by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
Over 70,000 people are in Belém, Brazil, for the annual UN climate change party, called COP30 because it is the 30th annual “Conference of the Parties.” This year there are 56,118 delegates, appointed by governments who are parties to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Besides the delegates themselves, there are over 14,000 observers, journalists, lobbyists, skeptics, protesters, and opponents of the predictable recommendations.
Those recommendations will attempt to address four political issues. First, where COP recommendations used to be threats against all the industrialized countries, this year it has devolved into a debate about whether such countries should even be asked to do better. Second, how to spend $300 billion that has been pledged for climate aid — which could become pointless as various nations renege on those pledges (keep reading). Third, how to handle various trade barriers that are only marginally related to climate. Fourth, how to report global climate progress, which the UN refers to as “improving transparency.”
Real transparency might also involve disclosing the carbon footprint of such a gigantic conference that always points fingers at everyone else’s carbon footprint. Not everyone there is a hypocrite, as some delegates express this concern every year, though of course they continue to attend. The impact is expressed as metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions (CO₂-equivalent). And the estimated climate footprint for 56,118 delegates attending COP30 is roughly 113,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. That includes hotels, local transportation, energy used by the venue itself (17,000 metric tons), and especially all the plane flights (96,000 metric tons).
That means every delegate is responsible, on average, for two metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, roughly half of the total annual footprint of the average human. How’s that for transparency?
