Photo: Military police line the perimeter of the Blue Zone at COP30 in Belém. Photo by Royce Kurmelovs.

The sun beat down on an unusually hot, humid morning in Belém, Brazil and thousands of delegates had arrived outside the Blue Zone at COP30 to be greeted by men armed with bows and arrows. They had set up an impromptu road block outside the pavilion where negotiations were taking place as part of the international climate change conference. As the crowd swelled—among them the CEO of Total, the only head of a fossil fuel company to attend this year’s negotiations in an official capacity, by invitation of the French government—the purpose of these men became clear. A group from the Munduruku, an Indigenous community protected by a ring of non-Indigenous supporters, whose land stretches across the Brazilian states of Pará and Mato Grosso, had blocked the official entrance to stage a protest. It sent a powerful message: lock us out, we lock you out.

The group’s demands were simple. An urgent meeting with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva and the revocation of a decree that would target rivers on their traditional territory for cargo shipping, a decision that would “open the gate” to more logging and mining activities on their land. In a statement released to coincide with the protest, the Munduruku Ipereg Ayu Movement said the decision threatened to end their way of life.


“There is no reduction in global warming without the presence of indigenous peoples,” it said.
The peaceful protest, endorsed by COP30 Executive Director Ana Ton as “legitimate”, was not the only one. After two consecutive COPs in authoritative countries with no tolerance for dissent, Brazil’s colorful democracy has brought activism back at this year’s climate summit. In the opening days of the conference, another Indigenous group broke through security at the front gate, some carrying banners that read “Our forests are not for sale”, a reference to carbon credit projects that Indigenous communities say commodify the forest. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people joined a colorful and vibrant protest march through Belém to demand “real solutions” to the existential threat posed by climate change.


Inside the Blue Zone, the dedicated area where negotiations are taking place, the atmosphere is officious. Throughout the week, the air conditioning system has struggled to beat back the heat radiating from tens of thousands of bodies packed into the exhibition hall, and an unusually hot and humid summer, even for the Amazon. In the mornings the Australian coffee queue duels with the Turkish tea line, a symbolic spectacle given their competition to host the next COP; in the evenings the Portuguese open 40 bottles of wine for the public to drink until they run out. A vast, temporary structure has been erected in the middle of Belém’s Parque da Cidade to house the delegates, negotiating teams and international media, supported by a massive logistical operation whose inner workings are kept largely out of view.

Ten years on, COP30 represents a stress-test of The Paris Agreement. Despite all the promises and pledges over the years, and the commitment at Dubai in COP28 to phase out oil, gas and coal “in line with the science”, oil and gas production have only increased since Paris, and emissions along with them. The world has breached the 1.5C target. Efforts to reduce emissions to date have prevented the worst case scenarios but under current trajectories, the world is still on track for 2.6C of warming. More has to be done—a reality that President Lula appeared to acknowledge in 

 when he said “COP30 must be the COP of truth”.

“It is time to take the scientific warnings seriously,” he said. “It is time to face reality and decide whether we will have the courage and determination necessary to change.”

As part of making this the “COP of truth,”  Lula’s government has backed a UN Global Initiative on Climate Information Integrity and in the first week of COP spearheaded a new Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate, which has been endorsed by ten countries so far: Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Uruguay. Nonetheless, the first week of the event was full of contradictions. COP30 was supposed to be an Indigenous COP, but the Indigenous pavilion is somewhere else. Despite this, the presence and visibility of Indigenous people at COP30 has been greater than ever before – but so too has been representation from the fossil fuel industry. A 

 found 1600 lobbyists had obtained access to COP30, amounting to one in 25 participants.

Belém was supposed to be a global meeting to discuss implementation. By the end of the first week, chatter among NGOs and diplomats, particularly those involved in pushing for a fossil fuel phaseout, expressed skepticism that any “roadmap” for dealing with climate change would include timelines, binding commitments and processes to determine these things. An attempt by Columbia to secure support for a recent 

International Court of Justice advisory opinion

 was scuttled when European countries and Australia balked. So far, “implementation” has largely meant discussions around technological fixes and carbon markets opposed to transitioning off of fossil fuels. Still, at a time when multilateralism is under attack, where the space for people of different cultures, nations and ideologies can meet to talk about problems is diminished, the throng of people from across the world in one place to talk about climate change resembles something hopeful. Multilateral diplomacy, however, is famously a place where hope goes to die.

If COP were a pointless exercise, it wouldn’t be targeted so heavily by the fossil fuel industry. To date, the process has been the primary vehicle through which governments have sought to address climate change in some form. Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed three decades ago, delegations have ostensibly meant to be meeting to work through the science, establish the economics and ultimately plan for the phaseout of oil, gas and coal, although explicitly talking about the phaseout of fossil fuels is a relatively new thing for COP. Even as Global South countries, particularly those in climate-exposed regions where shrinking glaciers, rising oceans and more frequent disasters have pushed for real, material action to end the production and consumption of fossil fuels – and COP watchers agree they’ve never seen so much discussion of fossil fuel phaseout at the climate summit – this language has made delegations from richer countries nervous.

Sometimes these objections are framed as tactical – language too strong or forceful would face obstruction from Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, whose delegations would object, saying they are being ambushed with new material. Saudi Arabia, however, has long provided a convenient villain for wealthier countries whose economies rely heavily on the production and export of fossil fuels. According to 

 by Oil Change International, just four countries—the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia – will be responsible for 70% of all new oil and gas expansion planned over the next decade. Those same countries have been responsible for the bulk of new production in the last decade as well, while Saudi’s production has declined in the same decade. U.S. President Donald Trump, whose campaign received 

 industry, may have pulled out of The Paris Agreement on his first day of his second term in office, but any embrace of language that explicitly outlines a fossil fuel phaseout would invariably create political problems at home.

An immediate logistical problem looms in the question of who will host the next COP. The two candidates, Turkey and Australia represent two fundamentally different propositions, but have remained deadlocked by the end of the first week. Australia was widely considered the favorite. A major fossil fuel producer, the country has taken significant steps toward transitioning its energy grid, with some jurisdictions running on 100% renewables for weeks at a time. The COP, which would be held in collaboration with the Pacific, would mark the first ever held in Oceania, and the first in the broader regions since the 2007 COP in Bali. To date, however, Turkey has engaged in an act of brinkmanship, refusing to negotiate or budge on the understanding that any failure to decide would force the conference to be held in Bonn, Germany, the home of the UNFCCC. Germany, however, has said 

, which would need to be organized in six months, but would do so reluctantly if forced. Should the situation fail to resolve, and the location default to Germany, it is possible COP31 would be significantly diminished – right at a moment when climate science says the world must go further, faster.

As we head into week two, the big debates for negotiators look to be shaping up around three key areas of implementation: finance—the age-old question of who will pay for the energy transition; logistics—how exactly a transition will work, via the Just Transition Mechanism (alternately referred to as the Belém Action Mechanism), backed by the G77 countries and China, which is taking a bolder position at this year’s COP than it has in years past; and technology—just how much the world will pin all of its hopes for reducing emissions on tech solutions versus reducing fossil fuel demand and production.  

Whatever fate world leaders choose here in Belém, its people have welcomed the world to their home, the gateway to the Amazon, and have taken their obligations as hosts seriously. They have tolerated the streets clogged with traffic and the lack of fluency in Portuguese with kindness and grace. This is their moment to show how they live and they are taking it, as they—and the rest of us—wait to learn whether world leaders will move to protect life on Earth or profits for industry.

COP30 So Far: Protestors, Polluters and Paying for Pollution

 [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

The Amazonian city of Belém is currently hosting negotiators from world governments, campaigners from global NGOs, journalists, protestors, and the world’s largest “sustainable business” trade show at COP30, the 30th annual convening of the signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), known as the Conference of the Parties (COP). Also present are lobbyists for major oil and gas companies like 

. Some world governments at the conference also represent oil and gas states like Norway, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Australia, Qatar and Canada. The world’s biggest oil and gas producer, the United States (U.S.), however, is absent. The Trump administration has instead sent a delegation comprising 80 government officials to 

 to get European governments to build more gas import infrastructure and import more American gas. Nearly half of Europe’s liquefied natural gas, or LNG, imports already come from the U.S.

COP30 marks ten years since the Paris Agreement was signed. And during these ten years, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Norway—all Global North countries that have bigger legal responsibilities to cut emissions than others under both the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement —have collectively increased their oil and gas production by 40% according to 

 from the nonprofit Oil Change International.

The report also notes that climate finance from the Global North since 2015 stands at about $280 billion while oil and gas companies fueling the climate crisis and headquartered in the Global North made five times as much in profits during the same time period.

The Brazilian presidency has called COP30 ‘implementation COP’, so climate finance is a big theme. One of the agenda item proposals for the conference was about Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement which states “Developed country Parties shall provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation in continuation of their existing obligations under the Convention.” But on opening day, the agenda was finalized and this item was not included. However, the presidency is currently holding consultations on it and it 

 of the G-77 and China group, which comprises around 134 developing countries and is basically the voice of the Global South at the UN.

The Oil Change International report also lays out some interesting comparisons between oil and gas producing countries. It shows that some West Asian countries have only marginally increased production levels or have decreased them, for example. Between 2015 and 2024, the UAE and Qatar increased production by 1% and Saudi Arabia decreased production by 7%. On the other hand, Australia increased production by 77%, the U.S. by 45%, Canada by 28% and Norway by 7%.

“It is particularly striking that many countries in the Global South, often criticized in the international media as ‘petrostates’, have either kept their production levels steady or even reduced them in recent years. They have done so while being far more dependent on oil and gas revenues and facing greater challenges in diversifying their economies than the largest Global North producers,” the report states.

At COPs, countries like the U.S., Norway, Canada and Australia—be it as part of blocs like the European Union and the Umbrella group or individually—have historically argued for high levels of ambition on mitigation action, in turn attracting criticisms of hypocrisy given that they rely heavily on oil and gas domestically. It remains to be seen what negotiation positions they will take this time around on mitigation considering the U.S. is entirely absent for the first time since the UNFCCC was signed in 1992 and many European countries are facing 

 to climate action. Net-zero policies are also 

What we know already is that Australia, Canada and Norway, alongside other rich countries like Japan and Switzerland are coordinating at COP30. They collectively opposed a call by the G77 for the creation of a Just Transition Mechanism, which would coordinate finance, technology and capacity-building activities needed to ensure an equitable energy transition away from fossil fuels, according to 

 have submitted the third round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) which are climate action plans under the Paris Agreement. Both outline seemingly ambitious emission cuts of about 70% from a given baseline year. However, neither NDC contains explicit mentions of reducing fossil fuel production. 

’s latest NDC also leaves out production cuts while promising to cut emissions by about half.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency released the 2025 edition of its flagship 

 today, projecting that oil and coal demand are on track to peak by 2030, and gas by 2035, driven by the exponential growth of renewable energy.

Running into COP30 with Oil and Gas

Bless you dear people for sticking with my very erratic newsletter-writing schedule. I swear to you that we will get this puppy back on a weekly track. In my defense, the small but mighty Drilled team has been working on a truly staggering number of projects at once and I've also been working on a book, and sometimes I have no steam left at the end of the week to put pen to paper. So here I am, after a long absence, with a lot to say. As is so often the case, while others have been saddened by what's happening in media lately, I have found myself positively enraged by it. I'm going to try to articulate why and maybe even formulate some ideas about what to do about it.

For a start, there's my usual gripe about people being unwilling to look at the historical roots of the current moment. Even the recent historical roots. How are so many people not seeing the role Big Tech has played in bringing the media in particular, and in a lot of ways the U.S. as a whole, to this moment in time? I'm making my way through 

 by Michelle Amazeen, the Boston University researcher whose research on advertorials we've highlighted before and she describes the media as providing the information citizens need for self-governance. A little dry maybe, but I think it's exactly right; this is the public service the media is supposed to provide.

So let's take a quick look at how Big Tech in particular has hijacked it: the tech industry loves to talk about the emergence of digital publishing as akin to the printing press in its democratizing power, but what it has actually created is a parallel alternate media ecosystem in which a small and powerful few control the information that billions of people rely upon for self-governance. That's happened in a variety of ways, from stealing its competitor's content and thus its ability to monetize it (see phase 2: AI, electric boogaloo) to creating a system that is solely focused on engagement and attention, forcing its competitor to follow suit, to effectively avoiding any of the responsibilities that come with publishing while also seizing all of the benefits.

This essay was sent out as part of Drilled’s weekly newsletter, along with our usual list of recommendations for things to read, watch and listen to on climate and democracy. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy having delivered to your inbox, 

The story of Bari Weiss's Substack (no I won't call it an outlet) "The Free Press" is a good illustration of the sort of fruit this new system has borne. Weiss was a contrarian opinion writer for The New York Times—not a reporter, never a reporter, though she loves to speak about herself as some sort of standard-bearer for journalism. She was hired along with climate denier Brett Stephens during one of the Times' many phases of believing the hype about itself being "too liberal" and hiring reactionary voices to counter that image. Weiss wasn't just tasked with writing controversial ragebait takes herself, but also with bringing in other voices who would do the same. After a few years, during which she made a wide range of schoolgirl errors (linking to hoax social media accounts, getting the facts wrong in myriad ways, what have you), Weiss was the one who brought in Tom Cotton's screed about how the military should be deployed to U.S. cities to shut down protests. Several of Weiss's colleagues felt it was an irresponsible editorial decision to run the piece; Weiss live-tweeted an editorial meeting about it, during which several of her colleagues claimed she was flat-out lying about the meeting, and then flounced out the door with a very public resignation letter. I've always assumed she quit before she was fired. Also, let's pause a minute here on the subject matter of that op-ed and how very real it's become, shall we? This is the Overton Window effect, baby! Throw out a radical idea, get a couple folks to normalize it, et voila you can shift public opinion in favor of something that would have been unthinkable. As we look around at the National Guard invading Chicago, Portland, and D.C., it's hard to see the Weiss-Cotton incident as just the harmless sharing of a variety of viewpoints. After leaving the NYT, Weiss started a Substack with her wife, tech reporter Nellie Bowles, who also left the Times. Once it got big enough to hire a couple of other writers and editors they called it "a media company" but it was never really more than a successful newsletter. I say that because it never moved beyond the sorts of hot takes that have made Substack millions, it remained around 90% opinion, though that didn't stop Weiss from proclaiming it a newsroom everywhere she went or people who don't know any better from repeating that lie. All of which would have been annoying but not particularly important had she not been tapped last month to lead CBS News, reporting not to any sort of editorial head but to the company's new owner, David Ellison the billionaire son of tech billionaire (and Trump funder) Larry Ellison. The Ellisons own Paramount now too, and are working on closing deals to acquire TikTok and Time/Warner, which would give them real information ecosystem dominance and the ability to control all sorts of narratives. It feels like the last domino to fall in tech's decades-long push to erase legacy media. It's important to understand 

 they've been so laser focused on that goal because it has to do with a lot more than money. Or at least than whatever profits these media ventures will earn them. It has a lot do with protecting their wealth generally, and the power that comes with it.

The story of how digital media ate traditional media's lunch is often told as one in which the better, smarter, faster tech simply won out and those newspaper idiots failed to figure out the business model of digital. Dummies! Are there dinosaurs in media? Absolutely. Did some of them make bad decisions as digital technologies became more prevalent? Sure. But what gets left out of this story is any intent from the tech companies. Do you really think they just 

kneecapped the fourth estate and gave themselves the power rich guys have been frothing at the mouth to attain since democracy first became a thing—the power to control public opinion? If so, then I'm afraid the dummy is you and I'm sorry you had to find out this way.

Erasing intent also erases accountability. Not just for the Bezoses and Musks of the world but also for those of us who work in media and still want it to do the job of giving people the information they 

Erasing accountability, in turn, erases political will. It creates a whole bunch of well-meaning folks who worry about things like whether or not regulating misinformation on social media is censorship and anti-free speech. One of the great successes of the tech industry over the past few decades has been its ability to convince large swathes of the public that their anti-regulatory desires, which are in fact the same as any other industry's, are actually your rights and freedoms. That they are not fighting to retain their own power and wealth, nay, but the very fabric of democracy itself. That if they are not allowed to reap all the benefits of publishers without accepting any of the responsibilities, then that means 

 are being stripped of your speech rights. (Yet another plug here for folks to read the book 

 which does a phenomenal job of eviscerating this myth.)

The biggest looming fight for those who care about anything from climate action to civil rights to democracy itself is not preserving the U.S. elections or securing the credibility of international climate negotiations, though yes of course those are important battles, it's protecting the rights of the two governments that have dared to take a first step towards regulating digital media—Brazil and the European Union—and batting back the idea that holding these companies to the exact same responsibilities as the companies they are trying to compete with (publishers) is somehow censorship.

And here we turn to the other thing pissing me off lately: the absolute cowardice of the media. To put a finer point on it: people who work in the media. How many times are you going to be shit on before you stand up, people?

Oooh easy to say from your privileged perch atop your own media empire, Westervelt! I need insurance! I need to pay rent! I get it, and I also feel compelled to push back on it a bit. I don't have insurance and I decided a long time ago that one way to protect myself against certain legal liabilities is to avoid having any assets at all. I also have several dependents. I'm the sole provider for a family of four, and my extended family often needs help of various kinds too. Let's just say the only thing my spouse or I will be inheriting is debt. I am also responsible for the livelihoods of several people, and I take that responsibility seriously (honestly more seriously than I take paying my own bills, has there ever been anything more stressful than being responsible for someone's rent?) I empathize with financial and professional anxiety and I've experienced it. And because I have experienced it and survived it, fear of it doesn't hold the same power over me that it once did. The same cannot be said of many people working in media, I fear. In fact I often have the same concern about folks working in media that I do of folks working in climate: not enough of 'em have ever had to make a dollar stretch and it makes them absolutely terrified of standing up to power. That is not the juice we need in this moment.

Too many people whose job is supposed to be speaking truth to power have bought into the fear that has been used to keep so many people docile throughout history, that they will be ruined and destitute and in perpetual servitude. To which I say: is that not where you are already if you're so afraid of writing or speaking the truth? Why do the job at all in that case?

I realize this might sound radical and even callous. So let me be clear: I am not advocating senseless risk-taking. I also 

 have privileges of various kinds, starting with the fact that I'm (mostly) white and educated and that continues to endear me to the capital class. I wouldn't say it's easy to get money, but I will say that I get invited into rooms where money sits and that is a huge opportunity. And I get that there are varying appetites for risk; I've never been particularly averse to it and so I probably wound up in the right job. But I do want to encourage my fellow journalists to reach deep and sack up and decide who you want to be in this moment, Ida Tarbell and Ida B. Wells sticking it to the man? Or Adolph Ochs, the guy who pushed the myth of objectivity and linked it to status to save the struggling New York Times back in the Progressive era?

Which brings me to the third and final target of my ire: the public. Everyone. Kidding! But also not. Because for reporters to feel empowered to do their job for society, we really need society to value that job; and to do that, people need to understand what it is that journalists do for society, when they're doing the job right.

I have ranted about this before (see below), but I talk to far too many (educated! politically engaged!) people who tell me their top source of news is an influencer. And look, I don't have a problem with the existence of "newsfluencers"--if they are better at getting people to engage with the news, then great. What I 

have a problem with is that people don't seem to get that those folks can't exist without real reporters doing the actual work of information gathering and analysis.

Like every other reporter I know, I can point to numerous occasions where an aspiring (and sometimes even successful) influencer has lifted my work, repackaged it and put it out as their own. In the very best case, they might cite the outlet the story came from. But what tends to happen in this scenario is that various members of the public will say some version of "that influencer is so much better than the 'mainstream' media," and increasingly opt to give their time, money and attention to the influencer. Nine times out of ten the information that person is sharing is not from a "legacy" outlet but from an independent one like ours, OR it's coming from one of the reporters at a legacy outlet that's still doing a really good job. In either case, like the tech bros before them, the influencers are lifting the benefits of the content without any of the responsibilities. They do not take on the legal, financial, or physical security risks required to get and share that information, they do not invest the months of reporting time or work with a fact-checker to make sure it's all accurate, nor do they have the years of experience on the beat to be able to connect the dots for people. And when they cut journalists out of the equation, it's not just for that moment in time--they're contributing to cutting those jobs forever.

The answer to this probably lies in the form of more and better collaboration between the two, but it's hard for that to happen absent any acknowledgement of the value of the work that journalists are doing. So instead what's happening is that we're seeing more and more journalists laid off, while more and more newsfluencers grow their platforms, and what will happen when they no longer have reporters to pilfer stories from? Maybe they'll do their own research and reporting, sure. But will it be with the same lens--getting the public the information it needs for self governance? Being extra careful to check facts before putting them out? Seems unlikely. Or maybe they'll pull from an increasingly less credible mix of whatever sources remain in media. Both seem bad!

I get that people are mad at "the media," but it would be great if folks could loudly and publicly support the folks who 

 taking on the risks of speaking truth to power. It might be just the push some folks need to choose bravery. 

Make Media Brave Again

Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy

An attempt by climate denial, anti-renewables and conservative campaign groups to pressure an Australian senate inquiry investigating astroturfing and climate misinformation may have backfired by inadvertently disclosing more information about these groups and how they operate than intended, the committee chair says.

 to investigate bad faith lobbying that relied on tactics such as astroturfing and the spread of misinformation and disinformation to disrupt efforts to end climate pollution in Australia. To date the inquiry has received over 200 submissions with its first public hearings held in late September.

Committee chair Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, a Greens Senator from Tasmania, said the process has already been targeted by the same kind of campaigns it is seeking to investigate, after Advance, a pressure group closely associated with conservative politics, sought to spam the email accounts of senators serving on the committee. Whish-Wilson said he personally received more than 5000 emails in the space of a weekend and is aware several groups had encouraged their members either to write committee members or make submissions to the process. “I honestly thought the volume of submissions would be a lot higher in terms of numbers,” Whish-Wilson said. “One of the biggest surprises of the inquiry so far is the amount of information we’ve been able to glean from the submissions. I don’t think the pressure campaign has rattled anyone at all. In fact I think it’s provided a fascinating insight in how organizations are using AI to generate submissions and write emails that appear distinct, and public relations firms to coordinate these campaigns.”

The inquiry has only just begun public hearings and has so far published 227 submissions on its website. Drilled – which contributed a submission to the inquiry – sought to analyze this material and found at least 96 submissions, more than 40 percent of submissions, were authored by organizations or people promoting climate denial in some form. A third of submissions were associated with figures promoting “hard climate denial”; the other two thirds – 64 submissions – were considered to display some form of “soft climate denial”. This describes situations where the author does not explicitly challenge climate science or deny  human activity was responsible for causing it, but instead attacks efforts to address the problem. Soft climate denial was differentiated from hard climate denial by intent. Whatever the motivations—some may be motivated by genuinely felt concerns about development issues—or ignorance, the result is a de facto defense of the continued production and consumption of oil, gas and coal. An additional two submissions were considered soft climate denial in the Australian context based on their overall message and conclusions even though they appeared to accept, or were ambiguous about, the author’s views on the science of climate change. Those submissions that were wholly irrelevant or unrelated to the overall inquiry, such as those promoting fusion power, were not counted in this group.

Where it was possible to associate a submission or author with a geographic location, at least a third of those engaging in soft-denial could be linked to specific anti-renewables campaigns in Queensland and New South Wales, or allied groups in other parts of the country who appeared to have made contributions in solidarity. These included group submissions on behalf of specific campaigns, and submissions from both the leadership of these groups and members. The combined effect of many of these contributions was an attempt to use the inquiry process to prosecute renewables projects and their developers for alleged misinformation, dishonesty or corruption.

Many submissions in this group were single-page documents that were often incoherent, expressed general anti-government sentiment, attacked the focus of the inquiry, or attempted to prosecute specific renewable energy projects targeted by past campaigns. The two most frequently cited campaigns were those undertaken against a proposed offshore wind project in the Illawarra, New South Wales, and the Chalumbin wind farm project near Ravenshoe, Far North Queensland.

Brown University Professor J. Timmons Roberts, speaking to the committee by video link in late September, described how his team’s research had shown many anti-renewables groups start out organically with genuine concerns but are later co-opted by other organizations or individuals with specific agendas.

“A lot of these concerns are genuinely felt,” Roberts said. “People do care about their places and are willing to fight for them, and I respect that very much.”

“When those fears are whipped up by external interests that have a self-interest which is based on their commercial attempts to do whatever it is, there are other outside interests that want to manipulate these communities, and I think that's deeply problematic.”

This was reflected in some submissions where authors described how they had previously volunteered with small, regional community groups in a volunteer capacity, before they eventually became drawn into larger anti-renewables campaigns. Though far fewer, the inquiry also received submissions from individuals, often anonymous, who said they were residents of these regions and supported renewable energy projects. These submissions expressed frustration at what they believed was widespread misinformation in their communities, and in some cases described examples of harassment, bullying and intimidation. There was also some nuance between anti-renewable submissions. Some contributors, for instance, urged the committee to distinguish criticism of individual energy projects, their developers and broader ecological concerns, from flat anti-renewables sentiment and climate denial. In this instance, Drilled counted apparent “

” submissions as soft climate denial as many still repeated falsehoods about renewable energy, climate change or the broader energy transition, and ultimately had the effect of preserving the dominance of oil, gas and coal by undermining technologies needed to phase them out.

These were accompanied by more sophisticated attempts to flip the script. In a manner reminiscent of DARVO attacks—an acronym for “

Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender

”—some submissions sought to use the inquiry’s terms of reference to indict groups campaigning for action to address climate change and accuse them of being the true astroturfed organisations. One submission from the National Rational Energy Network, an anti-renewables group led by ex-Queensland police officer Katy McCallum, once 

as “one of the loudest campaigners against Australia’s energy rollout”, involved a 12-page analysis of climate group Farmers For Climate Action. In her submission, McCallum sought to attack the group’s legitimacy as a representative voice for regional people. At the end, McCallum cited both Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg and John Stuart Mill’s 1859 treatise 

as authorities. A long-time McCallum ally, Jim Willmott from Property Rights Australia, also contributed a submission to the inquiry. Another submission by prominent anti-renewables group, Rainforest Reserves Australia was revealed in 

 to have been written using AI. The group’s submission referred to a nonexistent windfarm and cites scientific articles that don’t exist.

Submissions from more traditional climate deniers offered a who’s who of a previous generation. Historically, public discussions of climate change in Australia have been dominated by networks of typically older men, usually retired professionals or executives, who are well-connected among sections of the media, politics and the corporate world. The 30 submissions Drilled counted as promoting hard climate denial functioned as a self-reported list of who was still operating. Among the prominent figures to contribute was geologist Ian Plimer, perhaps Australia’s most internationally recognizable climate sceptic. Plimer started out as a newspaper columnist who, infamously, sold his house to 

finance a doomed lawsuit against creationists in the 90s

 before later turning to climate denial in the following decades. A reporter with 

 who once challenged Plimer on his ideas during an interview later described him as “

one of the most difficult and evasive interviewees I have ever spoken to

”. A biographical note attached to Plimer’s submission disclosed that he is currently “a director of various unlisted private Hancock Prospecting iron, energy, research and copper exploration companies.” Hancock Prospecting’s executive chair is Australia’s richest woman, iron ore billionaire Gina Rinehart. Alan Moran, another prominent figure and former employee of Australian think tank the Institute of Public Affairs who has campaigned heavily against any embrace of renewable energy, provided a submission through his organization, Australian Environment Foundation. At least three other submissions directly referred to Moran’s work or were made by people associated with his organization.

Another notable entry was offered by far right One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts who has been compulsively drawn to every significant public forum organized by the Australian government on the subject of climate change. Roberts, a former coal mine manager, infamously encountered the science of climate change while on a holiday with his wife to the Whitsundays where he watched Al Gore’s 

 Roberts was so confronted by the documentary’s message, he responded by attempting to disprove it frame by frame. The culmination of this process was a 300,000 word, 135-page treatise titled 

published in 2013, that even conservative commentator and climate-sceptic Andrew Bolt described as “

”. To support his thesis that climate change was an “antihuman” hoax to bring about a socialist New World Order aided by bankers and politicians, Roberts cited 

and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories at points. In 2016 he was elected to the federal senate to represent Queensland with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and has been a vocal opponent to any effort to address climate change.

Roberts’ submission was not the only contribution from an explicitly political figure. Unusually, Scott McCamish, an electorate officer for Victorian Senator Ralph Babet, a representative from the right-wing United Australia Party, contributed a six-page submission denying the science of climate change. Ordinarily, political staffers seek to avoid the limelight as they are not democratically elected, and their public activities may interfere with the work of their employer.

The average length of a submission to the inquiry was ten pages, but this was skewed by a number of notable outliers. Conservative pressure group Advance contributed the longest submission at 80 pages, with anti-wind campaign group, Rainforest Reserves Australia contributing a 78-page document and Senator Roberts offering a clipped 71-page thesis. Both Advance and Rainforest Reserves Australia expressed outrage and concern that they were being unfairly labelled astroturf groups under the inquiry’s Terms of Reference. Advance’s submission included a forward by executive director Matthew Sheahan, a figure described by 

a less-charismatic Australian answer to US right-wing strategist and media personality Steve Bannon

. The core part of the document offered a brief response to the terms of reference that criticized the inquiry as a “politically motivated attack on ordinary Australians”, with the rest made up of three attachments that ran to 62 pages, mostly composed of newspaper clippings.

As a point of contrast, a separate submission from the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society analyzed the political ad spend of Advance with social media company Meta. It found the group had placed 4,443 ads on Meta platforms with a budget between $1m and $1.6m, generating approximately 193m impressions. This level of activity, the submission found, placed Advance in the same league as both dominant political parties in Australia, without the same scrutiny. Its messaging relied on culture war talking points to promote opposition to policies designed to transition the economy and amplify “climate contrarian arguments”.

“By combining high-volume culture-war advertising with persistent anti-renewable and anti-climate organic messaging, Advance is attempting to influence the wider public sphere in ways that rival party campaigns while evading the same levels of scrutiny and accountability,” it said.

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S14, Ep10 | The Corruption of COP

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

COP30 So Far: Protestors, Polluters and Paying for Pollution

Running into COP30 with Oil and Gas

Make Media Brave Again

In Attempt to Spam Climate Information Integrity Investigation, Australia’s Climate Skeptics Score an Own Goal

The Crown Prince, The Climate, and Us

Carbon Bros

IPCC & COP

Petroganda

Climate Obstruction

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!