Time to 1.5 | 11 | Inside the Anthill

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

there. I came to this conference to watch and listen and document, but they were here to act, to do exactly what Timmermans said, preserve a livable future on this planet. How did it feel to be here with that enormous weight on your shoulders to know that people all over the world are pinning their hopes for a pathway out of the climate crisis on you. Welcome to Threshold. I'm Amy Martin, and it's time to return to where we started this season, the United Nations climate

talks. The UN climate talks are a lot of different things. They're confusing, they're bureaucratic, they're inspiring and boring and infuriating and exhilarating. They're also the only thing we've got. Currently, this is the only existing structure for dealing with climate change at a scale that matches the problem. That is to say, globally. There are two primary reasons why we need an international system for dealing with climate change. One is physical, the other political.

The physics side is actually the easiest to understand. The atmosphere doesn't adhere to national borders. It's like a well we're all drinking from and when carbon emissions get dumped into that well, they impact everyone, no matter where they were released. So that's one problem the UN climate talks are trying to solve, getting everyone to agree to stop polluting the well. But the tricky thing is, dumping carbon

into the atmosphere makes countries rich. So although it's in everyone's collective interest to keep that atmospheric well water clean, individually, there's a strong incentive to keep emitting and this is where the politics of the UN climate talks come into play. There's only a certain amount of carbon that we can burn before sending the climate into a catastrophic hothouse state, and some countries have used up a lot more of that carbon budget than others.

Countries like the United States and much of Europe that started emitting early and built big, strong economies as a result. At the other extreme, are countries that are very small, very poor, or both, that have added almost nothing to the problem. And then there's a shifting pool of emerging economies, countries like China and India that have recently joined the carbon burning party and aren't eager to leave it. So how do we manage

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

new post-climate crisis era. And if these talks fail, well, we simply cannot allow them to fail.

long tented walkway leading into the main conference area. We can't see out. It's a tunnel of white canvas above us, and on both sides, it feels kind of like an umbilical cord between the outside world and the highly protected pop-up city of the conference.

It's like being in a giant mall, sort of, or like an airport terminal?

voices, wearing serious expressions. Then I come upon the huge plenary halls where all the highest profile speeches get made, and radiating out from there is a big collection of meeting rooms where a lot of the actual work of the conference

gets done. Reporters are allowed into many parts of the conference, but sometimes all of the sudden we weren't, especially during the first few days, the World Leaders Summit, when more than 120 heads of state are on site, getting shepherded through the space, surrounded by a phalanx of security and support staff. I've been pushed aside by entourages numerous times. Just big groups of people will suddenly start pushing through.

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

Dr. Saleemul Huq: Well, I think the main message for today is that there's going to be a whole bunch of heads of government, including the US president here. They'll make speeches, they'll have a photograph with Boris Johnson, and they'll fly away. Much of the global media will fly away with them and think that it's over. It isn't, it's just starting. It's going to start day after tomorrow, when they've gone and it's going to last for two weeks.

This is Dr. Saleemul Huq. You might remember him from our first episode this season. He's the director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University Bangladesh. I interviewed Salim remotely before the conference, and he'd agreed to let me follow his journey here at COP26. Dr. Saleemul Huq: Journalists and their audiences need to be educated on the complicated stuff that climate change is.

I agree with Saleem, that's why we're here. Despite the incredibly high stakes of the UN climate conferences, I think most people have only a very vague understanding of how they work. I know I did. So let's start with a quick rundown of the origin story of these talks. In the late 1980s, as the world started waking up to the climate crisis, it became clear that there were no existing institutions or processes for dealing with this global problem. So people decided to

try to make those institutions. In 1992, at a major gathering in Brazil called the Earth Summit, more than 150 countries signed something called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNF triple C. You can think of it like a special wing of the United Nations devoted to working on

climate. Almost every country in the world is part of the UNFCCC now, as well as some non country organizations like the European Union, when countries agree to join this effort, they become "parties to the convention," and then they start coming to these annual gatherings we call "COPS." That stands for Conference of the Parties. The overall goal of each cop is to make progress on climate, to get all countries moving in the same direction toward a decarbonized world in an equitable way based

on the best scientific information available. But of course, every country has a different level of commitment to that progress and its own idea of what progress looks like and how we should get there. So they negotiate, and then they formalize the results of those negotiations in the documents that come out of these conferences, the Kyoto Protocol, the Bali Action Plan, the Cancun Agreements. The first COP was held in Germany in 1995 and 26 years later, here we are in

Glasgow at COP26. Saleem has been to every one of those COPS, including the watershed Paris conference in 2015 when the world finally coalesced around a goal: holding the global temperature rise to well below two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, aiming for no more than 1.5. Dr. Saleemul Huq: They rose to the occasion, and we have the

Paris Agreement. It's about implementing that now. Glasgow is not a new agreement, it's about implementing what we agreed six years ago, and we're not on track to do that. Dr. Saleemul Huq: Well, the best possible outcome has The Paris Agreement identified a goal and created a framework for achieving it based on something called "nationally traditionally always been an incremental progress, and we

determined contributions," or NDCs. This is a system in which countries make their own individual plans for reducing emissions and report on their progress at regular intervals. But heading into Glasgow, the NDCs were falling frighteningly short. The plans that countries had submitted, taken together, were projected to lead to 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming,

almost twice the 1.5 goal. This would be utterly devastating for the whole world, and especially for island nations and countries with a lot of people living in areas prone to heat waves, drought, and coastal flooding. Bangladesh, where Saleem lives, is one of those countries, so he was not feeling especially cheery at the start of the conference, I asked him what he thought the best possible outcome here could be.

have taken pride in having made some progress. But unfortunately, you know, this is not something that we compare ourselves with where we were last year and we did a little bit more this year. We have to compare ourselves with the climate. The climate has a say, and the climate is telling us we're not doing enough. This, of course, is not just Saleem's opinion. It's a widely understood fact. Here's UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.

renewable energy economy as quickly as possible. And yet, carbon emissions keep going up, and so do temperatures.

cooling, stabilizing ice around our poles shatter and melt. And it means heartbreaking stories of more and more people killed in dramatic weather related disasters and slower moving, but no less deadly disruptions to our ability to provide for our own basic needs, for food, water and shelter. Antonio Guterres is right. We are digging the grave of human society, and almost every one of the 40,000 people here at this conference

understands that. So what is taking so long after more than a quarter-century of these meetings, why haven't we stopped that atmospheric CO2 number from going up? What is the disconnect between the science and speeches and slogans and substantive climate action? We'll have more after this short break. Hey everybody, this is Erika Janik, Threshold's Managing

Editor. Did you know that we have a Threshold newsletter? Our newsletter is a great way to stay connected to Threshold between seasons, find out what we're thinking about and what we're reading, listening to and watching. So subscribe to the Threshold newsletter today using the link in the show notes or on our website, thresholdpodcast.org.

microphones and cameras, and third is everybody else. The UN calls them observers, but if you get access to the Blue Zone as an observer, it doesn't mean you're one thing or part of one kind of organization. Lots of people get in by affiliating with an NGO or international organization. One of those people was Paul Wilson, a Klamath tribal member from Oregon who traveled here with a group called Rios to Rivers.

literally observe, watch as the inner workings of COP unfold. I wanted to spend time with one group of observers to see how the conference works from their perspective. So early on in my time at COP, I wound my way through the labyrinth of country offices, through a heavy metal door and into a cramped, thin walled office where climate activists in their teens through early 30s were filling every available space of the room.

They're members of a group called YOUNGO, which is dedicated specifically to making sure young people get a voice in the climate negotiations. They have more than 10,000 members all over the world. When I first met up with them, they were wrapping up a meeting where they were coordinating the day's activities. Young people have been some of the smartest, loudest, and most passionate voices on climate in recent years. Most often this is trying to make change from outside

through protest and activism. Like at COP, this catchphrase from Greta Thunberg caught hold all over the city. But in the depths of the conference, these young folks were learning how to blah. There were people like Marie-Claire Graf, a fast-talking, strategy-minded Swiss woman who'd been working with YOUNGO for years, and brought prodigious amounts of Swiss chocolate to share with the group.

Marie-Claire Graf: When you start to understand what's going on, and if you actually can make sense of what is going on, and you have the different options at the table, and you can figure out yourself, okay, why do certain countries do this? It it's getting super interesting, and I think it's like in a very exciting thriller movie or something like this. And Heeta Lakhani, who got passionate about environmental issues after seeing trees taken down to make

way for a bigger highway back in her hometown in India. She said this conference is a world of its own, but there's something about it that grabbed her.

things UNFCCC. The vast majority of observers hustling through the halls are actually broken into nine of these different constituencies, each representing the main stakeholder groups of the conference. Along with YOUNGO, there's BINGO- for business groups, not the game. TUNGO for trade unions, not the thing in your mouth. And RINGO, which makes me think of the drummer in The Beatles, but is actually a bunch of research groups. So for YOUNGO, getting recognized as a

UN constituency was a big deal. It means the UN considers young people as a group that has one of the most important perspectives on climate change. If you're just one group advocating for a specific cause, it's easy for your voice to get lost in the swarm of activity in COP. But YOUNGO, with hundreds of members at the conference, can operate like a delegation of their own. They can strategize and coordinate, make sure

members are getting into the right negotiations. They can split up to make sure their presence is known just about everywhere. The group is pushing for specific agenda items under discussion at COP, things like climate financing that's fair to developing and vulnerable countries, a transition to clean and renewable energy focused on justice that doesn't leave

behind the most vulnerable. They participated in panels, watched negotiations and helped spread the word about the group's Global Youth statement, a 70 plus page document outlining their policy demands. The statement called for prioritizing justice and inclusion of all kinds, and perhaps unsurprisingly, focused especially on getting more young people involved. But at the same time that they're pushing for change in the actual climate talks, they're also teaching the

next generation of climate leaders and activists. This is even in their mission, and part of that training means learning the language of the conference, and that takes a while. Heeta Lakhani has been learning the process over several years. Her first time here was COP22 and she said, even after she'd gotten a master's in environmental studies-

of the YOUNGO family. And then the biggest motivation for me to keep coming back was, you know, if this was so new to me, despite having the privilege to be here so many times, and still, you know, having so many gaps in knowledge, so many gaps in understanding, I wanted to take this back home.

also been to several COPs. She's actually served as negotiator for Switzerland while she's focused on the intricacies of the negotiations at the conference. She says she also leads climate strikes back home. Marie-Claire Graf: I think it's good to kind of know both ways, and you can also play them like nicely, strategically. I think it's good to know how systems work to be able to either change

them or to come up with something better. Because if you don't understand the system, you can just generally blame it, but it's hard to come up with a better solution, if you don't know one, then very often, actually, the suggested solutions are exactly what is already there. As I spent time with YOUNGO, what really interested me about this group was what the organization suggests about the future of COP. The climate crisis is a long term problem.

Even if we stopped all emissions today, we'd be dealing with the effects of the damage that's already been done for decades, if not centuries. So just like we need to build new renewable energy infrastructure, we need to invest in our human infrastructure too. We need people with all kinds of skills, disaster managers, green builders and heat pump

installers and climate negotiators. In the context of COP, that means people who understand the ins and outs of creating and implementing complex international agreements that help keep the hundreds of countries in COP moving the same direction. This is part of what YOUNGO was doing. It's a training ground. Chandelle O'Neil: I didn't really have many expectations.

It's my first time getting to COP. This is my first time in like a UNFCCC space, like my first time trying to be a diplomat, basically. Chandelle O'Neill is a sustainable energy specialist and human rights advocate from Trinidad and Tobago. Chandelle O'Neil: It all comes together. It's all part of it. Social justice, crime, justice, inclusion, everything. It all comes together. For Chandelle and a lot of YOUNGO members, this

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

Chandelle O'Neil: It's just we have to work within the system that was given to us. It might not be the best, it might not be the most inclusive, but part of it is us coming into space and trying to transform the system, because the system wasn't designed for us, it wasn't made for us. So we're trying to build something better together.

Chandelle is part of this training ground, and the training ground is partly about bringing in people with all kinds of backgrounds from all parts of the world, both the global north and the global south. There's a sentiment out there that COP is just like Greta Thunberg said, all blah blah blah. That nothing really happens here. That these last 25 plus years have just been politicians going through the

motions over and over again. And I get that. It's something that I felt too going into the conference, and a degree of that feeling still hasn't left me months later. But I think that feeling of hopelessness might depend on how you frame what happens at COP and where change comes from. Is the conference a silo? Is it this kind of impenetrable fortress that generates our climate goals and action, or do parts of what happened here reflect other conversations that are happening

outside its walls entirely? If it's just a former the silo thing, I think we're pretty screwed, but I do see ways in which the conference has become more reflective of society overall, and YOUNGO was part of that, they gained a seat at the table about a decade ago. That ingrained in COP the importance

of the youth voice on climate change. Other groups, including the Indigenous Peoples Organizations, the constituency for indigenous groups all over the world, have also gained recognition, and I saw actions, events, panels and talks at COP26 focusing on other voices that have been left out, including perspectives from the global south, and an emphasis on

women and gender issues. I certainly still have questions, and I'm not saying these efforts are perfect, but compared to the technical, narrowly science oriented climate conferences of two decades ago, this is a radical shift. One morning, I saw evidence of that change unfold. I was bleary-eyed, looking around for YOUNGO members, and then I saw Heeta and Marie-Claire. I was coming to find you.

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

with each other, to forge a new future for the entire planet. So this change I'm seeing in real time here is something. But is it enough? Are these things happening at the pace and scale we need? Can this result in the actual policies we need to reduce emissions and change the trajectory we're on, and what are all these YOUNGO members getting trained to do exactly? How do you build a global climate agreement. Amy tries to figure that out after the break.

Agreement. Paris laid out the path, Glasgow is about walking it, and that involves a bunch of really dry, technical, but super important things like clarifying how the system for international carbon credits works, and making the process for reporting emissions reductions those nationally determined

contributions more transparent and uniform. And there's also old business to tend to here, way back at the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the world's wealthiest countries pledged to pay $100 billion per year to poorer nations to be

used for climate mitigation and adaptation projects. This was a recognition that about 10% of countries had generated 80% of carbon emissions, and that less developed countries deserve support as they try to deal with a problem they had a very small role in creating, but the wealthy countries have never made good on the 100 billion pledge. They keep coming up billions of dollars short, and that has led to a lot of mistrust in the climate negotiations. Here's Saleem again.

Dr. Saleemul Huq: This is a convention to tackle pollution, pollution by emissions of greenhouse gasses which come from burning fossil fuel and have a very long history. So it's a polluter pay principle here, not charity, not rich countries, helping poor countries. It's polluters paying the victims of their pollution. That's what we're demanding here. That's what the money is for. That's what they promise to give, and they're refusing to give. So there's a bunch of thorny stuff that needs to

get hashed out at this COP. Paris agreement implementation, climate finance and, of course, mitigation, lowering emissions, decarbonizing economies, with the goal of limiting heating to no more than 1.5 degrees over pre industrial levels. And all of it needs to happen at once.

research before we went. I interviewed multiple insiders, read countless news stories, watched footage from previous conferences, and studied academic articles which described and analyzed the process. So I thought I was pretty well prepared to hit the ground running, but I wasn't prepared for this. Informal consultation on guidance to the GCF in parentheses- COP8c, CMA8b and g,e,f, COP8d, CMA8c.

I'm standing in front of a big blue screen listing all of the meetings happening that day, including time and location. Screens like this were scattered all throughout the conference area, ostensibly to help keep everyone informed. But when you actually stop to read the text scrolling by, this is what you found. Contact group on CMP7a report of the AFB. Contact group on CMA8d, matters related to the AF. Joint COP/CMA, informal consultations. I mean, give me a break.

I had come here to watch the world worked together to build a climate agreement, to try to solve climate change. But where was that happening exactly? I needed help, and I found it in Dr. Adelle Thomas. How many COPs have you been to now? Dr. Adelle Thomas: This is my fourth one. So not that many, but still not a newbie. My first one was Paris, oh yeah, and I was completely lost then. Adelle is a Senior Fellow at the Climate Change

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

Like Saleem, Adelle was in our first episode this season, and she'd also agreed to let me look over her shoulder here, as an advisor to the negotiations for the small island developing states or SIDS. But before we can talk about the details of what she hopes could be achieved at this conference, I need to ask some much more basic questions. How does this work? Because, I mean, it's not just a conference where we're supposed to come together and exchange ideas.

We're supposed to actually like accomplish something. And practical, and is that primarily happening in the negotiations? Dr. Adelle Thomas: It's happening outside of the negotiations. I'd spoken with Adelle a few times on Zoom leading up to the conference, and I learned that she has this great half smile that she gives when I ask her a question that has a big, complicated answer that's going to take a lot of explanation. It's a smile that says, Do you really want to know

that's the smile she's giving me right now. And I do. Dr. Adelle Thomas: In the negotiation room, there is agreement on something that's been agreed already. They're just announcing it in there. So that's happened already in bilaterals or the informal, informals, as we call them. Informal informals? Dr. Adelle Thomas: Yeah, it's insane.

extremely bureaucratic. For example, here's item number 15, second review of the adequacy of Article four, paragraph two, A through B of the convention. The approved agenda for COP26 is two pages long with 19 line items, and Adele says it's pretty much impossible to track them all.

Dr. Adelle Thomas: There's lots going on, which is why the negotiation times, I think, are from 10am until 7pm and then outside of those meetings, are the other meetings that I talked Adelle says the best thing to do is to find one or about. two agenda items to follow. Her primary focus is item number seven, which reads "Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts." For our purposes, you can ignore everything but three key words

becomes permanently uninhabitable. We're going to be talking more about loss and damage in our next episode, but as we try to just learn the mechanics here, the key thing to know is that small island developing states and many other countries want the rich countries to recognize loss and damage and pay for it, and the rich countries mostly don't want to. Dr. Adelle Thomas: So for loss and damage, which is what I'm following, we have three official negotiating sessions.

We had one on Monday, we had one yesterday, and we have one on Thursday, and we have to come to some type of agreement by Friday. So those three meetings are the official informal meetings, but most of the negotiation takes place outside of that.

the same time, and they're often interrelated. I asked Adelle how the different negotiators from a particular country or group of countries keep each other up to date on their progress. Do they just rush in with like, I came from an informal informal with breaking news or what? Dr. Adelle Thomas: So there's a lot of coordination that needs

to go on between the different agenda items. So for instance, what we're looking at in loss and damage is affected by what's going on in finance, and both of those are happening at the same time, and so you have to have communication between your negotiators to make sure that you're staying on the same page. There's a lot of WhatsApp, which has been a savior, but, so you point to some of the challenges. So for small delegations, it's hard to be caught up on everything that's happening

everywhere. Whereas people countries with big delegations, you know, they have tons of people, and they can have people even specifically dedicated to making sure that there's communication and seeing how the different pieces fit together. So if you're from a smaller country, maybe you have what like three to five people? So and like, they might all be in actual negotiations, and then there's nobody out working the side channels or the back doors as much.

Dr. Adelle Thomas: Correct. Or there may be following different things and not being able to put the pieces together in real time. And, you know, like having to at the end of the day we reassess, which may be too late. Just to give you a range of the delegation sizes, Brazil had the largest group at this COP with 479 delegates. The United States had 165, South Sudan had 34, and the Bahamas

had 14. To amplify their voices and boost their chances of having some influence at the COP talks, a lot of the smaller or less wealthy countries have formed blocks that negotiate together. There's the alliance of small island developing states or AOSIS. There's the LDC group, the 46 nations defined by the UN as least developed countries. But the rich and powerful nations have formed blocks too. The United States, Canada, Japan and some other big emitters are part of something

called the Umbrella Group. And Brazil, South Africa, China and India have banded together as the Basic Group. So there are elements of the process here that are reminiscent of what happens in congresses and parliaments all over the world. People form coalitions and map out strategies for trying to advance their agendas. And at the center of it all is a piece of paper, or many pieces of paper, really, this document

that we call a climate agreement. All throughout the conference, draft text is getting passed around behind the scenes as the various coalitions try to unify their messages. Every single word of this text ultimately gets scrutinized and haggled over. It's a little bit like how legislation gets written in a democracy. But in this case, people aren't just collaborating and arguing with members of their own congress or

parliament. Climate agreements involve thousands of people from every country on the globe, and when you really think about that, what they're trying to pull off here, it's pretty stunning. These delegates are trying to write a document that meets the approval of representatives from all of the planet's human societies. I can't decide if that's an inspiring testament to our species' ability to cooperate and exercise in human hubris and folly, or just the hardest group

writing assignment ever given. Maybe it's all of the above. Pulling back out to the 30,000 foot level, just in terms of process, it's hard to understand how a bunch of people in this room are doing something that actually ends up leading to progress. Have you had negotiations that you've observed or been part of where you're like, we actually accomplished something here. Something was moved forward, even if it was a small thing.

Dr. Adelle Thomas: So it's a very long process, and it seems like you're just spinning your wheels, but eventually something comes out of it. Now, whether it's worth all of that effort, right? Do we need to go through all of this long thing to get to that point. I don't agree with that, the long process, but I have seen that, you know, some things still make a difference. Yeah, I'm looking for analogies for what this is, and what you were just saying almost made me think of like an

anthill. It's sort of impenetrable from the outside, but there's all this, like, busy activity and that anthill can get really big, like they are doing something, is that, am I on the right track at all? Dr. Adelle Thomas: Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it, and just even thinking of us as ants, which is what I feel

like in this conflict. We're all running around trying to figure out where we can be helpful, what we can do, but at the end of the day, we are contributing to something that's bigger than each of our individual inputs. So I think that's a helpful I said a minute ago that there are parts of this framing. process that are kind of like crafting legislation, but there are significant differences too. To start with, the United Nations is not a government. It's a voluntary organization.

It can't make laws like countries can. Even the crown jewel of the COP process, the Paris Agreement, is a blend of legally binding and non binding rules, and not all signatories agree on whether or not it's an international treaty or something else. The question of how enforceable these climate agreements are and should be is a matter of intense debate. That's just another issue that has to be worked out here. Another big difference between the COP process and how

legislative bodies work is that there is no voting here. COP is consensus based, which means everyone has to agree in order for something to move forward. So it's not like an agenda item can be approved if 60% or even 99% of the countries agree to it. If one party objects, then the negotiations stall. And that happens all the time. That's a big reason why progress at these

talks has been so slow. It's an incredibly frustrating thing to watch one country ruin it for everybody else, but especially so for people like Adelle and Saleem, who are inside this system trying to make it go faster. I spoke with Adelle a few times before COP26 and in our last conversation a few months before the conference, she was pretty down. I guess when you're an ant, it can also feel kind of demoralizing, because, you know you're tiny. I mean, how is your ant self? Right now?

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

What do you think is the most we could hope to get out of this? Dr. Adelle Thomas: The most I think that we can get out of this, I'm going to be optimistic. I think that we will have a pathway forward for getting the 100 billion per year in finance before 2023, which is what they're currently

projecting. I'm going to hope that we get recognition and a commitment for new and additional finance for loss and damage, and I'm going to hope that we get a commitment on the mitigation side to keep temperatures to 1.5 through countries coming back with better national plans, nationally determined contributions on meeting 1.5 so I hope that this COP will keep 1.5 alive, finance, and loss and damage. We'll be checking back in with Adelle in our next episode to see if her hopes are realized.

So at this point, I imagine some of you listening might be having a thought that I had, and probably everybody has, as they learn about how the UN climate talks work. We have to get rid of this consensus model. It's too slow and cumbersome. The very best it can do is deliver incremental change, and that's a huge mismatch with what the climate crisis demands, which is

quick, nimble, strategic responses. But then, if you take the thought of abandoning the consensus model one step further, you have to answer, what are we going to replace it with? And that opens a huge can of worms. Are we going to make the UNFCCC more like a legislative body with elected representatives and bills that get voted up or down? How would that work? What powers should this climate congress have, and

what are the checks and balances on those powers? Tabling the question of whether or not this is even a good idea, and the fact that most, if not all, countries would be opposed to it, just figuring something like this out would also take decades of global meetings. There are other ways to make climate

action happen, of course. Individual nations and groups of like minded countries can and do push forward on their own, and companies like the ones we profiled in our last episode can decide to lead instead of resisting the changes we need. But alongside all of these efforts, we still need the global architecture that's emerging through this UN process. We need coordinated planetary action, because Earth's atmosphere is the ultimate global commons. It

can't be chopped up into mine and yours. It's one contiguous, amorphous, crucial thing. So although the UN climate talks are full of flaws, this is the process we have, and we don't have time to create another one.

resolve the outstanding issues. We can move the negotiations forward, and we can launch a decade of ever increasing ambition and action, and that work, my friends, starts today. And we will succeed or fail as one.

Caroline Kurtz and Gabby Piamonte. Special thanks to Eva Knekta, Vivian Kalea, Emily Moore, Christopher Preston, Leslie Scott, Katy Scott, Joseph Harvey and Abe.