COP29: A Veteran’s Account of the UN Process

Guest

Elliot Diringer

Global Fellow, Center on Global Energy Policy

Transcript

Elliot Diringer: It perhaps has raised expectations that each and every one of these COP gatherings has the potential to save the world, and it doesn’t work that way. We’re not going to ever achieve that slam dunk COP where we’ve got it all solved. The problem by its nature requires incremental and progressive solutions.

Bill Loveless: The international climate negotiation process stands at a critical juncture. At the recent COP29 Summit in Azerbaijan, nations struggle to find common ground on financial support and carbon market strategies, all while grappling with the persistent influence of fossil fuel industries. One of the most notable developments to come out of the summit is the $300 billion pledge from industrialized countries to help developing nations adapt to climate change.

It’s a significant commitment, but still far short of the trillion dollars scientists say is crucial to prevent catastrophic environmental impacts. So how can global leaders close the financing gap and what practical approaches can ensure meaningful progress in climate negotiations amid rapidly changing political landscapes? This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless.

Today on the show, Elliot Diringer. Elliot is a global fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy directing the Center’s International Dialogue on Climate and Trade. He brings decades of experience in climate diplomacy, having first engaged with the topic as a journalist covering the 1992 Earth Summit and later serving as a senior policy advisor to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.

During the Biden administration, he led the establishment of the Energy Transition Accelerator and innovative carbon crediting platform for developing countries. He also spent more than 20 years at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions serving as the head of the international program. Elliot has attended 26 conference of the party’s summits, most recently attending COP29 in Azerbaijan.

I talked with him about the COP process and its effectiveness and what the outcome of this year’s summit means for the global energy transition. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Elliot Diringer, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Elliot Diringer: Thank you, Bill. Great to be with you.

Bill Loveless: I hope you’ve gotten some rest back from Baku where you were attending COP29. I know I’ve spoken to others who were there and typically they come back pretty tired.

Elliot Diringer: Indeed. It’s been well over a week now, so I am rested up and actually preparing for my next international venture off to Singapore in a few days.

Bill Loveless: Wow! I hope you get some rest for that too. Well, your experience with global climate talks goes back decades to the very beginning of the process. In fact, you first focused on climate change as a journalist covering the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the San Francisco Chronicle. What first attracted you to this topic, Elliot?

Elliot Diringer: Well, Bill, I’ve had an interest in environmental matters I would say going back as far as my boy scouting days where I was first introduced not only to the great outdoors, but the concepts like the conservation of natural resources, and that’s stuck with me ever since. So it was my focus as an undergrad.

And then when I started out in journalism, I found myself very naturally gravitating toward environmental stories and really jumped at the opportunity to take that to the international level with the ’92 Earth Summit. So was thrilled to have the opportunity to be there covering it for the Chronicle.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, and of course, you went on, as we’ve noted, to work in various levels in the administrations, Clinton administration, Biden administration, as well as in Washington for the NGO for quite a few years. But here we are, you’re just back from COP29 in Azerbaijan where there was a major agreement on climate change finance among other things.

We can talk about that in a minute, but first I’d like to step back and take a broader view of this entire conference of the party’s process going back over the years. Your career has followed more or less the entire arc of modern climate negotiations, from President George H. W. Bush’s signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change back in 1992 to this most recent COP29 in Baku. How has this process evolved over the years?

Elliot Diringer: Well, it’s evolved significantly and I’ve seen the highs and the lows. And I think arguably there is no challenge that really calls out the need for multilateral cooperative approaches more than the challenge of climate change. I mean, climate is the quintessential global challenge. We’re really not going to successfully address it unless everybody is on board, and that does require a multilateral setting.

I think we’ve learned quite a lot along the way. This is an effort that has proceeded in fits and starts. We had the Kyoto Protocol in ’97. We had the low point of Copenhagen in 2009. And then I think we had the high water mark of the Paris Agreement in 2015. I think Paris actually reflects a lot of the learnings achieved along the way, learnings about what does and doesn’t work.

And I think we’ll only know over time whether Paris actually delivers, but I think parties got it about as right as possible in Paris, and we’re now in the midst of seeing whether the Paris Framework actually can mobilize the level of action we need.

Bill Loveless: I’ve heard you talk a bit about the so-called top-down or bottom-up approach to these climate negotiations that’s taken place over the years. What do you mean by that?

Elliot Diringer: Yeah, so I would characterize Paris as kind of a hybrid approach that combines top-down elements and bottom-up elements. Early on with the Kyoto Protocol, governments tired a more top-down approach where they actually negotiated binding emission targets, at least for developed countries, where countries committed in a binding fashion to reduce their emissions by a certain level.

That didn’t prove successful, frankly, and I think that nobody really had much of an appetite to try that again. Achieving the emissions cuts we need requires efforts and investments across the entirety of our economies. And I think in retrospect, governments were extremely reluctant to commit their economies to some binding international figure.

From there, things moved in a more bottom-down direction in the Cancun Framework, which came later, where it was really left up to each individual country to design its own voluntary pledge without much coherence. And that didn’t prove to mobilize a sufficient level of effort either. So what we have in Paris is this hybrid. There are some top-down elements.

For instance, agreed global goals like the 1.5 degree goal, also goals on finance and adaptation. There are binding procedural commitments to be a party. You commit to having a nationally determined contribution. Basically, you set your own target and you agree to report periodically on your emissions and on your efforts to achieve your NDC, your nationally determined contribution.

And that reporting is subject to different layers of international review. So you’ve got this agreed collective goal. You’ve got a process where you have to basically say, “Here’s what I’m going to do, here’s what I’ve done,” and then you come back every five years with a new NDC. So the intent is that ambition builds over time.

So those are the top down elements, and inherent in that is the bottom-up nature of the nationally determined contributions, leaving it to each country to decide the nature and the ambition of its particular contribution, taking into account its own national circumstances and reflecting its own political situation. So that’s what we mean by a hybrid approach there.

Bill Loveless: But the progress at these meetings, whether on financing for developing countries or transitioning from fossil fuels is so gradual, particularly to those countries most threatened by climate change. At this pace, some might say we’re likely to just run out of time when it comes to making sufficient progress toward meeting the 1.5 degree goal, right?

Elliot Diringer: Well, there is no question at all that we have not seen the level of action that we need. So measured against where we need to be, we are definitely falling short. Measured against where we might otherwise be in the absence of things like the Paris Agreement, we have made progress. I mean, before Paris, scientists said we were on a path toward 3.5 or 4 degrees of warming. And at this point, it looks closer to 2.5 degrees of warming. Again, not where we need to be, but better.

That can’t be entirely attributed to the Paris Agreement, but I think it deserves some of the credit for bending that trajectory in a more positive direction. But I think frankly, one of the learnings over the years is a more realistic sense of what we can actually look to the multilateral process to deliver. I think at one time we may have thought that it was the means by which we would drive national efforts.

I don’t think that’s the case. I just don’t think that’s the political reality. It can serve to facilitate efforts at the national level. And this comes back to building confidence, confidence that others are pitching in their fair share. Because part of the collective action challenge of an issue like climate change is that there’s an inherent disincentive to being ambitious if others are not being ambitious because you are assuming the cost of climate action.

But if others aren’t, you’re not actually achieving the benefits, and you are putting your domestic industries at a competitive disadvantage. So when you are confident that others are in fact doing their best, then you can be more confident in putting forward your best effort.

Bill Loveless: You shared with me a New York Times article by Brad Plumer. The headline was, “Are All These U.N. Climate Talks Doing Any Good?” Brad noted that some experts have concluded that it’s time to rethink the structure of the UN Climate Summits. He added, “Perhaps the answer is to move to smaller talks with fewer countries or to exclude oil and gas producers or to get rid of the rules requiring everything to be done by consensus.” What do you think of that?

Elliot Diringer: Well, I think it is certainly worth looking for opportunities to improve the process. I think first it’s important to recognize that this is not the only game. This is the big table where every country has an opportunity to have a seat and a voice. And for that reason, I think it confers some legitimacy that many countries, especially those that don’t feel especially empowered, feel very strongly about and will fight very hard to preserve.

But this is something that we need to be tackling on all fronts and at all levels. So over time, climate change has become an important feature of the agendas of the G7 and the G20. We’re pursuing it in other multilateral contexts, aviation and shipping and elsewhere. So the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement is not the exclusive arena for tackling these issues. It is far, far from an ideal process.

I think if we could unwind time and design it differently, we might. I think that periodically we hear the question asked, is it time to reinvent or maybe discard the process? I don’t think we can discard it. I don’t think we want to discard it. But are there ways to reinvent it? Well, the consensus decision-making approach is a challenge. The parties have never adopted formal rules of decision-making.

So by default it’s left to consensus, which is actually a pretty imprecise notion. It doesn’t mean full unanimity. It’s pretty much up to the chair of the talks to declare whether or not consensus has been achieved. And there have been instances where some parties are objecting. But nonetheless, a decision is gaveled through. But it does put each party in a position if it objects strenuously enough to hold things back or to water them down.

So I’m somewhat skeptical, frankly, that parties will ever be able to get beyond consensus decision-making, but it is to a degree a hindrance. The idea of smaller meetings, I think that’s one worth considering. One of the ways this whole process has evolved over the years is that COPs have become mega events. I mean, they started out as a forum for multilateral negotiation among governments attended by a few thousand government delegates.

Over time, they have taken on much greater import as the singular climate event of the year, which concentrates the attention of the media, becomes a focal point for civil society. And most of the attendees never step foot into the formal negotiations. And I think that this is all good in that it does provide that singular annual focus and in that sense is holding us all to account.

I think the flip side of that is that it perhaps has raised expectations that each and every one of these COP gatherings has the potential to save the world, and it doesn’t work that way. We’re not going to ever achieve that slam dunk COP where we’ve got it all solved. The problem by its nature requires incremental and progressive solutions.

But if there were a way to perhaps sometimes tone it down and make it more workmanlike and with less hoopla, then that might provide some opportunity for greater progress. And the notion of excluding whether it’s the fossil fuel industry or anybody else, frankly, I think runs counter to the notion of an inclusive process. And I think it can be a slippery slope. How do you decide who’s in and who’s out?

I know much has been made about the numbers of fossil fuel executives attending the conferences. When you look at the roster they’ve assembled, it’s a rather loose definition of fossil fuel and who is part of the fossil fuel industry. So I think the numbers are actually quite exaggerated. But however culpable the fossil fuel industry may be for the situation we find ourselves in, it’s very hard to imagine us solving this problem without them engaged.

And I think that it might do more harm than good to the process to begin creating barriers to participation. It’s not as if all these observers are literally at the table shaping the decisions. Obviously with their presence, they’re hoping to have some influence, but they are far, far outnumbered by civil society representatives.

Bill Loveless: Government policies can change dramatically, especially in the United States. Donald Trump has said he would once again pull the US out of the Paris Agreement and reverse Joe Biden’s climate agenda. What impact did that outlook have in Baku, Elliot, and for that matter on future climate talks, so the ones that will take place over the next few years?

Elliot Diringer: Well, unfortunately, the international community has become somewhat accustomed to the US being in and then being out and then coming back in. So this is something folks have seen before. I think in the immediate term, it probably did contribute to something of a weakening in the US positioning in these talks. The US remains a major player whatever administration is in power.

During the first Trump administration, for instance, even though the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement, we did remain a party to the underlying UN Framework Convention, continued to participate in the talks. And frankly, I think had a very constructive role in helping to shape the implementing rules for the Paris Agreement. It’s hard to anticipate just how things will proceed this second time around.

People are always hopeful for US leadership. They are also always critical of the perceived absence of US leadership. I think the real import may be not so much in terms of how the negotiations themselves are affected, but rather how a withdrawal of US leadership affects the level of ambition that individual countries are willing to muster at home. And frankly, that’s where the rubber meets the road with action in the domestic context.

When other countries see the world’s largest historic emitter stepping away and investing less in solutions, some may feel a little more relaxed about their approaches to the problem as well. But back in 2001 when George Bush declared that the US was not going to be joining the Kyoto Protocol, there actually was a rebound effect with other countries rallying around the Kyoto Protocol and bringing it into effect.

We’ll see. And I do think that one major consideration is how other major players like China respond in the moment, whether they’re prepared to step up in some way to help keep the effort on track or help put it on track.

Bill Loveless: Are actions taken by the US to address climate change embedded sufficiently in corporate policies and elsewhere, regardless of the steps the Trump administration is expected to take?

Elliot Diringer: So that’s a great question and I think to a large degree, yes, we’ve achieved some momentum. And one of the interesting features of the Paris Agreement is that while international agreements generally are about the commitments and the actions of national governments, Paris has had a much broader signaling effect, you might refer to it as, where things like the 1.5 degree goal have become internalized across society.

So for instance, you have thousands of companies that have set net zero goals. I think that’s pretty much a direct consequence of the Paris Agreement. And I think that many of those companies having publicly committed themselves to those goals will feel strong pressure to maintain and work toward achieving those goals.

But I also think there may be very significant staying power to some of the policies that have been put in place under the Biden administration, and specifically the Inflation Reduction Act, which commits billions and billions of dollars of financial incentives to support expanded renewable energy, the deployment of electric vehicles, and a whole range of other technologies.

These incentives are now in place and much of the benefit of them, frankly, has been flowing to red states. Similar incentives that were put in place under President Obama survived the first Trump administration. And I think that we’ll see certainly rhetorical attacks on the Inflation Reduction Act and perhaps some genuine efforts to roll back pieces of it, but I think there’s also a pretty reasonable chance that a good part of that legislation will remain intact.

Bill Loveless: You watched as your boss in the Biden administration, John Kerry, worked to reinstate the US in the Paris Agreement and put the US back at the forefront of climate talks. What was that like back at that time?

Elliot Diringer: Well, I think that, frankly, the US was very well received by the international community. This was one of the moments when there was great hope attached to the return of the US, and I think it had a kickstart effect, if you will, on the global effort. One of the roles I played when I was with the State Department working for John Kerry was helping to organize the Leaders Climate Summit that President Biden hosted in April of 2021, very shortly after coming into office, where we had 40 world leaders.

I mean, this was a virtual summit. We were still in the middle of COVID, but you had 40 leaders and a number of countries came in with new nationally determined contributions. The US announced its NDC. And I think that injected significant momentum into the process heading into the COP that year in Glasgow. That momentum I think has carried through to this point. Looking ahead, I think we are on the cusp of what may be the most significant test yet of the power of the Paris Framework.

I mentioned earlier that one of the commitments of parties under Paris is to update their NDCs every five years. So we’re at the point in the cycle where parties are expected to come in next year with their updated NDCs, which would hold them through 2035. So I think the level of ambition that we see reflected in this next round of NDCs will be very telling as to whether countries are prepared to actually step up their efforts and bring us closer to being on track with the 1.5 degree goal.

Bill Loveless: And Elliot, that raises the question again of with the change in government in Washington, the Trump administration coming in again, how much enthusiasm or effort will be put into coming up with those numbers next year?

Elliot Diringer: That’s true, and there’s an open question as to whether the Biden administration actually intends to table a US NDC for 2035 before President Trump comes into office. That’s still a possibility. That will set a benchmark, one that we might not be able to achieve depending on how things proceed in this next Trump administration. But you’re absolutely right that the signaling of weaker leadership on the part of the US may translate into lower levels of ambition from other countries, and that would be extremely unfortunate.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, it is a rather urgent moment. Well, let’s talk about COP29 in Baku. After some tense negotiations, something that’s not unusual for a COP meeting, there was an agreement to provide some 300 billion a year from industrialized countries to developing countries to cope with climate change. It’s a big number, Elliot, but one far short of what’s needed.

Elliot Diringer: Well, the 300 billion certainly is short of what’s needed. So parties set two goals there, the 300 billion, which is the level to be mobilized directly by governments with developed countries taking the lead on that, and then the 1.3 trillion, and this is with a view toward 2035. And that 1.3 trillion is based on independent estimates of what’s actually needed. And obviously this is an aspirational goal, and this would be all sources of finance mobilized by all players.

And that’s a signal not just to governments, but to the private sector, to finance of the level of investment that really is needed both to put us on track in terms of clean energy and other forms of climate mitigation, but also to help developing countries meet their urgent adaptation needs so that they can cope with the impacts of climate change. But let’s come back to the $300 billion figure.

I mean, the history there is that ahead of Paris, developed countries committed themselves to a collective goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020. And there’s often been confusion around that. It wasn’t that they established a new $100 billion fund, and it wasn’t that all of that $100 billion was meant to be in the form of public money either. It was a mobilization goal. So it also includes additional private finance directly mobilized by public investments.

There’s been an accounting approach established to measure the flows. And the developed countries were late in meeting that goal in Paris. It was agreed to extend it through 2025, and it took until fairly recently to actually hit that $100 billion benchmark. And there was an agreement in Paris that there would be a negotiation culminating this year at COP29 to establish a goal for beyond the $100 billion.

And that’s how we wound up with the 300 billion, which as we’ve said is well short of what’s needed, but at the same time is a tripling of the level of commitment seen earlier. And I don’t think that given the fiscal constraints that governments face and the unpopularity of foreign assistance in countries like the United States, I don’t think it’s going to be easy to achieve that level of finance.

One of the major issues in this negotiation was whether to enlarge the donor pool beyond the developed countries who historically have been the ones on the hook, so to speak, for delivering climate finance. The US and other developed countries have argued pretty strenuously that this is no longer 1992. Other countries like China and the Gulf states have amassed considerable resources, as well as having greatly enlarged their level of responsibility for climate change and also should be looked to to contribute toward these finance goals.

China, of course, has very strenuously resisted being recategorized as a developed country, but it did come into these negotiations talking for the first time about the level of assistance that it has provided to other developing countries, putting that in the climate finance context. They said that they calculated that they had provided $25 billion in finance since 2016. So definitely showing a bit of a different attitude on this issue.

And in the language around the 300 billion goal, there is a recognition of the role of the multilateral development banks in contributing toward that, and that actually provides a means of counting contributions from countries like China, which are contributors to the multilateral development bank. So in a sense, somewhat indirectly, this outcome kind of enlarges the donor pool, while still being very clear that developed countries are to take the lead.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, and there’s still considerable uncertainty as to when dollars or funding or financing will actually reach the countries that need it most, right?

Elliot Diringer: Well, I mean, the finance flows through so many different channels. I mean, there’s bilateral finance. There’s multilateral. There is the private finance being mobilized. For instance, when the World Bank invests in specific projects on the ground, it tries to leverage private finance coming in behind the World Bank contribution. There are significant issues around access to those resources. So a lot of the attention within the negotiations was also focused on ways to simplify and improve access to those resources so that the funds can flow more readily.

Bill Loveless: There were other achievements too, including a global framework for international carbon market trading. It’s a critical mechanism for less polluting and less wealthy nations to raise climate finance. This came after years of failed attempts to establish such a mechanism. How would this work, Elliot?

Elliot Diringer: Yeah, so these are issues that actually go back to Kyoto in ’97 where the US was the one at that time pushing most strenuously for the inclusion of different types of emissions trading approaches in the Kyoto Protocol. We had had some very successful experience using emissions trading to deal with the acid rain problem here in the US and thought it held great promise in addressing climate change, and really insisted on those approaches being built into the Kyoto Protocol.

Europe and others were quite dubious, but in the end consented. As it turned out, ever since, Europe has actually gone full force with emissions trading, while the US has never instituted emissions trading for climate purposes domestically, but has continued to support the use of these types of approaches within the international framework. And this was the last piece of the Paris Rulebook to actually be finalized, establishing the rules under which countries can employ emissions trading in meeting their own NDCs.

So the issues are highly technically complicated and also somewhat politically fraught. And the whole notion of relying on carbon markets to deliver strong outcomes has become somewhat tarnished over the years by some really unfortunate experiences with people selling emissions credits that really didn’t amount to anything and companies making claims about how they were offsetting their emissions with what turned out to be worthless credits.

So hopefully now that there are agreed rules on how this would operate within the Paris Framework, that can help to begin to restore some of the credibility around carbon markets. I think there’s been a lot of money waiting on the sidelines to see when parties would get this framework in place. There’s a lot of hope that the voluntary carbon market could become a very significant source of finance.

One of the projects I worked on before leaving the administration was the Energy Transition Accelerator, which is an effort to really mobilize the voluntary carbon market to invest significant sums in helping developing countries accelerate the energy transition within their power sectors. So this is something that I think holds a great deal of promise. And hopefully with the rules now in place, we’ll see those investments flow.

Bill Loveless: Dropped from the final agreement was an explicit reaffirmation of a pledge made at last year’s COP to transition away from fossil fuels. That was at the insistence of Saudi Arabia. Explain what happened, Elliot, and what does that say of the influence of Saudi Arabia and other Middle East oil producers?

Elliot Diringer: Yeah, I’m not sure that I would chalk it up entirely to Saudi Arabia. I think China may have been a very significant player here as well. But one of the major achievements at COP28 was the inclusion of language committing countries to transition away from fossil fuels. And this was regarded as such a breakthrough because historically the negotiations have kind of taken a technology neutral approach.

I mean, Paris doesn’t speak to specific technologies or fuels, but this was a very overt recognition of the role of fossil fuels in contributing to the problem and the need to transition away from them. I mean, the outcome last year also talked about tripling of renewable energy by 2030 and doubling the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. So really got much more granular and concrete in terms of the kinds of efforts that are needed to deliver on the Paris goals.

There was an agreement last year to undertake a follow on dialogue, and this is coming out of what was referred to as the Global Stocktake process. And that was what was under discussion this year at COP29 was how to structure and carry forward this dialogue. And there was very strong resistance from the Gulf states and from China to getting that dialogue off the ground.

I mean, in the case of China, it’s less about oil and gas and probably more about coal, but a real resistance to establishing a forum within the negotiations for countries to continue to focus on how to deliver on that kind of aspiration. And I think that this was I think one of the major disappointments at COP29, frankly.

It appeared to step back from the level of acknowledgement achieved at COP28 on the importance of transitioning away from fossil fuels. But these issues are by no means going away. They will be revisited at COP30 and I’m sure will be litigated again.

Bill Loveless: Speaking of COP30, what should we be anticipating as plans are underway for that meeting in 2025?

Elliot Diringer: Well, I think what may be most significant is what leads up to COP30 as countries table their new NDCs. And by the time we get to Brazil for COP 2030, we’ll be able to look across those NDCs and assess the level of ambition that’s being delivered collectively. And I’m sure there’ll be a lot of commentary by parties and others around those NDCs at COP30.

In addition, the finance issues will continue to be in play. The fossil fuel issues will continue to be in play. And I would expect that Brazil as a tropical forest country will also put those issues front and center, and we’ll see some renewed focus on the need and efforts to reduce deforestation.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, certainly it’s going to be still another significant COP meeting and one that who’s development will be looking forward to following over the coming months. Elliot, thanks for taking time today to join us on Columbia Energy Exchange to discuss this process, your long history in attending and covering it, and your observations on where we might go from here.

Elliot Diringer: My pleasure, Bill. Thanks very much.

Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Elliot Diringer, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Erin Hardick and Daniel Waldorff from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Lily Lee, Caroline Pitman, and Kyu Lee.

Sean Marquand is the sound engineer. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy Policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @columbiauenergy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way, we appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.

The international climate negotiation process stands at a critical juncture. At the recent COP29 summit in Azerbaijan, nations struggled to find common ground on financial support and carbon market strategies, all while grappling with the persistent influence of fossil fuel industries.

Industrialized countries did pledge $300 billion to help developing nations adapt to climate change, but scientists say the commitment is still far short of the trillion dollars needed to prevent catastrophic environmental impacts.

So, how can global leaders close the financing gap? And what practical approaches can ensure meaningful progress in climate negotiations amid rapidly changing political landscapes?

This week host Bill Loveless talks with Elliot Diringer about the COP process and what the outcome of this year’s summit means for the global energy transition.

Elliot is a global fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy, directing the Center’s International Dialogue on Climate and Trade. He served as a senior policy advisor to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and led the establishment of the Energy Transition Accelerator under the Biden administration. Elliot also spent more than 20 years at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, serving as the head of the international program. He has attended 26 Conference of the Parties summits, most recently attending COP29 in Azerbaijan.

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