors that are more progressive. And they recognize the, the need of decarbonization. And there are [00:43:00] other businesses non-state actors that are clearly conservative. They are in favor, the status quo and with different discourses that are not open saying that. And we have also the NGO community. Most of the NGO community is much more representative of civil societies, national civil societies, and global civil society. But there are also significant part of growing of NGOs that are much more dependent on related of to the business community and both side. But particularly what is the major problem is with NGOs that are related to fossil fuels non-state actors.

 yeah, maybe building on on [00:44:00] that, what we see is because of this whole Paris agreement, which is expected to orchestrate action by non-state actors. We see a great interest from non-state actors and especially the private sector in COPs. They go to COPs because they can showcase their let latest technologies and solutions.

They can be part of different side events where they show how they are becoming leaders in the, in the transition. They are also there to lobby government representatives. And they have been studies and by, by different organizations really showing how they are more and more lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry being part not only of of government delegations, but also going to COPs to. part of side events to do also deals with [00:45:00] different countries and, and actors. I think there is still in general some more knowledge and research that would be needed to really understand what those actors are actually doing at COP. And what's their potential of influencing the negotiations, knowing that still today, and that has always been the case for non-state actors to have an impact and an influence on decision making processes, being it NGOs or the private sectors. It's more effective to do it nationally.

 Could I have you talk a little bit about the efforts that are working to reveal this obstruction or oppose it, including your own work, this book, you know, academic research activism, journalism.

What are the things that are pushing back against this and do you see any that are particularly [00:46:00] effective?

 Yes. So, so there has been quite a lot going on in the negotiations and also in the side events to try to name and shame in a way those actors who are obstructing negotiations, but also policy making nationally. And we can mention the  Notorious Fossil of the Day" that is being awarded by NGOs to some of the countries who have been obstructing the, the discussions. So that's, yeah, those, those kind of name and shaming, naming and shaming practices and strategies are being used a lot by civil society. What we see also, and obviously they, they provide this kind of really important moral dimension and moral argument in the negotiations is the fact that we also have a very active and influential [00:47:00] coalition of countries who are the most vulnerable to climate change. And here I'm thinking about the AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island, developing states, which has been very active as well to kind of push for more ambitious action that has been also active in trying to bridge between different countries and developed and developing countries. And that, that's something that I find very interesting, which because it's initiative that brings together not only s countries is being pushed by them. But it also initiated also from discussions academic discussions, is this non-proliferation agreement on fossil fuel. And that's being discussed and increasingly also supported in the negotiations, which I find an interesting example of how to to build collaborations and support from different actors, being civil society, government [00:48:00] representatives, as well as researchers.

 We're coming up to the COP in Brazil, and I know Brazil came up in this chapter a couple times too. So I'm curious to hear what you think we can expect to see at this COP, what people should be looking for.

 The international situation in which this COP is going to happen is extremely difficult because of the new American administration. This is a major, major problem, but also is what I, I, I said before about the, the priority of national security. Today, how this affect all countries, eh, that has diminished the attention significantly to to climate change mitigation.

Okay? So this is a major obstacle for the convention for COP 30. And I would say that, so for [00:49:00] example, the one issue that is key in obstacle of the negotiation is the major difference of position between developing countries and developing countries, generally speaking. Okay? So this is a major obstacle, okay?

And there is for, from one side, there is less and less. Availability for financing from developed countries and from the other side, there is growing resentment in developing countries. I would say particularly in low income and low middle income countries in relation to the, to developing countries and to the, the credibility of the negotiation.

This is something is accumulating a lot. Okay. And it's, it's going to be more difficult this year, in my view. There are two things that are favorable in this. COP one is that the first one in a democratic country after three COPs in autocracies. So in the [00:50:00] environment of the COPs there is a diffuse influence of when you have a lot of, an atmosphere out of civil society mobilization that could be extremely intense in this case because Brazil is promoting the participation of civil society, national and international, even with all the vulnerability of Brazil, because has a good policy for controlling deforestation right now. But the land use change, but not about oil exploration. That is Brazil is becoming more and more one of the most important oil exported in the world. Okay, so this is the ambivalence or of the schizophrenia of the Lula administration. But anyway, it's from the Brazilian government is promoted and, and there is another thing that I think is relevant, and this is an uncertainty in my view, the uncertainty is what would be the [00:51:00] role of China in this convention?

Could China take advantage of the of the vacuum because there is no more European Union leadership. Okay? And United States is in the opposite side of the convention. So will China take advantage and change positions saying, okay, we recognize we are a global superpower, global economy superpower in all dimensions and we, cannot be considered anymore a developing country. We have many of the dimensions of developed country. Even if the per capita income is still in the high middle, income is not high, inc. I think, theoretically this could happen. There is a high probability of this to happen? [00:52:00] No, it's a low probability. But this, if there is a movement of China in that direction, whatever the specificities of this movement, this will create a new kind of environment in this scope that could diminish the negative situation of today, of the world and global climate policy.

And even could be very favorable for China, but because could, could reduce the opposition to China in democratic countries, because China is an autocracy. Okay? So there is, because theoretically because I don't have any inside information about China, okay? This, I think this could happen. The other thing that I think is important is what will be the role of the Brazilian president, not the Brazilian government behavior in the negotiation that will be like in any other country, but the Brazilian president, the, the most important goal of the [00:53:00] Brazilian pre president is securing the continuity of the negotiation.

It's a low ambition goal, okay? So, the danger is the implosion of the of COP. So this is our goal. Keep the COP going on. So for that, we need to have a very low ambition position in terms of hard matters, let's say. Okay. But we can create an atmosphere of discussion that is more forward thinking without entering in very tough issues in relation to emissions, for example.

But yes trying to, to say, how can I say that? For example, trying to circumvent, [00:54:00] try to avoid the deepening of the let's say of the risk of the.

 I would really agree with Eduardo on the question of trust and the resentment, the lack of trust that we, we have seen in the last years. I was in, in Baku at Cop 29, I was also this June in Bonn. And the, the negotiation are stuck on several issues because of the disappointment of the new collective quantified goal on, on finance, which is seen as completely way too weak by developing countries.

And I think that's being a really big challenge for the Brazilian presidency to try to bring trust [00:55:00] between the countries, but also to, to try to have, to restore trust in the process.

Taking into account also that the United States pulled out that the EU is increasingly sometimes having very, like, having to take the same statements and kind of like obstructive a bit kind of positions that the US used to take, for instance, on finance and loss and damage. So I think it's going to be an important COP to try to talk about this question of trust and resentment and how to move forward in this new, very c

Transcription

The UN processes created to deal with climate change have been infiltrated by obstructive forces since jump. In this episode, as COP 30 begins, Kari De Pryck, of the University of Geneva, and  Eduardo Viola, of the Institute of International Relations Brasil join to look at how they operate, and what we can expect to see at this year’s COP in Brazil.


S14, Ep10 | The Corruption of COP

Carbon Bros

IPCC & COP

Petroganda

Climate Obstruction

At this point, everybody knows that it’s naive to think that fossil fuels won’t be around for decades to come. Even in the best-case scenario, it’s just too expensive and too politically fraught to move more quickly. Plus, we’ll still need oil and gas—and maybe even coal—to keep the lights on while countries around the world gradually decarbonize their economies. 

Well, not everybody agrees with the Very Serious People in Western boardrooms and capitals whose smug, self-interested takes set the parameters of what is and is not possible. More than a decade ago—when wind and solar power were far more expensive than they are today—the nation of Uruguay, long plagued by droughts and energy shortages, transitioned its entire economy such that some 

 now comes from renewable sources. And they did it in just two years. And they used the savings to slash the country’s poverty rate from 40 percent into the single digits.

Uruguay’s conventional-wisdom-busting transformation is one of nine inspiring case studies in the journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s 

Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe

 spoke with Hakimi Zapata about what lessons climate advocates and policymakers around the world can learn from Uruguay’s remarkable transition, why the left should not shy away from articulating the economic case for clean energy, and how many of the progressive policies profiled in the book seem to emerge from moments of crisis.

The conversation below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy.

Want to listen to the whole conversation? Check out this week’s podcast episode:

In a lot of ways, your family’s story embodies the American dream. Yet you write, “There are plenty of other countries that offer their citizens not just a better future, but a better present.”

I’m the daughter of undocumented immigrants. My mom’s from Mexico. My father’s from Iran. I grew up in a household where this idea of the “American dream” was talked about quite a lot. I often refer to my brothers and me as these little American dreams that my parents had. I was the first in my family to get a college degree, so in some ways, that American dream did come true.

But in other ways, it started to feel like that American dream that my parents had was actually more possible in [other] countries. A lot of that understanding came from a health incident with my mom. When I was in grad school, my mom, who hadn’t had access to healthcare, hadn’t had health insurance for many years, had undiagnosed, untreated diabetes that was diagnosed when she was being rushed to the emergency room, nearly in a diabetic coma, and had to have her right foot amputated.

At the time, I was flooded with this concern that, unfortunately, many of us have felt. How was she going to survive? What was her life going to be like moving forward? But at the same time, I had this added dread of, how were we going to afford the insulin she was going to need to stay alive? How were we going to afford all of the treatments she needed?

I knew, because I had lived in countries like the UK, that it didn’t have to be like this, that we could have universal health care, and that we’re one of very few wealthy countries in the world to not have a system like that.

Can you tell the story of Uruguay and their remarkable energy transition?

This book has what I would call “crib to crypt” policies: everything from universal health care to paid parental leave to universal pensions. But I couldn’t really conceive of a book that talked about progressive policies like paid parental leave that didn’t also talk about climate change or biodiversity loss. If there is no planet to have children on, what is the use of paid parental leave?

Uruguay was a fascinating example of how a lower-income country could do the unthinkable and actually green their grid in less than two years. And that story, like a lot of the stories in the book, starts with a crisis. Uruguay doesn’t have any naturally occurring fossil fuels—still hasn’t found any, despite searching for them. Because they have a publicly owned utility that’s been around since the early 1900s called UTE, the government was essentially in charge of keeping the lights on. It depended on hydroelectric dams for more than half of its electricity needs, and the rest came from imported fossil fuels, usually from neighboring Argentina and Brazil.

Whenever there were severe droughts—and they became more frequent and more severe over the years because of the climate crisis—they really struggled to keep the lights on. They had rolling blackouts and power cuts. It was incredibly disruptive to everyday life. I went to a textile factory where the owner told me, “Whenever there was a blackout, we would just have to stop working. There was nothing we could do.”

There was a real recognition in the early 2000s that this was a crisis that was affecting everyone and everything, and something had to be done to address it. In 2005 you have the first Frente Amplio left-wing coalition party winning an election. The Frente Amplio negotiates a cross-party agreement with all political parties in Uruguay: yes, continuing to look for fossil fuels, because they think this is important, but actually exploring renewable energy on a mass scale. This starts a record-breaking transition.

The public utility, UTE, was until then in charge of everything from generation to distribution to transmission of electricity. They opened up generation to private companies because they didn’t have the funds to do it all themselves. They put out calls for private companies to come and set up wind farms and solar farms and also biomass throughout the country.

It’s been so successful that you now have a country that runs almost entirely on renewable energy—something between 97 to 98 percent, [even as] energy consumption actually 

. Because the country went from being low-income to middle-income, people were doing things like buying air conditioning units for the first time and a lot of other [products] that increased the demand for electricity.

Despite this, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars every time they had a dry year or a drought lasted longer than they expected, they [are] saving those millions and also selling their excess green energy to Argentina and Brazil.

One of the patterns that seems to play out across the stories throughout this book [is that] things had to get really bad before these changes could build the coalition or the public support to move forward. I found it encouraging that so many of these good policies emerged from a moment of crisis.

That was one of the most hopeful things that came out of the book for me. I started to realize there was this pattern of dark periods yielding long lasting solutions.

The National Health Service, the first universal healthcare system in the world, came out of the literal ashes of World War II as Britain was trying to chart a different path forward after the devastation. You look at Uruguay—rolling blackouts, this inability to keep the lights on in the most literal sense—and that crisis leading to a consensus across the political spectrum that something quite different needed to be done. I looked at Portugal, dealing with a dual epidemic of overdose deaths and opioid use and rising HIV/AIDS rates, creating this consensus that something that hadn’t been tried before needed to be tried because whatever they were doing just wasn’t working.

I think about that a lot in the U.S. It’s not like all of our problems started with this second Trump administration or even the first. There have been a lot of people who have been suffering for a very long time under our current systems. I would argue that Trump is very much a symptom of this broad discontent that we’re seeing. A lot of people feel that they can’t survive in the country as it is.

Do you think Uruguay’s transition could have happened the way it did if they did have more of an entrenched fossil fuel industry?

I think it would have been a lot harder. You have the example of Argentina right next door, [which] has a lot of oil reserves and has not been as interested in a full green transition. That’s the case in a lot of countries. You’re right that it was sort of luck [that Uruguay did not have fossil fuels], but in many ways it had been a curse throughout the past century. Not having fossil fuels really held Uruguay back.

Something Ramón Méndez, a physicist who helped lead the transition from the department of energy within the Frente Amplio government, said to me is really important. We’re going to get to a point in which, he thinks, there are economies that have transitioned and there are economies that haven’t. Those that have not transitioned are going to suffer economic consequences. There was a 2022 Oxford University 

 that said the world could save $12 trillion by 2050 if we ditched fossil fuels. There are very clear financial incentives to transition to clean energy.

The other side of things is that we can’t afford not to. We’re facing an existential question here when it comes to the climate crisis. What kind of planet is going to be left in the coming years to fight over these profits for?

One of the things I thought was interesting about Uruguay’s [transition] was that climate change was not the focus of this effort. It was economic. On the left, we talk about climate in the way that you and I have been—for good reason, because it is an existential threat to all of humanity and the planet.

But in some ways we don’t want to make the economic argument because it feels like conceding the terms of the debate to a more neoliberal perspective. Can you talk about the way that this was framed to the people of Uruguay as an economic issue rather than a climate change issue?

I went through so many interviews with everyone from policymakers to electrical engineers to people running the wind farms to people on the streets. Very few times, if any, would they mention climate change unless I brought it up. It wasn’t the driving force behind this green energy transition, which feels counterintuitive to those of us on the left in the U.S., who see this primarily as a question of fighting this existential threat.

But Uruguay did something really fascinating. First of all, in a very real, material way, everyone could feel this crisis. Then it was framed as something that would bring a ton of investment into a relatively small, low-income country. [Uruguay’s] calls for renewable energy projects for wind and solar farms before 2008 essentially went unanswered. The main wind turbine manufacturers were too busy with larger economies to really care what Uruguay wanted to do.

The 2008 financial crisis created an opportunity for Uruguay. [Renewable projects in] a lot of larger, wealthier countries like Germany and Spain, and I’m sure in the U.S. as well, were put on hold because of this banking crisis. Those same manufacturers called the government: “Hey, do you still need these?” So it was this question of the financial conditions for something like this to happen.

Then there was the question of electricity prices, which are still relatively high for the region, despite the fact that there have been these massive savings by transitioning to renewable energy. The government made a decision that was very controversial, which was to take those savings and fund anti-poverty measures. In many ways, this really paid off because even though people weren’t necessarily feeling the economic benefits of a green transition in their electricity bills, they did feel it in a lot of other ways. Under Frente Amplio, from 2005 to 2019 poverty was reduced from 40 percent to under 9 percent. This wasn’t just clean energy, but being able to stabilize your energy supply had a huge impact on how the country was run.

I understand the reluctance on the left to talk about green policies as purely economic policies. And yet, if we do not make this argument and we cede that space, we are missing a huge opportunity to point out that people will benefit economically from a green transition.

A couple of the folks you interviewed described the energy transition as a tool for social justice [and] wealth redistribution. It reminded me of some of the foundational principles of the Green New Deal: This is not just a climate thing, not just an energy thing. This is reshaping society.

And it’s something that on the left we could talk a lot more about. Obviously, sacrifices are going to have to be made on some level for some of these policies to be implemented. But this is actually a place where we can highlight how much better lives are going to be, down to the air we’re going to breathe. Rather than having a fossil-fuel generator in your neighborhood, you’re going to have a solar farm, which doesn’t have that impact on air pollution and air quality, which has all of these knock-on effects in society. I don’t see the downside in talking about this.

One of the lessons that you outline at the end of the book is the importance of public ownership. In the context of the energy transition, there’s two different aspects to nationalization. There is, what do you do with these legacy industries—how do you get them to change if they will not do so willingly? And then, what do you replace them with?

I’m a big believer in public ownership. I have seen how it allows critical infrastructure to be built for everyone, and not just for those who can pay for it. Public ownership is the only way that we can ensure that that’s the case. I looked at universal public schools in Finland; universal healthcare in the UK; Uruguay’s grid, which is publicly owned; and a number of other places.

All of these stories highlight how important it is for these things to belong to us, for people to feel like they have ownership. The reality is that corporations, private companies, answer to their shareholders, if that. Whereas in a democracy—which we still live in—the government and these publicly owned utilities, for example, have to answer to citizens.

In Uruguay, what I found really interesting was [what] someone said to me: that energy distribution can be redistributive. It can be a matter of social justice. I don’t see how you would do that if you hand over everything to the private sector because they’re interested in profit. You had people like Ramón Méndez ensuring that all of the contracts that were set up with private wind farms and solar farms made it so that, as he describes it, electricity remained a de facto public good. Those private generators could only sell that electricity back to the public utility and use some of it themselves.

Gonzalo Casaravilla, who was the head of the public utility, told me that you—as a country, as a community—need to come together to decide what’s best for your local needs. He talked about how different that energy transition might have been if you had a bunch of multinational companies coming in and saying, “Well, we’ll profit more from putting a wind farm here.” [In Uruguay,] they were able to decide all of these things with the public interests at heart, rather than with profit.

Let’s talk about Costa Rica. The chapter about Costa Rica’s biodiversity law reminded me a lot of the U.S. policymaking process. Whereas Uruguay’s came out of a moment of crisis and was a radical transformation in just a couple of years, the way you described Costa Rica’s process was much more convoluted—much longer; more entrenched interests saying, “We like things the way they are”; prior supporters getting cold feet and changing their minds.

Many people within Costa Rica started to recognize this devastating crisis that was taking shape in the 1980s, 1990s, in which there was severe deforestation of their rainforest for things like banana plantations or other for-profit endeavors, often run by multinational or American-owned companies.

Costa Rica is this incredible place, one of the most biodiverse places on earth. Because it’s in Central America, it’s this corridor between different flora and fauna that come together. There was a sense that these natural resources were the riches that Costa Rica had. It wasn’t a wealthy country, but this was their wealth—the natural environment that they lived in—and it was being decimated right before their eyes.

The story goes back to the Rio Convention on Biodiversity [in 1992]. There is a biologist, an environmental lawyer, and a local policymaker that start to pay attention to what the CBD [

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Support our reporting,subscribe today!

S14, Ep10 | The Corruption of COP

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

Support our reporting,
subscribe today!