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Thank you, Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatarati. This week outreach and optimism in oil country. Today is the start of COP twenty eight, and for the next two weeks I'll be in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, along with more than seventy thousand other people who will come for the year's biggest climate conference. It is one of the
most controversial corps in recent memory. It is being hosted by an oil dependent nation, and the president of the summit, Sultan al Jabber, is also the head of the state's oil company. Many are worried that it's being run by the wrong people at the wrong time, just as the world is experiencing record breaking heat, yet representatives of almost two hundred countries are now gathered here in the Bay to create a new consensus that will hopefully push the
world closer toward net zero. If things go to plan, we should see a global agreement to triple renewables, double energy efficiency, phase out fossil fuels, and work out how to implement a fund that would compensate vulnerable countries for climate impacts. Have no doubt these are difficult negotiations. Getting every single country to agree to one common text is
a gargantuan task. So for this first episode from Copp, I wanted to talk with someone who's been on the inside, someone who has helped forge these agreements from the ashes of broken diplomacy. My guest today is Christiana Figures, who is now the co host of the podcast Outrage and Optimism and was formerly the head of the UNF Triple C,
the body tasked with running COP meetings. She took over the role at a low point in global climate negotiations in twenty ten, just after the COP fifteen meeting in Copenhagen, where there were big expectations for a meaningful legally binding agreement. It didn't come to pass, and the meeting became known as Brokenhagen. Christiana arrived in the aftermath and spent the next five years bringing world leaders together to form a new alliance. Her efforts culminated in the signing of the
Paris Agreement in twenty fifteen. But now the world is way of track to meet that goal. So I wanted to hear from Christiana about what we can expect from COP twenty eight, the role of the fossil fuel industry in these negotiations, and whether COP is still fit for purpose. Welcome to the show, Christiana.
Thank you, thank you for the invitation. Now.
You were appointed as the head of the UN after PLC in twenty ten. This was a year after the Copenhagen COP had ended in failure.
Six months six months.
After, yes, very soon after, and everyone was pretty down on climate diplomacy at the time. What were you thinking taking over the job of running the event, the organization that makes global climate diplomacy happen.
What was I thinking? I was thinking that we would never ever ever get to a global climate agreement, at least not in my lifetime. That was my first thought, because the global mood on climate was so despondent, and everyone was so angry with each other. No one even wanted to talk to each other anymore, let alone any trust in the in the system and in the process. So it were, they were definitely very very dark days.
And now climate diplomacy frequently splits on party lines, on developed and developing country lines, on very fossil oriented economies versus renewable oriented economies. There are just so many divisions. What did you need to do at that time, right after Copenhagen to bring people back to restart and get to the point which you did when the Paris Agreement was signed.
Well, definitely did not start bridging those devices that you have mentioned, and you gave a short list of the many, many device that are there, but rather start much more humbly enticing people just to come back to the table, all of which was built on the back of re energizing the Secretary area itself, which is five hundred people strong, because they give their lives to this, this is what they do twenty seven hours a day, and they were
at least partially blamed for the disaster in Copenhagen. So my first responsibility was to pick them out of the doldrums and re energize them, remotivate them, and slowly build them up to the top performing organization that they prove themselves to be. In the year twenty fifteen, you.
Wrote a book called The Future We Choose, which came a few years earlier than my book will just come out this year, And in that I explained this two track world where there is progress happening, clearly we can see it, and yet the progress is very far from where we need to be because climate impacts are getting worse. But coming back to diplomacy, you know, each cop sort
of builds onto its previous version. This year there is a big push on trying to make sure that this gap that does exist between where we are and where we need to be can be shrunk and quickly. But in September you said that cops have become a circus. When did you lose faith in the process that pushes global climate diplomacy forward.
I haven't lost faith in the process. That would be very odd for someone who's dedicated her entire life to that. I have no idea where you got that impression. Now, I have definitely not lost faith. What I mean is that we have to understand that the cops were designed. And I speak because I joined before COP one something called the International Negotiating Committee, which was the body that designed the cops. So I know for a fact that cops were designed for one purpose, and that is to
hold the multilateral process that reaches legally binding agreements. That is what it was designed to do. It has succeeded. It has succeeded because in twenty fifteen we adopted the Paris Agreement, and in twenty twenty one we adopted the rule book for the Paris Agreement. So substantially, although I must say there are still some very important parts that still need this multilateral negotiation process, but substantially we are in the process of moving from negotiation to implementation. The
cops were never meant to implement. That's the point. Implementation doesn't happen as the result of negotiation in negotiation halls. It happens in the real economy. It happens through policies. It happens through healthy competition, through investments, through innovation and technology.
That's where the push is. Now. The question then is does the COP get redesigned for this new purpose to support implementation, Does it stay as a multilateral negotiating process, or do you bring both of these together in a new way that honesty cannot be what we have now. I mean, I don't know how many people are being expected at COP twenty eight, but it's it's above sixty thousand, and you're not going to get sixty thousand people worth
of negotiated agreements. And you wonder whether their time and effort wouldn't be better used in a different form that would actually be there to support implementation and to monitor the pace of implementation, because after all, that is the purpose of the global stock take, which happens this year for the first time, mandated by the Paris Agreement. So as of now, what we really should see is how quickly are we implementing the Paris Agreement.
Now, what has happened with COPS is that they've become bigger and bigger. As you say, more and more people come to them, and the core part of the negotiations that continue to happen still remain about the same size. It's really all the other things that happen on the outside that are becoming bigger. There's what people call really the trade show. People wanting to come and show what they are doing on trying to reach the Paras agreement, or wanting to talk about technology, or just wanting to
network in a way that is probably needed. But it's also happening at a time when we've just had the hottest year, we are on track to reach a new high in emissions in twenty twenty three, and we are going into a COP that is being hosted by an oil producing, oil dependent country and led by a president who's the head of the national oil company. It's not the first time this is happening. We've had a COP in Qatar before, where it was an oil producing nation,
but it was pre paris. What do you think needs to happen to make the COP process more effective? Is it trimming the number of people going to the COP? Is it splitting this into one that does negotiation and another that does trade show Where do you think COPS need to evolve to make us narrow the gap that exists between where we are and where we need to be.
Well, it is not for me to decide that. That is for parties to decide what they want to do. I would definitely point you toward the party process that is looking at this, but having said that, it does seem like first we can't do completely without the multilateral negotiations because there are some very important parts that have not been agreed to and that are key importance for
the survival of developing countries. So certainly everything that has to do with loss and damage we now have theoretically a fund, but it's definitely not up and running. So there are some issues that would definitely not just justify, but necessitate the multilateral negotiating process to continue. Having said that, the implementation I think could stand a redesign. If that is the new purpose of yearly meetings, then form follows function. And if that is the new function, then how do
you bring it together? How do you sum it up? How do you use it to let us know how we are doing with respect to the objectives and the targets established in the Powers Agreement. That is the piece that I think needs some serious consideration so that we would be able to gather the fruits that are put on the table at cops. On the side that is non negotiating, but it's not enough to gather the fruits
and put them in a fruit salad. We want to know how are we doing, And it should have a much more accountability, more accounting going with it so that we can know where we are. And I know that the Executive Secretary of the Climate Convention, Simon Steel, has already launched a process to begin to think about how to renew that.
After the break we talk about the big, oily elephant in the room, let's address the elephant in the room going into COP twenty eight, which is the fossil fuel industry. You wrote an op ed in July saying that throughout your career as a climate diplomat, you've made efforts to bring along fossil fuel companies to move climate goals along. But this time you've said you've had enough that you were wrong that fossil fuel companies could ever change. What
made you come to that conclusion? And if that is the conclusion that we have come to, how do we deal with that reality when we go into COP twenty eight. But that many fossil fuel companies showing.
Up, well, first of all, I don't think that we should drown in a class of water people showing up at the COP They're going to be thousands of people showing up at the COP as we know, and how many oil executives going to show up, I don't know. We will probably never know, because they can sign in as anything else. I understand the symbolic significance of that. Completely understand you don't want to have the tobacco companies come to a health conference. I understand. I totally understand.
I am not minimizing that. But also, at the same time, let us not be so simplistic as to assume that the only influence that oil executives can have is through their physical presence. Let's get down to something that is more important. I lost patients with the oil companies because I have seen what they chose to do with their
unprecedented profits over the past year or two. I honestly had the hope, the expectation, the ambition that seeing as much cash as they saw for no reason of their own, just because Russia cruelly invaded Ukraine, I had thought wished for that they would take part a substantial part of that cash and invested in to the energy transition, fully well knowing that is not their business model. But if they want business continuity, they have to get with the program.
But they chose not to do so. They chose to give much bigger dividends to their shareholders. They chose to buy back shares. They chose in the United States to put a lot of money into lobbying against climate policy, both at the national and at state level. They chose to finance a campaign against ESG, on and on and on.
That is deeply disappointing to me, because, yes, I had the hope that this industry, with the engineering capacity that it has that is unequaled in any other industry, with the pockets that they have that is unequaled in any other industry, I had thought that they would be able to turn a new leave. They didn't. They chose not to. In fact, they chose to step back from where they had stepped forward previously. So that is why I lost
my patience and I lost my hope for them. What I find very interesting, Akshot is I don't know if you followed this announcement of Exon mobile buying companies, did you see.
That Exon bought Pioneer and Chevron bought hes. Both of them have word fifty sixty billion dollars worth of another company that is an oil and gas company.
Very interesting, very very interesting, And I've been wondering why. First of all, why did those companies that are admittedly much smaller than the ones that purchased them, why did they allow themselves to be purchased? If the oil and gas industry had a really rosy picture of the future, do you think those small companies would allow themselves to be purchased or would they have continued to go on their own.
Well, they also did not get as much of a premium. So when a company, a big company buys a small company, it's typically coming with a premium because it will give you a little more than what the stock price is currently for that small company. The premium in these cases, both the cases was actually quite small relative to historical
premiums when big oil and gas mergers have happened. The other thing that I've understood is that both the companies that they've bought most of the time they have an exposure to shale oil, which is a much more short
term oil production. So if you are as an oil company thinking about a future where maybe twenty years from now oil may not be required as much, but you want to make short term profits, you want to try and capture the market share right now at a greater level because oil prices are high, these are quite good bets from just money making perspective. And so there is
an idea in economics which called it revealed preference. So companies may say to you, you know, we believe there's a lot of room for oil to still grow, that the world is not investing enough in oil that they must and then you look at what they are actually doing. Turns out they themselves are not investing in oil. This is not just happening in USL companies. It's happening even with Saudi Aramco.
So you know what I call what's going on musical chairs, That's what I call it. So and so this is not a statement of fact. This is just a quirky little two in the morning idea. And I'm going to put it in a question mark because it is a question.
Could it be possible that some US based big companies are already feeling themselves squeezed between quickly diminishing social tolerance and increasing demand destruction which we have already seen, and therefore their future is not quite as rosy as they thought, and they're trying to acquire more volume and more assets that will allow them to be the last man standing that will allow them to still have a chair when
the music stops. If what they're playing now is musical chairs, or what the economy plays now is musical chairs, what happens if they're getting ready for a showdown? Who is going to be the last man standing? And I say man because most of them, with the exception of Cheval, are led by.
Men, with the exception of oxy Oxy. Thank you if you take that point of view. Still coming back to COP, how do you think we should look at fossil fuel company's influence on the COP process. It may be symbolic, but it is true that we are going into a COP in the United Arab Emirates, which is an oil dependent economy.
Yeah. What I actually think is quite sad is that doctor Sulton Algebert I think missed a really important opportunity because, as you have mentioned, he's not just the president of the oil company, he's the president of a state owned company, very different, very different than publicly traded. Let's remember that seventy five percent of all oil and gases in the hands of state owned companies, and so this could have been maybe still is an opportunity for the president to
mobilize state owned companies, because those are his peers. His peers are not Exxon Mobile, Total Shell BP, those are not his peers. His peers are the state owned companies. So I think it's actually quite a missed opportunity that he has not been able to bring state owned companies to a more responsible position with respect to climate, because I do think that it's very interesting shut that we keep on focusing on the publicly traded companies that are only twenty five percent of the.
Production in the Cup negotiations. You have said, there are certainly things that require a multilateral framework, a multilateral discussion, a multilateral decision making process. One place where that is crucial is climate finance. Climate finance can be put in three buckets. You put money towards reducing emissions, you put money towards adapting to warming, and then you put money
towards compensating for the damages that come from climate. All three buckets need to be funded at different amounts, and we'll have a different type of body funding them. But the gap that exists, it's trillions of dollars on an annual basis. If you add all of them up, what do you think is the best way in which we can make sure that developed countries start to give the kind of money that they must to developing countries to the funding gap on all three buckets.
What is the good news on this first, the good news is that last year we invested a trillion dollars into fossil fuels and a trillion dollars into renewable. This year we're still investing a trillion dollars into vassal fuels. I can, I'll believe it. However, we're investing one point seven into renewable, so you know, it's it's it's the right direction. Now, as you point out, one point seven is good but not sufficient. We actually need to get
to four trillion a year into renewables. However, how interesting that we have seven trillion dollars a year that are, according to my sense, misallocated to fossil fuels subsidies, and that's seven percent of global GDP. So the money is there, right, It's just a misallocation that is highly political, understand but correcting even a part of that misallocation would go a
long way. And then, of course, the reform of the financial system along the lines of the Bridgetown Initiative to mobilize both short term liquidity for the class response as well as long term funding for developing countries would be hugely helpful. And part of that, as we know, is to buy down the first risk of many of these investments in the three buckets, so that private capital can then follow. So it's not like we don't know what
to do. There are very important suggestions out there. What's missing still, frankly, is political will.
What should we look out for at COP twenty eight this year that would look like success.
Do you want the ideal or do you want the realistic? Both the ideal we need to see commitments to transform energy systems, transform food systems, and transform finance systems. So transformation in energy, food and finance, and energy tripling energy capacity by twenty thirty equitably phase out. We're currently at phase down, phase out our fossil fuels, especially reallocating subsidies, and very importantly, because we always forget it, double the
energy efficiency that we have. So those would be the three and energy systems and the food systems, and in nature transform the food systems. I mean we are food system around the world is so inefficient and so unfair. The fact that we still have people who go hungry when we have enough food production, which is not doing a good job of where we produce, how we transport,
how we get it. So building the resilience to that, and then for the non food area of deforestation, increase lad restoration and revitalize all or degraded ecosystems that are both water ecosystems as well as land. And on the finance, we've already touched on it, so you know, the fame is one hundred billion. Here we are again ding ding ding right, the whole hundred billion? Where are they? And adaptation finance, loss and damage fund? What is going to
happen with that? Can we get granular with that? And then reform public finance so the money gets to the right people and is easily accessible and is enough of a powerful attractor for private finance to align its investment plans and portfolios.
That's a great list. Now a realistic one.
A realistic I think we can definitely get a text that commits everybody to tripling renewables. I think we can get a text that commits to doubling energy efficiency. I think those two are possible. I think it is desirable. But can we get it. I'm not sure phase out of possible fuels. Maybe with some very creative working of the text, we might be able to get to more than we have right now, which is phase down fossil fuels.
And I think actually we'll get an uptick on finance, not where we need to, but an uptick on finance, possibly spearheaded by the United Arab Emerts itself. I think that we will see quite a few coalitions coming out going into sexual transformations, in fact, city based decarbonization efforts, so everything that takes us from individual efforts to collective efforts, sexual efforts, so going from what I call pilot projects
to much more industry level projects. And I think that we will begin to see the recognition of the pivot from incremental to exponents.
Climate change gets a lot of attention in twenty twenty three because climate impacts are every where you see them and we are hitting all kinds of records. This year's cop is expected to have as many as one hundred thousand people. Maybe you entered the climate space at a very different time. You've been involved in climate diplomacy since the early nineteen nineties. What drew you to climate diplomacy? In the first.
Place, the disappearance of a species, a tiny little golden toad that was endemic to one of our reserves here, conservation reserves. It disappeared in my lifetime, and I quickly surmised that if I had witnessed the disappearance of one species in this tiny, little postage size country of Costa Rica, that that must be that many other species were disappearing, and low and behold, once I started studying, Yes, many, many, many other species have disappeared and continued to disappear.
Now this is despite Costa Rica being the country that protected its forests. So it was when you looked at the disappearance of this toad, it was not because you weren't doing the work, the country wasn't doing the work. It was climate change, a global problem.
That is correct. And since then I have learned that scientists have decided that it was the first species to disappear because of climate change. I didn't know that way back in the nineties. Scientists didn't know that either, But now we know, and I just think, let's just remember that all of us alive right now are the ancestors
of future generations. We think of ancestors only because we think of our ancestors going up the line, but do we remember that we currently standing right here are the ancestors of all generations to come, and are we acting with the responsibility that we want as ancestors of the future.
I could keep talking to you for a very long time. Thank you so much, Christiana. Since recording this interview with Christiana, the BBC and the Center for Climate Reporting published an article that alleged that Sultan al Jabber used his role as COP twenty eight president to push for fossil fuel deals when speaking with members of foreign governments. A spokesperson
for COP twenty eight said the article was inaccurate. Responding to the report, Christiana said, this is the Volkswagen twenty fifteen moment for the COP twenty eight presidency got red handed. The COP presidency has no other option but to now unequivocally step up the transparency, responsibility and accountability with which they lead the process. Thank you for listening to zero. We'll be at COP twenty eight for the next two weeks.
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in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boid and senior producer is Christine Riskell. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Kira bendram I am Akshatrati. Back next week.