On COP30 and the Future of Climate Negotiations

You're listening to On the Record from the Council on Foreign Relations, bringing you select conversations from leading minds in foreign policy. Welcome to today's Council on Foreign Relations meeting titled From Cop 3 to Cop 30 and Beyond, the future of climate negotiations. My name is Alice Hill. I am the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council, and I will be presiding over today's discussion. This week, the 30th Conference of the Parties, or COP 30, opened in Brazil, with some 50,000 people expected to attend. The COP is the annual meeting of nations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. That treaty binds the world to avoid dangerous climate change without specifying really how to do so. More than a quarter of a century ago, at the third conference of the parties, or COP 3, which was held in Kyoto, Japan, negotiators emerged with the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol was the first international treaty to set legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets for developed countries. A play called Kyoto, which some of you may have recently seen, captures the drama behind those negotiations. Nearly two decades later, the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 2015 took a new approach, allowing countries to determine their own contributions to the global climate effort. And now, negotiators are back in Berlin, Brazil, for COP 30. They face mounting pressure to demonstrate real progress, just as the world seems to be losing its climate ambition. The United States, the world's second largest emitter, is once again on course to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. It will not be sending a negotiating team. At the same time, China has been positioned itself as a leader in clean energy manufacturing. Against this backdrop, COP 30 is shaping up to be a stress test for multilateralism and the greater climate effort. To unpack all of this, I'm delighted to be joined by two distinguished guests. David Sandelow is the inaugural fellow for the Center on Global Energy Policy and co-director of the Energy and Environment Concentration at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. He's the lead author of the Sustainable Data Center's Roadmap and the Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap. Notably, he was a member of the U.S. Kyoto delegation in 1997. Dr. David Victor is the Distinguished Professor of Innovation and Public Policy and the Director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego.

He was a convening lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and he's the author of several books, including Global Warming Gridlock, which was recognized by The Economist as one of the best books of 2011, and the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming. We are so fortunate to have them both here with us today, and I'm going to use my prerogative as the presider to kick us off with a question of my own. And this question really gets to the heart of the matter? Are multilateral climate negotiations even working? And in your view, are they a success or failure? I'm going to turn to you first, David Sandelow. Please give us your view on that big picture question. Thanks, Alice. Great to see you. Great to see you, David. Thanks to the whole CFR team for organizing this. I think the multilateral climate negotiations are working in important ways, although they're, of course, not solving the problem. The Paris Climate Agreement was a landmark diplomatic achievement. It brought together more than 190 countries with wildly different national circumstances to agree on global goals for fighting climate change and on a framework for fighting this problem over the long term. In Paris, which was a conference in 2015, more than 150 heads of state attended. It was the largest gathering of heads of state out of New York ever, or one of the largest. And the conference sent a strong signal the financial markets to corporate sea suites and all over the world that climate change is a priority and that the world was mobilizing to meet it. attention to the problem steadily grew in the years afterwards. And I think the bottom line, the results were positive. Before the Paris Agreement, the projections were that we would reach peak temperatures of about seven to seven and a half degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. The current projections now suggest that peak temperatures are going to be between four and four and a half degrees above pre-industrial levels. It's Fahrenheit again. What we're currently facing is still very dangerous. Emissions are still rising. The warmest 10 years on record have been the past 10 years, so we're nowhere near solving this problem. But to answer your question, the multilateral climate negotiations, I think they're making a positive difference. Well, I agree with you that there's definitely the curve on emissions has bent down, and that has helped us bend the curve on... temperature rise, but there is the overriding issue of whether this will be enough. I'm going to turn this over to David Victor now and for his opinion on whether this is working. Yeah, I mean, to be brief, I think what David Sandelot, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm not sure we have a huge amount of diversity. Two-thirds of us are named David, but it's great to be with both of you. I think

David's assessment is correct. It really depends on our theory of change. We'll get to that when we talk about Kyoto and was Kyoto a good thing or bad thing. The theory of change that I think is relevant for international law in this area is, is this umbrella creating legitimacy in the overall effort to invent new technologies, put those new technologies into service? In that sense, it's working. It's not, most of the work is not being done by the legal instruments. It's being done by innovators and by national policymakers and local policymakers. But the right way to measure progress is against the counterfactual and what David summarizes is exactly right. Because most of the world doesn't operate in Fahrenheit, they operate in Celsius. The goals in the Paris Agreement are set as well below two degrees. By that metric, we're failing, absolutely. By any reasonable estimate of where the world is really headed, two and a half to three degrees Celsius, it's incredible because it's not. four or five, which was the trajectory we were on 15, 20 years ago. So that's very, very successful. I think the last thing I'll say is it's very easy to see all these negotiations like what's going on in Berlin right now and see chaos and disagreement and we may, one of these years we're going to have a conference end with no formal agreement that might be this year and look at it and see failure. But the right way to think about this is how do the negotiations and the diplomacy, how do they create momentum and focus for the real work of technological change. In that sense, it's actually working pretty well. Well, negotiations have been a key to all of this process. And one of the reasons we're here today at CFR discussing this is that there's a play about the 1997 Kyoto Climate Conference. running at the Lincoln Center in New York City after a successful run in London. Now, each of you has had a particular role to play with regard to that Kyoto Protocol, the outcome of that 1997 conference. David Sandelow, you were a member of the U.S. delegation to the Kyoto Climate Conference, and David Victor, you wrote an insightful book on the collapse of that Kyoto Protocol in the aftermath of the meeting. I want to ask each of you to reflect on those experiences, particularly David Sandalow. What was it like being at the Kyoto Conference? And I think you also saw the play. So if you have any reflections on that as well. And then I'll turn it over to David Victor. The Kyoto conference was exhausting. More than anything else. Yeah, I imagine. By far the most sleep-deprived experience in my life, and there are many competitors. This has been...

documented extensively. I think Stu Eisenstead, the lead U.S. negotiator described the final plenary session of looking like a neutron bomb had hit because people were sleeping in the plenary hall. There's a culture in international negotiations of staying up all night to negotiate at the endgame, not just in the climate negotiations, but others. And I think that reached its apogee in Kyoto. But there was, you know, there was a sense of optimism. leaving the leaving the hall. I mean, the agreement almost didn't happen. At the end, there was a big snafu. The chair of the conference was a very skilled Argentinian diplomat. called the key players in, an agreement was reached with some kind of very thoughtful compromises. And then everyone came out very optimistic. Sadly, that optimism wasn't, you know, turned out not to, we weren't able to live around the optimistic feeling for reasons that David kind of very thoughtfully went into in his book, which he can describe. You asked about the play. I think the play's tremendous. I saw it in London. It is very entertaining. I think the playwrights did an astonishingly good job of dramatizing some really wonky material. And it's engaging. It's interesting. I think even for people who are not in the climate world, according to the number of people I spoke to, they have this very interesting device of using the leading oil. lobbyist at the conference as the protagonist for the play, or one of the protagonists for the plays, which sets up a great dynamic. And actually, my only complaint about the play is that the final third or so of the play focuses on a dispute between the US and China, which is totally imaginary. Nothing like that happened at the actual Kyoto conference. But most of the rest of the play is a very faithful rendition of the actual issues in the run-up to Kyoto in the years before Kyoto and then at the conference itself. Yes, and I think it's quite a feat to bring out the human stories behind all those negotiations. It does sound dry on its face, but there are humans behind that, and they all have their own narrative. So David, Victor, you picked up after the ending of Kyoto and wrote a book about what was the... aftermath and what is your summarize for us what your critique of the Kyoto's result cute Kyoto cop's result was Well, let me first also say, every once in a while, diplomacy produces huge drama. And that was clear the case in Kyoto. It's a little bit like learning how to fly. There are long periods of incredible boredom and then moments of terror. And that's what happened in Kyoto. And so you had, David Sandelow was there. We had this extraordinary lawyer, Su Benias, who's represented in the play, who knows how to put together agreements. Al Gore showed up in a parade of news coverage.

There were all these disputes. The chair gaveled things close because everyone was asleep. So it was dramatic. I'm an analyst. I'm trying to figure out, did the drama make a difference? And my key beef with the Kyoto Protocol was the legal theory of change, that what most people at the time saw as a huge asset, which was that it was had legally binding targets and timetables for emission controls, I saw as its chief weakness, which is that if you're going to make emission quotas, legally binding, and governments don't control the emissions from their economy. At best, they have an impact, a loose impact on that by steering things with policies and technologies and so on, that you create a conservatism. But by making them legally binding, you get governments overly focused on, can I comply? Because they actually take international law seriously, at least. Often they do. And if you're worried about compliance, then you go to the lowest common denominator. You pull your punches. And what you want to do is the exact opposite. What you want to do is encourage ambition and risk-taking. Chuck Sable and I called experimentalism in a new book that came out a couple years ago. So you want to encourage experimentation and pushing the envelope and learning quickly from that. And that was the genius of what made the Montreal Protocol and the ozone layer work. And to me, it was astonishing to see a lot of the same people who had been involved in Montreal negotiations go to Kyoto and not understand why the previous system worked and what they were creating in Kyoto was bound to fail. And the last thing I'll say on this is it was very hard at that time to be solidly in favor of action on climate change and opposed to Kyoto because the mania around Kyoto, people had it on their license plates and bumper stickers. And so you had to kind of show your bonafides that you cared about climate, but you were critical of the theory of change. What I think is different now is the theory of change. I think more people are lined up around something that actually works. So that brings us to this cop. And of course, this cop is. fulfilling commitments made under the Paris Agreement, which brought a different approach, a more voluntary approach by nations. They bring forward their own particular commitments to cut emissions. So people are gathering in Brazil. The report so far is that there is a quick maneuver to finalize the agenda that can... draw out on a many-day process. Brazil was successful in bringing that forward. Gavin Newsom has arrived, and he's a bit of a rock star there. Of course, President Trump is not present. No U.S. negotiators. President Xi Jinping of China is not present. So it's a little less glamorous than it's been in the past with world leaders showing up.

What's all this mean? What are you watching out for at COP 30? And what would a successful COP 30 look like in your opinion? I'm going to turn to David Victor first, just to have his view, and then I'm going to turn it over to you, David Sandalow. Yeah, so first, I think the world is actually going to learn that it's good when the Trump administration doesn't show up to these negotiations if they're going to be troublemakers. Because we just ran that experiment. They showed up in spades at the International Maritime Organization's conference that was designed to adopt. carbon reduction plan in effect the kind of carbon tax applied on shipping has been a tremendous amount of innovation and pushed on shipping partly because the innovators lead companies many of them are based in europe and they're under a lot of pressure at home so there was a lot of positive direction there and the trump administration bullied people and kind of blew it up for a while I think it'll be beneficial to not have them there because these are consensus institutions. So I think there's going to be a lot of complaining about the venue. You know, people are staying on cruise ships. It's expensive to stay there. It takes forever to move point A to point B. The all-night parties or the all-night events, you know, will be even longer. What I'm looking for, though, most is what's the mood at the end? Bob Cohen and I wrote an article a long time ago about... how cooperation on climate is highly decentralized. We call it regime complex. And that article, I understand, had pretty big impact on how people thought about the theory of change that they're putting in the Paris Agreement, which is to be decentralized and to allow lots of different enterprises and encourage that, not bottom-upism, but kind of fit for purpose. So you have lots of different clubs and activities that are working on climate. That's a good theory of change. If we have a prominent failure out of... And people take from that the lesson that the whole system is sideways and that we need a big reset that doesn't work on climate. There's a lot of talk right now about resets on climate policies and strategies. That will be really harmful. So I'm looking for the mood after. And even if there's a failure, are the leaders on climate already putting the pieces together and showing this is what serious action on climate change means? so that we have continued momentum. And Gavin Newsom being there is a great example of this, not because he himself is the right person or the only person who can do this, but in the absence of the Trump administration, you have a lot of states and some firms, fewer this year than before, some firms showing, hey, we're still in because we know where the direction of travel. Yeah, and there was actually even in Sao Paulo, the week before this, a meeting of governors, mayors saying we're still in. So there definitely is some presence of the United States, but not from the federal government. David Sandalow, what's your view on this? What are you watching for?

So a few points, Alice. First, I think in many ways, the most important activities related to this cop have happened in the run-up to the cop, and that's the submission of the nationally determined contributions by countries. And there's a narrative, I think the dominant media narrative that I've read is that these NDCs are very disappointing. There is, I have some disappointment, I must say, but I think there's also a kind of glass half full or maybe at least a glass third full narrative about the NDCs that have been submitted. The United States obviously didn't submit one. I think that China did submit one. Well, I think we talked more about what's happening in China, but I think there was some disappointment by. climate kind of diplomats that the Chinese NDC wasn't stronger. But that said, 110 countries have submitted their plans, their nationally determined contributions for addressing climate change. numbers of them, including Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Australia, 27 countries of the EU, the UK, the UAE, their NDCs are all consistent with the path towards getting to net zero in their countries by 2050, net zero mission. So there's a lot of positive momentum around climate change in the world, and that's reflected in the run up to this meeting, and I think that's important. There are other issues that are other topics that are being addressed at this meeting that I'll be looking for. Brazil has an announcement on tropical forests, which has been a diplomatic priority of the Brazilian governments. I think it'll be interesting to see what momentum that gathers. There's also a dialogue around, I think, a hugely important part of these COPS, which is come to be called the action agenda or what's happening outside of the formal governmental meetings. And this is a huge change since Kyoto, by the way. At Kyoto, there was not a big exhibition hall with massive amounts of CEOs and companies coming to exhibit. And today, these cops have that. The cop in Dubai reportedly had 100,000 people. It was extraordinary, and it was businesses and clean energy coming to do their meetings, and it became a major trade show and event for people paying attention to this issue. I think there's an interesting innovation here by necessity because Belém has such limited facilities. The action agenda dialogues have moved to two different cities as well. So we actually have three different cities, Sao Paulo, Rio, and Belam where these dialogues are taking place. I think it's a key point. These cops have become more than just what the governments agree on at the end. That's always the lowest common denominator feature. It's become a meeting point for the world to address this issue. So you raised a stark difference between now and 1997, the Kyoto Protocol. And that's the state of our geopolitical scene, the dynamic between the United States and China.

What will that dynamic mean for these negotiations? And how do you see China emerging in the void that's being left by the United States? David Sandelow, I'll turn to you first, since you raised the question of China, and then we'll hear from David Victor. Well, first, I think it's important to lay the foundation for what's happening in China right now on clean energy. I mean, it is extraordinary the amount of clean energy deployment in China in the past few years. And many listeners may have heard this in other places. But for each of the past three years, there's been more solar power deployed in China than have ever been deployed in the history of the United States. It's just remarkable. the deployment of electric vehicles is amazing to more than half of the new car sales in China this year will be electric. And for those who haven't seen it, there's remarkable pictures of vast mountain sites covered with solar panels in China today. It's important to say at the same time, China is also, there's a lot of coal plants that are still being built in China, but there is a steady. deployment of clean energy in a way that we just haven't seen this. It's changing the world in many ways. In Africa, in Pakistan, Chinese and other places, Chinese solar panels are accelerating the pace of decarbonization. So that's an important background. With respect to the international process, I think the Chinese government has seen the absence of the Trump administration as an opportunity for leadership. Xi Jinping has said that a number of different occasions of the first Trump term in particular and continues to engage in this process, even though the U.S. isn't there. I think the... Just one final point on this. In the history of these multilateral negotiations, when the U.S. and China have come together, it has helped to drive the process forward in very important ways. Most notably in 2014, when President Obama, President Xi Jinping, got together with a bilateral agreement that then helped to shape the Paris Agreement and make that global agreement possible. I think that also happened in the Biden years under Secretary John Kerry's leadership on the U.S. side. And obviously, that's missing today. And without U.S. and China driving progress, I think it's going to be harder for the world as a whole to drive progress. So I think that's a real loss for the world. Yeah, I mean, I think not only is it important for the two big countries to work together, that has a big impact on the diplomacy, has a big impact on the technological frontier. And I think the tension between the United States and China is mostly really bad for the green agenda. Greg Nemet has this wonderful book and website out called How Solar Got Cheap, and it looks at the story that David mentioned about the solar deployment in China, but from a global perspective, where you had innovations that began in Japan and the United States, they moved to Germany with the Antigavenda that brings down costs a little more. They moved to China with the manufacturing revolution, brings costs down a whole lot more. And because markets are more or less open,

the best technologies, best performing technologies have a global market and that brings costs down even more. And that same story is playing out with batteries. It's playing out to some degree in electric vehicles. This goes on and on and on. The tension between the United States and China and then all their friends, trying to figure out who they're friends with, is creating chaos in that. And that's driving up costs. relative to what they could be otherwise. In some cases, because of innovation costs are still coming down. So we have to find some way of rebalancing the trade relationship. It's not politically sustainable. Probably not economic sustainable either. But there are a lot of ways to rebalance that don't involve totally blowing up the political relationship. So that's my big concern here. And I guess one last comment on this is we have a tendency to focus on this as a tariff story. You know, tariffs are very much in the news. And the tariffs play a big role. But to me, what is having a bigger impact on the frontier of international trade is all the intellectual property, foreign entities of concern rules, kind of this Orwellian concept that for some federal policies, you in effect have to squeeze out any Chinese involvement in any aspect of the supply chain and be confident you've done that. That's just, and those rules will take full effect only in January. And so that's going to, is already creating a huge amount of chaos. And it makes practical things hard. For example, one of the leading designs for new nuclear plants is called the AP 1000, a plant designed by Westinghouse. We have two in the United States. There are six in the world. The others are all in China. It's hard to learn from the Chinese about what they've been doing running AP 1000s because we're obsessed about intellectual property and security. And then you wrap all that in nuclear. That all gets much harder. So it's those kind of practical things that are going to really hurt the green tech revolution. So I work or focus on the issue of adaptation, and every time there is a cop, there's some eye-popping numbers mentioned for new financial needs. And this time is no different. The estimates on the needs for adaptation, as well as a transition to clean energy are in the trillions at this point. But not many countries in the developed world are stepping up to the plate to pay big new sums. And the private sector is often looked at as the source for some of this money, but we haven't really seen that, particularly not in the adaptation. So... Can we really look for progress on finances at this cop or is it really off the rails? So I'll turn to David Sandelow first.

Well, Alice, first on adaptation. Thank you for all your leadership on this topic over the years. I mean, the work you've done in adaptation has been so important. And there's an interesting dialogue on adaptation that's happening at Bilem, independent of the finance dialogue, related to it, I guess, which is an effort to identify indicators for adaptation related to a global goal on adaptation. It's a little bit wonky, but I think it's an important dialogue that's part of this cop. On finance, I think this has been one of the most challenging, maybe the most challenging aspects of these cops. I think there's been more heat than light related to finance with really bitter conversations between developing country delegations and developed country delegations. I think developing country delegations looking for transfers of funds from public treasuries that are just not realistic. They're not going to happen. And the dialogue to try to bridge those gaps, I think it's been very hard. Many developed country delegations, including from the United States, have pushed back, have emphasized the importance of private capital is the only way to really meet these needs. And I think it's been a very challenging part of the multilateral negotiations. Yeah, I guess I'd say three things about this. First, agreed 100%, that adaptation is the key, even though we're making progress. were in for a lot of climate change. And for decades, literally, the science in this area has been very clear. The less wealthy, less developed societies will be more exposed as a fraction of the GDP and welfare measured in lots of other ways. And so they're really on the front lines and they're going to get hammered much harder. And so there's a moral obligation here and so on. I like to think of adaptation, not as adaptation, but as resilience. Because adaptation often implies you kind of sitting there. drinking my tides, waiting for bad stuff to happen, and then suddenly bad stuff happens and you have to adapt to it. Whereas what we really want to do is make the societies less brittle and more resilient. And so resilience seems to be in these days, and I think that's true also in climate. Second, funding situation is really, really hard. In part, because you've got all this chaos in the global system, but also because Most adaptation projects are designed to create local, I mean, they create local benefits, local jobs, local investment and so on. That's great. But they're intrinsically hard to get somebody else to then pay for because all the benefits and money flow in the place where the money is spent. And so in a world where folks are already wary about a lot of international transfers, adaptation is structurally a really, really hard problem. Last thing I'll say is, I'm less pessimistic about the state of adaptation because most resilience, because most of what makes society's resilient is built into the development process. It's built into how the markets function, insurance markets, for example, and the way infrastructure gets funded and whether infrastructure projects have an incentive to pay attention to climate exposures. And while there's a lot more work to be done, the situation today compared to 10 years ago, it's just radically different all around the world and the awareness of the problem and the extent to which concerns about climate is mainstreamed into development. So in that sense, I don't want to be overly optimistic here, but that's the right way, I think, to think about resilience. And in that sense, it's less of a project with a budget that somebody in another country has to pay for and much more of a process.

I do agree. The process is important. You've got to get that consideration of climate risk mainstreamed into the decision-making on everything from health to infrastructure to our financial markets. Still a work in progress, but as you've said, there is progress that's been made. We do have our first question from Robert Cohane. Delighted to have you with us. I was going to ask about Bill Gates' recent letter, which was reported, I thought, misreported it in the New York Times as backing off climate change. If you read the letter, as I read it, what it did was emphasize the importance of innovation. And exactly as David Victor was saying. So I want to ask you what you thought of Bill Gates' position. And is there a feasible path for a decentralized pattern of innovative action on climate change? Yeah. So the question from Bob is about the Bill Gates letter that's received a huge amount of press attention. I'm happy to say a few words initially about this. I read the letter exactly as Bob said, which is it's not backing off climate. First of all, it's saying that we have to do climate and lots of other things. And the reason you have to do the other things is because the return on investment from, for example, deploying vaccines is really, really high. The return on investment in form of resilience from development is really, really high. So that's why you need to not just decline and you have to do a bunch of things. So I saw him as saying that, frankly, that message has been a constant. among thoughtful analysts for three decades. So in that sense, there was literally nothing new in the letter, except that it came from Bill Gates, and therefore you had all this just like hyperbolic reporting, just completely hyperbolic reporting about it backing off and so on. The last comment I'll make is the message from that, I think, is we need to invest in innovation, which he's doing, a bunch of other people are doing, we need to invest in development, which produces resilience. I think not only is there a strategy for pushing innovation in the climate agenda, that that's what's in fact going on. And look no further than what US firms are doing, despite the fact that we have chaos at the federal level on climate or hostility, is you have all kinds of firms still working on clean tech. trying to do it quietly so they don't get noticed by the White House, but working on clean tech because there's opportunity there and because they also know that's where the puck is headed, I guess, as we go into hockey season. And so that's durable. And I think that doesn't solve the climate problem. You ultimately need to tax the polluters. You ultimately do a whole bunch of things. But that's the place where I see, in some sense, the greatest hope right now. Yeah, I thought Bill Gates made a number of very good points. I mean, first, the development is adaptation, development is resilience, as David was saying. Then the focus on reducing the green premium. And I think what's happening in solar right now is just a case in point of the importance of that. We've reduced the green premium and solar to zero or even negative and look at how it's taking off. And then his focus on human impacts, I think is important as well. I think he starts the piece with, I think, a kind of straw man attack on what he's.

calls climate alarmism or similar terms. And I think that got a lot of attention because he starts the piece that way. But then I think a lot of the piece makes some really, really important, powerful points. In fact, you can read, so we have this famous report from various distinguished scientists to the Secretary of Energy that came out last summer that was also attracted huge amount of press attention. You can read that as an attack on climate extremism. You can read the Bill Gates letter as an attack on climate extremism. The point is not to give up the guard on this, but the point is to manage this alongside a whole bunch of other problems. Thank you. Please do ask your questions. We have the next questions from SWATI M. Hi. My name is Swathi, and I work at EUSF, so a lot of my colleagues are at COP right now trying to figure things out with everybody else. My question is going to be a little unformulated because it's a new area for me, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. So it deals with the legal space, the climate law space that is progressing right now. And I see, you know, there's more ever since Paris Agreement was, adopted, there's been more and more legal cases by the people trying to hold governments accountable and by governments trying to hold corporates accountable and so on. And with the ICJ advisory opinion that came out earlier this year saying that governments have a mandate to reduce fossil fuel activity in their countries, and also there's a parallel conversation happening about how maybe the legal community can help with figuring out new financing models through the work that they're doing. Like, how do we use these cases to ask for more financing for adaptation, for instance? I'm just curious if you guys have any thoughts on this and what you're seeing as the most pragmatic way forward for climate law to play a role in improving accountability and financing for commitments made at COPS. Thanks. David, do you start? I think most of this is actually unhelpful because it's creating legal obligations where they don't really exist and they are pushing into the realm of the law. a bunch of questions that the law is not well suited to address. So, for example, Swati mentioned in passing the ICJ advisory opinion and the way a lot of people have interpreted this as we shouldn't be using as much fossil fuels. We will need to make big reductions in the use of fossil fuels. But the goal here is to cut carbon. So take, for example, the future natural gas. As an energy analyst, There is no, in my mind, no greater question right now about the future of the energy system than what happens to gas. You can imagine a climate world where we use much less natural gas because of its impact on CO2 and also methane leaking, or a world where we actually use more gas, but we do it with carbon capture and storage like this project that Google has just announced for Iowa for one of its data centers. I don't know what that's, that has to be worked out mostly by the marketplace and so on. So I actually see a lot of this stuff, the legal machinery stuff.

as folks being too clever by half, and it's not ultimately going to solve the problem. But the one area where it has a really big impact is that it creates a credible threat to firms and governments that are seen as dragging their feet, that they will be encumbered by some, you know, unknowable harm that could be catastrophic to them. That motivates a lot of experimentation. That's what Chuck Sable and I, kind of a wonky way, call a penalty default. It's an extreme outcome that you suffer if you don't work the problem. And that's been a big motivating factor in getting a whole bunch of firms to work the problem and governments to work the problem. And I think in that sense, it's helpful, but not for the reasons that the legal machinery folks think is helpful. I have a slightly more favorable approach to this than David. As a conclusion about it, I think the last point you made is an important one, David, that this has motivated companies in important ways. And I think this varies in legal systems around the world as well. I think in the U.S. legal system, it's less likely to be successful in the European legal systems and maybe some other countries. There's more potential for impacts that are important for climate mitigation adaptation than here in the United States.

Former judge on the panel, and I can tell you that there is an explosion of litigation regarding climate change. Most of the focus is in the international spirit, on governments not doing enough, damages from companies. And then we have this whole new field of science, attribution science, which is allowing litigants, plaintiffs, to put the... fingerprints, particularly defendants on certain levels of emissions. Here in the United States, we have a struggle occurring, unfolding between certain states and fossil fuel giants that's back in front of the Supreme Court for the third time this year as to whether states can sue for damages based on alleged conduct by the fossil fuel companies, for example, in not being completely forthcoming, allegedly, on the risks of climate change and the damage. So whenever there's money involved, and there is money involved here in terms of the harm caused by climate change, I think we will see many lawsuits going forward. And in some instances, they may not include even the term climate change. They'll just be talking about the impacts. A really important area to watch, and particularly with regard to these this big issue that the fossil fuel companies are fighting with these lawsuits against them by state governments is the endangerment finding and how that will play out if the Trump administration does withdraw that finding. It could open up greater liability for the fossil fuel companies. Really interesting area of the law. But I'm going to turn this over to our next questioner, Jennifer McFarlane. First of all, thank you very much. Nice to see you again, Alice. At least I get to see you. Jennifer McFarthur, and I've had a career in scathing climate tech companies. I have several hats now. One that's most relevant to the question is on the board of the nonprofit Vera. Terrific. Well, delighted to see you all today. My question is, how much, Josh Pudgeonby from University of Texas, my question is, how much damage can the Trump administration do to global efforts through coercive? attempts in international organizations to back away from either climate commitments like the International Maritime Organization or climate and clean energy monitoring like international energy agents. And if I may, a secondary question is any reactions you might have to Jessica Green's recent piece in foreign affairs about essentially critique of the cost process is obsessively focused on carbon accounting which leads to the kind of questionable emissions trading that you'll just talk about and and not enough effort to tell the balance energy and energy I'd welcome your reaction to her piece of you credit I'll just, I'll start on that and just, first, you know, the U.S. delegation through the past, you know, 10 years and more, and has been a tremendous intellectual leader in the climate negotiations. And for anybody who's interested, I highly recommend Todd Stern's new book, Landing the Climate, Landing the Paris Climate Agreement, which details a lot of this in great.

and the history and not just the kind of tick-talk of the negotiations, but also the thought that went into it. And Todd, people like Subini, who Dave Victor have already mentioned, Jonathan Pershing, Rick Duke, and Secretary John Kerry, they've all played a really important intellectual role in pushing the negotiations forward. So their absence, I think, is being felt. Josh, on your question about the damage the Trump administration can do, I think it's already doing it. And, you know, the ringing down of the IMO agreement, I think is, it's damaging, and it signals that there's more potential damage ahead. But on a more encouraging note, I think it is, it's a striking fact that despite the absence of the United States, the world is marching forward at Bilem, at COP 30. leaders are coming, delegations are coming. If anything, I think the absence of the United States once again is leading people, countries around the world to say, we're going to stick with this, even if the United States is coming in and out. Yeah, I think... Go back to the end of the Second World War, the United States has been a public goods provider. And building international institutions, that story has been told many times, including by Bob Cohen, who asked the first question today. And it was Jess Green as one of his former students, so the United States has provided these public goods in various ways. And since the early 1990s, the United States has not been a reliable provider of public goods in an environment. Sometimes we are, sometimes we aren't. But the flip-flopping in the United States is what's really interesting, whereas the reliability of the Europeans is they've really come in to fill that void. So when the United States is absent, people look to who else is going to do that. The Europeans are doing that. They always have done that and so on. The Brazilians are trying to play that role. There's incredibly talented diplomatic team that's running this from Brazil. Can they paper over fundamental disagreements? I don't know. But you say a lot of other countries doing this, the Chinese in various ways, technologically, are filling in some of this void. So you've got this fragmented global landscape where different countries for different reasons, different groups of firms are providing the kind of stability. I think... they can do a huge amount of damage for the reasons that David Sandelow mentioned, and that they're not there causing more damage right now, or at least visibly, is actually what's, I think, more interesting than that they are there. I do think everything that's interesting in terms of of deep decarbonization is capital intensive and it requires very long lifetimes. It's like infrastructure. And so when you're looking as an investor to do these projects, you're hunting for not just technology, but also credibility. Where can you deploy capital and get a return on your investment? And in the hunt for credibility, a lot of that hinges on policy. And the United States' credibility in that space has gone down as a result of all the flip-flopping at the federal level. So there are some states where that happens.

But the credibility engine is elsewhere. And I think that's the really big news. That's probably harmful to US industry over the long term. Jess Green is a close friend. She and I both think that going back, even to Kyoto, there's been an obsession with counting numbers. and having accounting systems and not enough attention to what's really going on in terms of innovation that changes facts on the ground, improves technology, because that's key to understanding how the politics change. If technology becomes easier and better performing, then things that used to be hard politically become easier. And so you generate your own tailwinds. So in that sense, she and I agree. We have different views about the lobbying groups and their pernicious behavior and things like that. But I think we have to just remind ourselves that we're not trying to create a legal engine in climate cooperation that's telling everybody what to do because nobody can do that through the international law. We're trying to create something that helps generate these tailwinds that are improving technology and are bending down the curve. So since 1997, we've already talked about the change in the relationship between the United States and China. But we've also seen in more recent years the development of something that may affect our progress on climate change, and that is the growth in AI and the determination to power more data centers for the AI-fueled world. So what does that mean for global climate action? I'd one of you. How long have you got, Alice? I know you know a lot about AI and what it will mean, but give us your elevator speech on this. I've done two book-length reports on this in the past couple years. This is a topic of an entire different session. But my short summary would be the following. There is a lot of discussion of all the power demand from AI related to data center electricity use. and the potential for that to increase emissions. I think that's something we need to pay attention to, and there has been some fossil fuel plants kept online in the United States as a result of data center demand, some growing natural gas use. I think by far the bigger opportunity here relates to using AI to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And there are lots of ways that AI technologies can do that. I think they already have made a big impact in a number of areas, including in particular in methane emissions monitoring and our methane mitigation strategies. We know much, much more about methane emissions today than we did 10 years ago. And that's the result of the deployment of satellites and other sensors combined with machine learning tools, which allow us to analyze all this data that we wouldn't be able to analyze otherwise. And then there's enormous potential in managing the electric grid, things like dynamic line rating and VPP's virtual power plants, which depend upon these tools. And then I think it's a big exciting opportunity in

materials innovation for clean energy. These AI tools can help us dramatically accelerate the pace of invention in areas like battery chemistry or super strong lightweight steels. We did a great workshop with some folks on geothermal and materials innovation and the potential for AI to make advances there. So I think there's tremendous potential for AI to make a difference on climate change. No guarantee that will happen, but there's tremendous potential. I guess I'd say, I want to say two things. First is, AI is in principle and now a little bit in reality, pushing out the supply curves in many industries. They're doing that in clean tech ways that David Sandelow mentioned. I'm particularly interested to watch what happens in the nuclear side and in grid management where these are routine tasks that are idealized, ideally suited to AI, and we're now seeing the leading firms push that out. We have to remember, of course, that AI is pushing out all the supply curves. So it's also improving the ability to find and produce oil and gas and coal where that's happening and to manage complex coal plants and so on. I think AI is biased green in that sense. I think more of the green tech revolution tasks are going to be improved, especially in a world that starts to care more about being green. But I haven't seen any really careful analysis on whether and how AI is actually biased green. But that's my sense. The other thing I'll say is, A lot of the, first of all, I'm just very impressed that we got to 51 minutes in a meeting on energy and climate, and we didn't talk about AI because normally, you know, all meetings that AI just sucks the oxygen out of the room in the beginning. And it's been the energy for AI discussion. My read of the literature is that we're almost everyone's overestimating the energy demand for the data centers because they haven't seen what happens when there's a strong incentive, grid reliability, the cost of electricity and someone to innovate. And there's a tremendous amount of innovation that's possible. add to that the bubble that seems to be going on, and we're kind of a big reset, and there's going to be a lot of overestimation. But I think the harder question is, what's the impact of AI on the rest of the economy? Because if we are on the cusp of a big productivity-led boom, a la what electricity did over a century, last century, then demand for energy is going to go up a lot because the economy is going to grow at a faster rate, all else equal, and that's going to compound over time. bigger energy for AI story, I think, than how many watts do we need for a data center? Well, just add from my perspective, one area where AI seems to already be making a difference is in adaptation, that is, is weather forecasting. And I just read today that... Deep Seek had the best modeling of Hurricane Melissa. So I think we will see improvements in our forecasting, which will allow people more time to prepare, which can reduce the damage. So as we're wrapping up here, I want to ask each of you, if you could give just one piece of advice.

to the negotiators that will come four years from now, not, excuse me, not next year, whether it's Australia, Turkey, wherever it may be, what would you tell them for their next COP 31? David? I hope I haven't stumped you. There must be something. Find the bathrooms. I'll tell you what I've already said. Maybe not negotiators, but strategists. Everyone needs to be working on Plan B or somewhere deeper in the alphabet. Because one of these years, one of these events will end. It's hard to predict the details, but the structure is easy to predict. One of these amazings will end in a catastrophic failure where some countries take their ball and go home for whatever reason. How do we make sure we keep momentum? When that happened to the Kyoto Protocol, it happened formally in 2009, one of these cops in Copenhagen, we didn't have formal agreement. It was great. I mean, everyone was upset and so on, but once they got over that, it was great because it opened the space for new ideas, and that was the Paris Agreement. Fantastic. This time, it... won't automatically be great because it could open the space for dumb resets or it could open the space for smart resets. So the number one thing I'd be working on, but probably not telling very many people about it, is what's our plan if the wheels come off the bus? I would give the same advice, and I'd put it at the best, they never give up. There's a saying that's ascribed to Nelson Mandela. He said, I never lose. I either win or I learn. And I think that keep that in mind, as David's saying. And this whole process, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. So keep marching forward. Well, thank you both. You've seen a lot of winning and a lot of learning, and I appreciate you sharing your experiences with us here today. I want to thank each of you for joining the discussion and really enriching our understanding of what it means to have 50,000 people descending in Berlin, Brazil, and elsewhere within Brazil. Special thanks to each of you and for those of you in the audience for joining us here today to learn more about COP 30 and what's ahead. Thank you so much. This event was brought to you by the Council on Foreign Relations. If you'd like to learn more about upcoming CFR events or catch up on global affairs, head to cfr.org. Thanks for tuning in.