COP Summit 'Was Like a Trade Fair'
Film maker Josh Appignanesi got insider access to the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. Now, his new film 'Colossal Wreck' is premiering in time to throw light on the forthcoming COP30 in Brazil
“It was like a trade fair,” says film-maker Josh Appignanesi, recalling his trip to the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, where he found himself rubbing shoulders with oil barons and bankers as well as fellow environmentalists.
Appignanesi was invited to the UN organised conference after making a documentary called My Extinction, about his eco-activism with XR. He captures his journey to the Gulf in his new film, Colossal Wreck which premieres next week.
The irony of flying thousands of miles to an oil state to participate in an event designed to stave off the climate crisis isn’t lost on Appignanesi, who admits to an appalled fascination with the futuristic ‘Blade Runner’ style landscape of Dubai.
“As a filmmaker, it was just the gift that kept on giving. The moment you step off the plane, you’re in this simulacrum, this sort of techno utopian fantasy, which some people think the world should look like.
“It’s clean, it’s safe, it’s got all mod cons. The ‘gastarbeiter’ [foreign guest workers] are nearly invisible, and you will only burn to death if you leave your air conditioned vehicle.
“So what’s not to like?” he asks with more than a hint of the irony that infuses the film.
His new release is timely, coming just a couple of weeks before COP30 in Brazil. The independent Climate Change Committee warned only today that the UK needs to be better prepared to cope with extreme weather conditions caused by global warming, which could lead to unprecedented heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and flooding.
COP28 was overshadowed by allegations that the United Arab Emirates - of which Dubai is the second largest member – was more focussed on striking oil and gas deals than on seeking to combat the use of fossil fuels. The President of the summit was Dr Sultan al-Jaber, who is also head of the UAE’s state oil company, Adnoc.
As Appignanesi drily observes, it was “extraordinary” to have a climate conference “hosted by an oil baron who was caught doing side deals with the sort of oil lobbyists who populate COP.”
The event itself, he says, “is like a trade fair. People are setting up their stall politically. They’re setting up their stall economically. There are some really smart, well intentioned people there, but everyone’s speaking that same language. Somehow the discourse is just at some level about money.”
Some delegates, he suggests, are more interested in getting their hands on goodie bags containing free iPads, than they are in saving the planet.
It is these obvious contradictions that lead many climate activists to regard COP with contempt, even though previous summits have secured international agreements on reducing greenhouse gases and have set targets for reducing global Co2 emissions.
Appignanesi admits, however that the gap between political promises and compromised reality is often uncomfortably large and he says, “there are powerful vested interest pushing back all the time as we’ve seen – and [that] is now mainstream rhetoric in the form of Donald Trump.”
Since Trump’s election for a second Presidential term in January, for example, the US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, negotiated in 2015, which committed signatories to reduce global warming to no more than 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra, encouraging the burning of fossil fuels, has led to a slow down in the transition to green energy, but at a time when the international order is fracturing, Appignanesi takes comfort from the fact that some of the world’s leading nations are at least in the room together.
“In these times that we live in, of international regulation and agreement essentially falling apart, growing nationalism and so on, it seems to me that international agreements, for all their flaws, are probably a good thing. International meetings where everyone, or almost everyone, is at the table, are a really good thing as the post war settlement unravels. I’m thinking, ‘well, the United Nations is not perfect, but is it just going to be every man for himself? No thanks.’”
COP delegates also – occasionally – hear from those directly affected by climate change. The most moving sequence of Colossal Wreck features an indigenous Brazilian woman talking about the destruction of her land and community in Guarani-Kaiowa, a region of tropical rainforest in Brazil.
Appignanesi says, “they are at the front line of climate change and environmental change. They’re also at the front line of climate injustice, because – and it’s not really a spoiler – they are being murdered. So she gets [to COP] and she says, ‘look, this week, three of my people have been killed, and another 34 wounded’. She says it’s a genocide – but it’s also an ecocide, and it’s also an epistemicide. In other words, a whole culture, a whole way of knowing and being is being destroyed.
“So she’s basically saying, ‘look, this is an international crime, and it has to be stopped’. I left something like three minutes of the speech in there, which is a long chunk for a documentary, and she’s just talking to the audience. It’s very emotional and the breath just goes out of everyone there, and you’re like, ‘okay, this is why we’re here.’”
Colossal Wreck premieres at the Curzon, Soho, London on October 22.
Listen to the full interview here: