Podcast: Behind the scenes of the chaotic COP30

In this episode of C&EN Uncovered, host Craig Bettenhausen speaks with C&EN Policy and Regulation reporter, Delger Erdenesanaa, about her article talking about the trials and takeaways of the 30th annual United Nations climate summit. Check out Delger’s story on COP30 and the proposed biobased climate solutions and how they may impact the future of the chemical industry and the world.

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The following is a transcript of the episode. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Craig Bettenhausen: Welcome to C&EN Uncovered. I’m Craig Bettenhausen. C&EN Uncovered is a podcast series from Stereo Chemistry. In each episode, we’ll take another look at a recent major piece in Chemical & Engineering News and hear from C&EN reporters about striking moments from their reporting, their biggest takeaways, and what got left on the cutting-room floor.

The COP30 Climate Change Conference wrapped up recently in Brazil, and the results were widely hailed as middling. Delegates from world governments made some concrete progress, mostly around funding amounts and mechanisms for battling climate change and coping with its consequences, but the response from environmental advocates and many of the nations most in danger from rising seas has ranged from disappointment to anger. C&EN policy reporter Delger Erdenesanaa was on site in Belem, Brazil, for most of the proceedings and wrote a suite of articles about what happened. We’ll put a link to those stories in today’s show notes. She’s here today to tell us all about what you saw and what to expect going forward. Hi, Delger. 

Delger Erdenesanaa: Hi, Craig. 

Craig: So, for anyone that hasn’t had a chance to read your articles yet, can you give a brief recap of what you saw?

Delger: Yeah, so I was in Belem, Brazil for the first half of the conference, and, yeah, I actually started writing about it a bit before it kicked off, just to kind of set the scene. So these are these international summits organized by the United Nations that happen every year. This is the 30th year. If people know anything about them, they probably know that in 2015, countries came together, and they signed this agreement called the Paris Agreement, which sets this big goal of countries all said they want to limit global warming to below 2 °C above what the earth’s temperature was in pre-industrial times, basically and ideally, to 1.5 degrees above. And this year was a big year, because we’re now officially starting to get above that 1.5 degrees line. So that was kind of the context going into this conference.

There’s also the fact that the US is once again withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. They did this under the first Trump administration, and when he came in again for a second time this year, he announced that he plans to do this again. Yeah, so the US didn’t send an official delegation there, but pretty much every other country was there, more than, I think, 190 countries, and there was a lot of, I guess, hype about the congress taking place in Belem, because it’s sort of this smaller—it’s still quite a big city—but a sort of smaller city for Brazil that’s close to the mouth of the Amazon River, and it’s like basically in the Amazon rainforest. And so there was a lot of attention going into the event on deforestation.

And what I thought was really interesting about this year’s conference was that it seems like countries, industries, experts, the UN itself, they’re starting to pay more attention to the chemical industry, the chemical manufacturing industry, which is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. And I think a lot of people actually consider it, like, the hardest industry to decarbonize, you know, to get to a really, like, low or even zero emissions place, you know, maybe only, like, behind fossil fuels themselves. And I think because it’s just such a huge problem there, I think people have kind of put it on the back burner, and, you know, dealt with things that are a bit easier to deal with first. You know, like, just getting more renewable energy, you know, dealing with other industries like steel and cement, but there’s starting to be more attention on chemicals now, and Brazil is a really big player in the biofuels industry. And so there was a lot of attention to this idea of using more biofuels, both to fuel industries like chemicals and also to use, like plants, biobased products as a feedstock for the chemical manufacturing process.

Craig: What does a day reporting from COP30 look like? What are you actually doing as a reporter?

Delger: Yeah, it’s pretty chaotic, to be honest. So you have to get into the conference, first of all, which is kind of a whole thing, because there’s a lot of security, as you can imagine, and you kind of have to plan ahead of time, because there’s so much going on, like all at the same time, what you really want to focus on for the day. You know, whether you want to be trying to find individual people to interview, or whether you want to go to some of these side events, which is a lot of what I focused on, because I kind of feel like these experts are starting to pay more attention to the chemical industry. But actually, I don’t think the media is so much when it comes to climate change and what different industries should be doing. And so I felt like that was a good place for me to really focus during the week. So yeah, I tried to go to a lot of those different discussions that companies and people who research the industry are having, and then, you know, try to pull aside people to interview as well.

Craig: Interesting. So biobased chemicals have been a big topic at C&EN for a while now, we’ve been covering this. A lot of the companies, the chemical companies, they can make biobased chemicals. This technology is evolving, improving, but it’s there. What do the companies there, what were they asking for in order to increase their use of biobased chemicals? Do they say they need subsidies or they need mandates? What are their asks?

Delger: Yeah, I mean, kind of all of the above, like, they were there to influence countries, basically, to create policies and programs that help make their products more competitive compared to the conventional ones. And, you know, I think what exact policies they want probably depends on the individual country. But in Brazil, for example, like, the federal government started this new, like, labeling, like, third party, not third party, like, government certification program for these kinds of be considered more sustainable chemical products. So that’s one example. You know, this researcher from Japan, who also works for Mitsubishi Chemical, told me, you know, that’s something that people from different countries really looked to as a good example of a policy that promoted, like, more sustainable chemistry was the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, and that included a lot of subsidies and, like, incentives for decarbonizing things on a really industrial scale, for, like, making big industrial facilities greener and things like that. But that, of course, a lot of it is being rolled back, and then some of that funding is being canceled.

Craig: So even though the US is backing away from the Inflation Reduction Act, you’re seeing other countries kind of look at that as a model for their own policy structures.

Delger: Yeah, well, you know, we actually didn’t hear that much at this conference from countries, like politicians themselves, on this topic, very much. But those who, like, study this topic, watch it, who are advocating for change, yeah, they hold that up as a, as a good example for other countries to look at

Craig: Interesting so, so the advocates, the environmental advocates, and the companies, they also kind of like the mindset of the Inflation Reduction Act? Even if the governments aren’t necessarily saying one way or the other. Is that the right way to think about what you saw? 

Delger: Yeah, advocates, definitely some people from some companies, yes, yeah. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. And I would say also that, like, the people who are there from chemical companies, at least, that I saw and talked to, were mostly from these companies that pursue biobased products, for example, who are kind of in the green chemistry space and less so from, like, the really big, more conventional companies.

Craig: Biobased chemicals, and especially biobased fuels, they’re not universally hailed as an environmental win. Because you also talked to some people that are very concerned about the push toward biofuels, especially, can you talk a little bit about what their concerns are?

Delger: Yeah. I mean, a lot of people have very legitimate concerns about this, because if you’re growing crops to be used as biofuels, as bio feedstocks that potentially, depending on where it is, how it’s done, it could contribute to deforestation, because that’s something you need land for, could also potentially even displace the use of that land for food, so it could have an impact on the food supply, potentially. There’s also a lot of controversy over the accounting of the carbon emissions, basically, behind all of this. So, you know, I think, like, intuitively, you would kind of think, okay, plants are renewable, if you can grow them again and again to be used for this, they also absorb carbon dioxide. And so it seems like this should be a lower emissions thing than using fossil fuels. But there is some research that shows sometimes using biofuel can actually increase emissions. But if we’re going to do it, it’s definitely something that needs to be done carefully. And I think what it looks like really depends on where exactly you’re doing it, what crops you’re using, things like that.

Craig: And especially on the fuels, and especially on the ethanol side, the indirect land use change is a metric that people argue over a lot. Did you run into that in the discussions?

Delger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s really, like, at the heart of this controversy over whether or not it actually increases emissions. Because if you, for example, are converting, like, a forest or some other sort of natural ecosystem to turn into farmland, to grow these crops, just that process of chopping down those trees or, like, tilling the soil or whatever, that is an activity that releases, you know, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And there’s different ways of counting those emissions into the activity.

Craig: I imagine in Brazil, that’s probably a more controversial topic. So, because in the US, it’s kind of, it’s a lot of corn in existing corn fields, but in some of the tropical areas like Brazil and parts of Africa and parts of Asia, there really is a real deforestation risk to increasing bio feedstocks.

Delger: Yeah, the Brazilian government was really sort of touting the biobased economy as something sustainable that it’s doing to fight climate change, but it’s hugely controversial, especially among Indigenous peoples who live in the Amazon rainforest. Something that I think was pretty notable about COP30 was that there was a really big presence of Indigenous peoples there, a little bit less so in the official negotiations themselves, but certainly a lot of people were there just at the side events, also protesting outside the conference. And there was even this whole side event somewhere else in the city at a university called the People’s Summit, where people put forth their solutions to climate change. Something that people really are calling for is stronger land rights for Indigenous peoples, for local communities, so that they can have more say about whether their land is going to be used for these kinds of purposes or not.

Craig: So at its core, COP30 is a negotiation. And a lot of these questions about how do we count land use and greenhouse gas emissions come down to just two parties that don’t agree. negotiating. Was there progress? Was there a compromise? What did they actually accomplish on some of these fronts?

Delger: Most years, the progress that they actually make during these negotiations is pretty incremental. At the end, countries produce this document, like a declaration or an agreement, that kind of lays out what they’ve all come to a consensus on, and it’s consensus based, so everyone has to agree, which really is part of why progress is so incremental. Some of the things that they made progress on was basically saying, we all commit to giving developing countries more money for their climate efforts, especially adapting to those effects of climate change that are already here, like extreme weather, money to deal with those consequences. They also committed to prioritizing this idea of a just transition, so, like, a transition to cleaner energy and the low-carbon economy that doesn’t leave behind workers in affected industries and doesn’t cause additional pollution or, like, other environmental problems as a consequence of some of these newer industries that we need to grow. People were kind of disappointed, though, because there wasn’t really any concrete agreement on what to do about deforestation, for example. And something that actually happened was a group of countries came together to create this whole separate thing outside of the official UN process. Countries like Brazil, like Colombia, like the Netherlands, and they recruit a lot of other countries to sign on as well, saying, well, okay, maybe we can’t get to a total consensus on this, but here’s a group of countries that is committed to ending and even reversing deforestation and also to transitioning away from fossil fuels. 

Craig: I remember seeing some coverage that one of the things that had environmental advocates most upset is that there wasn’t a stronger call or agreement to move away from fossil fuels.

Delger: Yeah, you would think that that’s something that is at the center of climate change, obviously, and would be at the center of these negotiations. But there are a lot of really powerful countries whose economies depend on oil and gas, and so, yeah, historically, they have rejected or just waffled on the idea of a complete transition of the global economy away from fossil fuels. I think a lot of those countries prefer the idea of still using some oil and gas, but then using carbon capture or carbon removal from the atmosphere, for example, to kind of balance out those emissions. So coming to an agreement on, like, a total transition away from fossil fuels is hugely controversial among all the different countries. And a couple of years ago, actually, they did manage to put language saying that this is something that we’re working towards. And so this year, what they did was they just, they referenced that past agreement, but they didn’t put anything new into this year’s agreement on how to implement that past agreement, and they didn’t explicitly use the words fossil fuels.

Craig: So I have to ask the kind of pessimistic vibe question, because one of the motifs from some of your coverage, the average coverage, is that there was money and agreement around adapting to climate change, and not a lot of agreements around actually changing our behavior. And as you said, it was, we’re hitting 1.5 before the meeting even starts. Are people at COP 30… Have they given up?

Delger: No, I don’t think they’ve given up, but I think, yeah, everyone knows that if we want to take that goal of 1.5 or even two degrees seriously, we’re not on track to do that. There have been so many other big global issues that have taken up a lot of the international detention. I think countries are still slowly chipping away at the climate change issue. Like we touched on, some countries are trying to, outside of this really slow, incremental, UN process, kind of create momentum in these different ways. But, yeah, I think the general vibe is we’re still working on this, but slowly and not fast enough. We’re still in this fight. The fight is alive.

Craig: So, it seems like this year’s COP meeting was especially tense with, as you’ve mentioned, some of the global consensus around the climate crisis and the goals kind of cracking apart. Could you feel that tension on the ground as you were reporting?

Delger: Yeah, it was pretty tense. And, I mean, I think the atmosphere was chaotic in general, and the absence of the US was something that was a huge elephant in the room that everyone could feel.

Craig: No, you say they’re absent. I mean, were they just not there at all, or did they not have an official delegate?

Delger: I’m actually not sure. They definitely didn’t have an official delegation. I’ve been to some of these UN congresses in the past, where I know they sent, the government did send a couple of people quietly, more so to just kind of observe the process, and I’m sure they were having conversations with people in back rooms or whatever. Yeah.

Craig: Do you get the sense from this that the real action is in the room with the microphones in the auditorium, or is it in the back hallways and conference rooms and late-night cigar discussions?

Delger: Yeah, I think the real action is definitely behind the scenes, especially when it comes to these countries that are heavily dependent on oil and gas. I think the real action is, you know, whatever one-on-one conversations people managed to have with those countries.

Delger: Now, some US states participated, though, right, in an official capacity. I think I remember seeing Gavin Newsom, there were some US state presence.

Delger: Yeah, there was. Gavin Newsom, most notably, I think also the governor of New Mexico was there at one point, but yeah, Gavin Newsom definitely puts himself and California forward as kind of a big, powerful economy, just on its own as a state, and kind of has positioned California as a counterweight to the US as a whole, and as a place that is still committed to taking climate action. People definitely swarmed him whenever they saw him.

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Craig: So you were there in an official capacity, representing C&EN, what kind of people and organizations sought you out, wanting to be heard by the readers and listeners at C&EN news?

Delger: Yeah, people in the chemistry industry, especially companies that feel that they are doing something to tackle climate change were definitely eager to talk and put forward those kinds of solutions, both to kind of, like, show off their efforts, but also, you know, maybe as an example of how their companies can learn from and put forward their opinions on what governments should do to support a greener chemical industry overall.

Craig: And one story that I saw briefly, there was a fire.

Delger: There was, yeah.

Craig: What happened? What was going on? Why was the conference on fire?

Delger: I had actually left at that point, but yeah. I mean, so these conferences are huge, right? And sometimes they have to put up temporary facilities. This was happening in a giant tent, basically, a tent that was powered by diesel generators, and they had kind of been having electrical problems all week when I was there, and then, yeah, shortly after I left, a fire broke out in part of the tent. So yeah, I think people kind of saw that as a metaphor for climate change overall. 

Craig: Yeah, I didn’t realize this was a diesel-powered climate change conference that then caught on fire. That is quite the statement.

Delger: Yeah, a lot of allegory there.

Craig: So what’s the future for COP? Because I think people, it seems like every year, get more and more frustrated at the pace of change of COP. And there’s been some discussions about changing the COP process.

Delger: Yeah, there’s some discussion. A lot of countries are really frustrated by the slow pace of it, and in particular, this requirement that you have to come to a consensus between every single country in order to say anything as a group, and so, yeah, I think there’s some rumblings about whether they move away from consensus to maybe, like, a majority vote or something like that when it comes to the final agreement that emerges from these summits. I think we see more and more of these voluntary initiatives organized by groups of companies, groups of countries, and we see more and more just happening outside of the UN process as well.

Craig: Yeah, thinking about that sort of consensus-versus-a-vote thing. I mean, what kind of authority do the delegates have? I know that in the US, they have to then come back and get a treaty approved by Congress, so.

Delger: Right, yeah. So, I mean, it depends on whatever your individual country’s laws are, like if the US had sent an official delegation, for example. So the way the Paris Agreement worked was the negotiators from countries—with direction from their governments back home, of course—they agree to something there, but yeah, then generally they have to go back home and get whatever is in that agreement, that treaty, or whatever, passed through their national legislatures.

Craig: Yeah, I’m often surprised. I report for the business group, and I end up in meetings that aren’t there for public consumption. It’s the industry talking to the industry, and I don’t want to take their feet off the fire by any stretch of the imagination, but I do see these conversations happening among the chemical industry, even when no one’s watching, which is encouraging. Now, I’m sure it’s not everybody, and I’m sure that there are some darker corners that I’m not invited to, where they’re rolling some things back, but there is some genuine will.

Delger: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that’s the case for the issue of climate change, just broadly, right, at this point, everyone is aware of it, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. And I think when you have money on the line, like, you are thinking about it definitely, and I think that’s why we see more and more effort and money being put into adapting, for example, and, like, dealing with extreme weather, because that’s something that you can see, that’s obvious, that you just have to tackle it. But when it comes to actually using cleaner energy, phasing out fossil fuels, that’s where it gets difficult.

Craig: Yeah, the chemical industry is actually hugely at risk from sea level rise. Most chemical production assets are on the coast in order to take advantage of shipping. There aren’t a lot of chemical factories up high in the mountains. I’m not going to say none, but as an industry, there’s a lot of risk that they’ve got to be acknowledging on their books and hopefully doing something about.

Delger: That’s a really good point. That’s something that didn’t really come up at COP, but, yeah, that is a huge issue.

Craig: Now, you mentioned that the chemical industry is responsible for a big chunk of carbon dioxide emissions. Do we have a solid number like we always say that aviation is 2%, do we have a number like that for the chemical industry?

Delger: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, there’s different ways to measure this. I think a group that people generally look to for reliable numbers is the International Energy Agency, and they say that primary chemical production accounts for about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. I mean, which kind of doesn’t sound like a lot, 5%, but when you think about it coming from just, like, one industry, that is a lot.

Craig: And for some of our listeners that might not be deep into chemicals production, there’s two big hats. There’s the heat that’s used by chemical factories, but then there’s a lot of process emissions, a lot of chemistry that’s done at industrial scale emits CO₂ as a byproduct. And so there’s these two levers that the chemical industry is trying to pull on with varying levels of success.

Delger: Yeah, that’s right. And then there’s also the issue of fossil fuels being used as a feedstock, you know, as a raw material that goes into making these chemical products. And depending on how those products are disposed of, what happens to them when people are done using them, that is actually something that could eventually be released back into the atmosphere as well.

Craig: Yeah, that end of life. When you talk about something being biodegradable, that usually means it’s breaking down into CO₂.

Delger: Yeah, and because of the use of the issue of these feedstocks, chemical manufacturing is actually the largest industrial, at least consumer of fossil fuels in the world.

Craig: I didn’t realize that. So is there anything else from your trip that you thought was interesting that didn’t make it into your story, but you really wanted to tell somebody?

Delger: Oh, there was so much. I mean, yeah, I wish that I could have gotten out of the main conference itself and gone to this People’s Summit, for example. I mean, there was just so much happening on the sidelines. There was so much protest going on. Something about this year, the summit happening in Brazil is, you know, Brazil is a democracy. It’s relatively open to things like protests from its citizens compared to some of the countries where the conference has been held in recent years, so there is just a huge civil society presence, yeah, which definitely adds, like, a different dynamic to these negotiations. Kind of surfaces different kinds of concerns that just everyday people have about climate change. Yeah, I think one point that maybe I want to make sure we touch on is just the issue of consumption, right? There’s just so much competition for resources, you know, especially when it comes to land to produce biofuels, for example. I think that ultimately, just the amount of chemicals, the amount of energy, the amount of land we all consume, is something that, that has to be tackled in order to solve this carbon emissions climate change problem.

Craig: Yeah. So an interesting, personal angle, this trip was very short time after you started at C&EN.

Delger: Yeah.

Craig: As a climate reporter, after this trip, how are you feeling about chemicals as an angle on climate change?

Delger: I think that’s just reinforced how important of an industry it is and how much it needs to be part of the climate change conversation. Going and reporting was a great way for me to see this, the scale of the chemical industry, especially the manufacturing part of it, but also just to get a better sense of how complicated and long these supply chains are. And, yeah, it’s, it’s a really thorny, difficult, but important issue. And yeah, one that I think we all need to be reporting on.

Craig: Well, Delger, thank you for diving deep on this with us.

Delger: Yeah, thanks for having this conversation with me, Craig.

Craig: Listeners, you can find me on social media as @Craigofwaffles. Delger, how can they find you?

Delger: They can find me, well, first of all, if you have any tips for future stories, you can just email me at my C&EN email, it’s D_Erdenesanaa@acs.org, and you can also find me on Bluesky @EDelger or LinkedIn, just by searching my name.

Craig: Great, well, you can find Delger’s story about—well, the stories about the 30th annual United Nations Climate Summit on C&EN’s website, or in the December print issue of C&EN. We put a link in the show notes along with the episode credits. We’d love to know what you think of C&EN Uncovered. You can share your feedback with us by emailing cenfeedback@acs.org. This has been C&EN Uncovered, a series from C&EN Stereo Chemistry. Stereo Chemistry is the official podcast of Chemical & Engineering News. Chemical & Engineering News is an independent news outlet published by the American Chemical Society. Thanks for listening.