Communications ConCOPtions
How two UN bodies tried this week to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat
After this week’s UN Conference of the Parties (COP) conferences on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Tobacco Control (WHO’s FCTC) demonstrated the wasteful ineffectiveness of these global travelling circuses, the two events closed with their prewritten press releases celebrating their enormous success. But how on earth can the UN continue to pretend that their failed global policy system is anything but ridiculous? Strangely, these events need to fail in order to meet the multitude of their success factors.
COP30 Climate Farce
COP30 will not be remembered for any significant achievements but rather for the hundreds of thousands of trees cut down to build a highway through the Amazon rainforest to the conference site, the Brazilian officials who called the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz a Nazi, the indigenous group’s onslaught on security officials as they took over the conference site, and parts of the African Pavilion burning down (due to some malfunctioning fossil fuel generator). While 80% of the citizens of Belém, the COP30 host city, have no access to a functioning sewage system, they had to suffer the complaints from conference Karens about the issues with food and transportation.
The narrative for COP30 was written well in advance: play the blame game.
The fossil fuel industry would block any meaningful agreement so the conference gameplan was to set up the barely involved industry as the scapegoat, focusing on their “interference” as the cause of the failure to even label fossil fuels as the cause of anthropogenic climate change. (For the record, humans who eat, travel and use electricity are the cause of a small percentage of global CO2 emissions that are man-made.)
Before the event, NGOs aligned with KickBigPollutersOut got the media to report that less than 4% of all COP30 attendees came from the fossil fuel industry (the number was adjusted upward from 2% despite the reality that most delegates at COP30 from NGOs and that most of the industry actors attending were proposing means to transition to low carbon energy alternatives).
After the conference, activist delegates from Greenpeace and other NGOs were all over the mainstream media bemoaning the COP30 failure (because of industry collusion, and, of course, Donald Trump).
Behind the declarations of failure and disappointment from one and all, the UNFCCC quietly snuck through a document that was the most demanding yet on the global community. The UN press release was a clear effort to snatch victory from the jaws of predicted defeat. COP30 apparently agreed to mobilize $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 for climate action, double adaptation finance by 2025 (sic) and triple it by 2035, replenish and operationalize the Loss and Damage Fund, and provide a forest finance roadmap to try to close the $66.8 billion annual gap for tropical forest protection and restoration. The last roadmap, like the UN declaration to censor challenges to the manufactured climate consensus, have only been signed by a limited number of countries.
How are they going to achieve all of these ambitious targets? Who is actually going to pay for these trillions of dollars? Well, that is a planned failure for another day. Today the UN, the activist communities and the media will redirect the focus on blaming everything on the present group of scapegoats from industry.
COP11 on Tobacco (and Message) Control
If ritually blaming industry for blocking leadership on climate change has become the policy playbook at the UNFCCC COPs, they learnt the rules from the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). This is an even harder propaganda contortion for the FCTC given that no tobacco industry-affiliated delegates (down to the fourth level of relationship) were allowed anywhere near the COP11 conference center in Geneva. They only allow observers from NGOs who will repeat the FCTC’s strict orthodoxy against tobacco harm reduction (and non-existent NGOs that Michael Bloomberg told them to accept).
As expectations for success at the 11th COP on tobacco control had been tempered, there was not much to mention in the final agreement. There was something about the environmental pollution of cigarette butts, more ways to litigate Big Tobacco and the promise of an agreement on illicit tobacco trade. But the reality is that the parties to the FCTC are tens of billions in arrears for the funding of past objectives, so there would be no point putting more policies on the table. Most of this year’s COP11 achievements were “reaffirmations” of past declarations.
Where the FCTC tried to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat was in moving the focus from tobacco control to nicotine control. Their closing press release frequently mentioned actions against “tobacco and nicotine products”. The WHO General-Secretary, Tedros Ghebreyesus claimed in a COP11 speech that e-cigarettes and other nicotine alternatives were as dangerous as tobacco. Any parties to the conference, like New Zealand, claiming that they had achieved radical reductions in smoking rates by responsibly regulating the use of tobacco harm reduction products like e-cigarettes, were roundly condemned. Harm reduction was portrayed as a disgraceful industry tactic.
The FCTC has become such a farce that their obsessive narrative control of the COP conferences has spawned an alternative parallel event, the Good COP, where scientists and harm reduction experts met to promote a human-friendly and results-oriented alternative. The FCTC will continue to hold their COP conferences, but as long as the organizers are beholden to the zealots and billionaire prohibitionists, no one will notice and fewer delegates will bother attending or contributing.
Finding Success in Perpetual Failure
As shown in a recent Firebreak article, no one benefits from the UN intergovernmental multilateralism actually succeeding. If the UN organizations (from the WHO, UNFCCC, UNEP…) were to actually show leadership and solve any global problems, there would be no more rosters of meetings to put forward endless policy demands, NGOs would lose an important stage for their campaigns, industries could no longer buy time between the endless COP failures to develop and promote their innovative alternatives and the media wouldn’t be able to relish in an almost weekly supply of global fear campaigns to report on. Even billionaires like Michael Bloomberg would have to find alternatives for his billions that he is wasting at the moment merely to have the title of WHO Global Health Ambassador and the opportunity for the former US presidential candidate to strut on the world’s stage.
There must be something very cynical about people who wake up in the morning and go to work thinking about how they can manipulate their failures to their benefit. I suppose that’s why Michael Bloomberg has to pay them an average of $25,000 a month. They profit well at the cost of their integrity.
The only people who don’t profit from these perpetual failures are the consumers, investors and publics who face the consequences of bad policies, bloated, wasteful budgets and dangerously myopic transition strategies. But it was never about these poor people. They can endure without a working sewage system, but our UN delegates need that highway through the Amazon to get from their jets to their nice new hotels.