93,000 Delegates, a Drowning Island, and a Coffee Cart

Palau president Surangel Whipps Jr put it plainly at COP31 in Antalya: "It is a painful process to go through to watch your island drown. To watch your farms being inundated with salt, your roofs getting blown off from the next typhoon. This is the reality that we live in." Meanwhile, Australia's Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen spent the first week of the summit answering questions from Australian journalists about the cost of a coffee machine.

That's the scene. The United Nations has gathered 93,000 delegates from 190 countries to plot a path through a climate crisis costing the world an estimated $US 1 trillion each year. The Australian pavilion has become the conference's most popular place to get a coffee. Coalition frontbenchers were still sneering at the cart's $32,000 budget on Friday.

Who Has the Power

Bowen holds the title of president of negotiations, a job he created after Australia lost its bid to host the event in Adelaide. His brief: get 195 countries to sign off on one text. "My job is to chart a sensible course, a practical course," he said. "I'm also chairing negotiations, which means we need 195 countries to agree with us, which means steering a consensus outcome. Not everyone will get everything they want."

Not everyone will get everything they want. Tell that to Palau. The consensus machine runs on the veto of its most fossil-fuelled members, and it took 28 years for a COP text to include the words "fossil fuel." Some nations are fighting to make sure it never happens again. When Bowen helped break the deadlock in Dubai in 2023, three years ago, he did it locked in a room with US climate envoy John Kerry, Dubai's COP president and Saudi Arabia's energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. A handful of men and a petro-prince, deciding the terms for everyone else.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it himself: "Fossil fuels must go the way of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs did not have a lobby. Fossil fuels do."

What They're Calling "Implementation"

The headline offering from co-presidents Türkiye and Australia is "35 by 35," a pledge to lift electricity's share of global final energy consumption from roughly 21 to 23 per cent today to 35 per cent by 2035. It is non-binding. It puts no strictures on the type of energy used. It speaks of "advancing the shared ambition" while "recognising different national circumstances and development priorities."

Fanny Petitbon of climate activist group 350.org didn't dress it up: "World leaders, the UN Secretary-General and negotiating blocs representing over 70 countries have urged progress on fossil fuel transition. Yet Turkey and Australia have answered with deafening silence."

The co-presidents are among the countries most reliant on fossil fuels for electricity. Türkiye announced on the day talks opened that new oil discoveries would lift daily production to over 100,000 barrels a day in the second half of next year. France says the pledge isn't worth anything if made on the back of fossil-fuel electricity. The Energy Transitions Commission estimated that if the whole pledge were powered by clean energy, it would cut warming by about 0.3°C. ABC Global Affairs Editor Laura Tingle called the central plank of the talks "starkly unambitious."

The numbers behind the theater are grim. This week's meeting was the first time it was conceded that the 1.5°C target had been blown. Forecast warming has risen from 2.6°C to 2.7°C. The United States isn't attending at a national level. China's President Xi Jinping sent his vice-president. Narendra Modi, Mark Carney and Sanae Takaichi stayed home. The Paris Agreement was signed 11 years ago, and Copenhagen was 17 years ago.

The Alternative

Richard Folland, a former UK diplomat now with Carbon Tracker, described what happens when the room deadlocks: nations blocked on fossil fuel transition build coalitions outside the process. Last year at the COP in Brazil, 57 nations did exactly that by signing the Santa Marta declaration. When the official channel jams, people route around it.

Back home, the government spent $150 million on the COP and pre-COP meetings. The Pacific Resilience Facility drew a foundational $100 million from Australia, with $200 million pledged against a target of $500 million. Domestically, the opposition and One Nation have pledged to abandon net zero, while an electorate battered by interest rate rises grows testy about spending.

Bowen, asked about the politics, shrugged it off: "That's climate politics, inevitably. The Liberal Party will always say it's too much, and the Greens party will always say it's nowhere near enough." On the coffee cart, a mainstay of every Australian COP pavilion since Angus Taylor came up with the idea five years ago, in 2021, he had his line ready: "They spend money on the COPs, but they had no impact while they were here. We spend money on the COPs, and we have impact."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opened the summit by declaring, "What has taken place in Gaza is not only a genocide; it is also an ecocide." The oil figures were announced the same day.