New Climate Reality Outruns The Old Cop Agenda

ANTALYA, Turkey — The world is meeting for a course correction on global warming. The world’s energy demand has other plans.

This year’s United Nations climate conference, which kicks off in this resort city on Monday, must confront the grim new reality that the world is now certain to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, the most ambitious target that nations agreed on in 2015.

The U.N. said last month that the world’s best hope now is to prevent temperatures from soaring past 1.8 degrees — with the remote possibility of invoking unprecedented political action and massive amounts of carbon removal technologies to bring them back to 1.5C.

Yet even this new scenario is rapidly slipping out of reach — despite a global upswing in clean energy. Efforts to tackle fast-acting pollutants such as methane are hitting roadblocks. And the sudden emergence of a trillion-dollar data center economy combined with soaring cooling needs worldwide are boosting fossil fuel use, three years after countries agreed to start ridding themselves of oil, gas and coal.

“A lot of things have changed” since last year’s U.N. conference in Brazil, said Maria da Graça Carvalho, Portugal’s climate minister. “Data centers were not a topic there ... It’s going to be a very interesting COP,” as the summits are known.

Another thing that's changed is the Democratic rout of Republicans in last week’s U.S. midterm elections, raising the prospect of more attention there on issues that could help the climate, like clean energy. Nearly 20 House Democrats and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse are planning to attend the talks.

U.S. allies are skeptical. The election might mean there are “a few more happy NGO faces at COP, but that’s it,” said one European climate negotiator who was granted anonymity as his government does not authorize him to speak to the press. The U.S., he noted, still won’t be represented in the talks, and President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from both the Paris Agreement — for the second time — and the foundational U.N. climate treaty means it won’t be back anytime soon.

The political volatility extends to global efforts at reining in carbon emissions. While war-driven disruptions to fossil fuel supplies are spurring a shift to clean energy, including a surge in electric vehicles, the resolve to fight climate change is weakening across governments, as even the most active countries soften their policies amid rising economic anxiety.

Taken together, countries’ climate plans are now set to deliver only half the emissions reductions that were anticipated a year ago, thanks largely to the United States. And the planet is hurtling toward a catastrophic level of warming, at 2.8 degrees by the end of the century.

The talks in Turkey are supposed to kick off a course correction. They mark the start of a two-year process of assessing action under the 2015 accord, with governments meant to agree on steps to rectify any shortfalls in 2028.

There promise to be many. Yet the negotiations seem immune to the time pressures: hyper-fast technological evolutions, combined with the slow-by-design nature of COPs, risk making the talks unagile to abrupt new climate dangers.

“Is the old COP agenda purpose-built for the new world? And the answer to that is clearly no,” said Eurasia Group chair Gerald Butts, who has advised Canadian prime ministers Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau.

Some officials say negotiations should focus on delivering the commitments made under the Paris Agreement in 2015 rather than get distracted by new developments.

“This is going to be an implementation COP,” EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra told the European Parliament in a debate last month. “And it should be an implementation COP, because frankly speaking, we have too often fallen into the trap of trying to do many new things, rather than just deliver on what we already have.”

Many of the issues with the power to torpedo global climate goals are being debated on the margins of the talks, in what’s known as the "action agenda." Themes such as methane, AI, sustainable cooling and fossil fuels are all getting name-checked there.

Supporters say the growing use of this process can make the talks more nimble by avoiding the stringent consensus requirements of formal COP decisions. They point to the action agenda as an example of how the talks have progressed from setting new rules to a focus on delivery.

“We've seen this emerging for the past couple of COPs … I think that's also an interesting development for this COP in particular, where we're seeing this increased attention on the action agenda, which I think is really a positive development,” said Mattias Frumerie, Sweden’s climate ambassador. “It becomes this space where there really is action, where we see various results highlighted.”

The downside, critics say, is that pledges borne of the action agenda lack the pressure or accountability that comes with signing onto an international agreement.

The formal conference “is the core, that is where the global community comes together,” Frumerie said. “But then, what we do outside... it's over and above what we can do in the negotiations.”

Deals between countries and companies on the sidelines of the talks could have a meaningful impact on decarbonization and electrification, but they’ll struggle against one of the biggest barriers to addressing climate change: politics.

“Inertia is a really powerful force in political systems, and the incumbents who have a lot of political power will fight to give it up. And I think that's what you're seeing pretty much in every oil and gas producing country in the world,” said Butts.

A COP divided

Two of this year’s biggest issues — electrification and AI — are on the action agenda. Turkey and Australia, which are co-hosting the talks, are urging countries to support a voluntary commitment to collectively scale up electrification of global energy supply to 35% by 2035. It’s at about 20% today.

Some countries, including Australia, which is brokering the talks, want to inject the electrification goal into a negotiated outcome. But that promises to be tricky. Cracks are already appearing over whether that pledge should explicitly refer to “clean” electrification, or allow it to be met with natural gas and coal.

That makes the issue a subtext for reducing fossil fuels. Similar battles have stymied the talks for years.

“Obviously the more renewable energy the better, but also, against that, any electrification is almost always good electrification under our analysis,” Chris Bowen, Australia’s energy and climate minister, who presides over the formal negotiations, told POLITICO. “But, you know, there will be parties with views that we need to work through.”

Another voluntary pledge asks countries and companies to make broad commitments to sustainably build AI infrastructure — but it would let them choose their own targets, while putting equal emphasis on using the technology as a climate solution.

When Brazil hosted the talks last year, it attempted to streamline hundreds of voluntary initiatives launched over the past decade and get countries and companies to start reporting their results.

But several of those high-profile initiatives have foundered as members withdrew or altered their policies amid economic and geopolitical pressure. The U.S. and EU, co-founders of a global pledge to cut methane emissions, have weakened rules aimed at doing just that. And banks have fled a climate finance alliance amid right-wing attacks on sustainability.

Meanwhile, the talks themselves have tried to shoehorn in more issues — only to come up short on delivery. Many countries that pledged to wind down fossil fuels have moved in the opposite direction, while a hard-fought fund for victims of climate disasters is facing a major shortfall even as catastrophes like this summer’s glacial collapse in Nepal become more prevalent.

The U.S. is the most extreme example of backsliding. The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement a second time and double down on fossil fuel use weakened the world’s collective push to lower emissions.

U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, who will attend the talks with 18 other congressional Democrats, acknowledged that next year’s Congress won’t have the power to reverse Trump’s environmental rollbacks, but insisted his party can play an important diplomatic role on climate issues.

“We recognize that the rest of the world knows that the United States is a country that … dropped out of Paris not once but twice, but I think also there's a real value in us being able to convey to the world, No. 1, that America has spoken, and No. 2, that so many of the challenges we face are the same," he told reporters last week.

Meanwhile, a group of wealthy countries and island nations is calling for a united response to the U.N.’s recent findings that the world will miss the 1.5-degree target in Antalya. But such demands tend to face pushback from major polluters such as Saudi Arabia and its allies.

That split screen was on display at a major oil conference in the United Arab Emirates last week.

Sultan al Jaber, the UAE’s industry minister and former president of COP28, announced that ADNOC, the state-owned oil company he leads, would be partnering with OpenAI to enhance its operations. That includes using AI-enabled drilling to develop a 25-year natural gas project it says will help meet growing energy demands from AI and other industries.

“The choices we make today will determine the energy landscape a decade from now,” said al Jaber, who oversaw the 2023 agreement in Dubai where nearly 200 countries agreed to wind down their dependence on fossil fuels. “Let's apply the lessons we have learned. Let's build capacity and everything that supports it.”

‘Not perfect’

The talks were never designed to be nimble. All negotiated outcomes require consensus among nearly 200 nations — meaning the final agreements often reflect the position of countries that want to continue using fossil fuels.

And introducing new ideas can be glacial compared to fast-evolving realities.

“The process of climate conferences is certainly not perfect. But it is the only process that brings us together as a global community to tackle the global challenge of climate protection,” German Climate Minister Carsten Schneider said last week. “And it offers us a great opportunity to find solutions to other crises of our time at the same time.”

Defenders also point to past successes. Since the Paris Agreement was signed, the world has slashed its expected warming trajectory from 4 C to 2.8 C.

“I share the skepticism, but there isn't any other meeting of the U.N. that is as important as the climate COP. This is where we have most players around, not only governments [but also] private sector, civil society, Indigenous people,” Ana Toni, the Brazilian CEO of last year’s COP30, told reporters in October. “In every COP, we go a little bit further.”