The bureaucratic charade of UN climate conferences

The greatest irony of the yearly United Nations climate conferences, the most recent of which, COP30, wrapped up last weekend in Belem, Brazil, is the huge number of delegates flying into an event that preaches massive restrictions on flying. For example, when I attended COP15, the United Nations' 15^th major climate conference in 2009 in Copenhagen, I was astonished to find that, at about 30,000 attendees, it was literally the biggest conference in world history, up to that time. More than 85 world leaders attended COP15, another record for any conference on any topic, ever. Everyone from U.S. President Barack Obama to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well as the heads of state of the UK, Germany, France, India, the Philippines, and many other countries were all in attendance.

The event planners never expected all 30,000 registrants to actually make the round trip to Denmark, so when practically all of them showed up, the Bella Center, where COP15 was held, was overwhelmed and had to turn thousands away. I got in simply because I arrived and checked in well before the high level second week of the conference.

To make matters worse, especially for delegates from poor, hot countries who had spent the equivalent of a king's ransom to fly in, Al Gore showed up, and the statistically coincidental "Al Gore effect" was in full swing and Copenhagen found itself in it's coldest December in decades. So, after standing in line outside the center in sub zero temperatures for eight hours, only to be refused entry, thousands of delegates were furious at the organizers' ineptitude. Many of the protesters on the streets outside the event were undoubtedly angry delegates.

But COP15 was small in comparison with the most recent UN climate conferences. Below are the attendance figures of all COPs up to last year's since the first in 1995 as assembled by Carbon Brief. This year's COP30 was the third-largest COP in history with 56,118 delegates registered, while COP28 in Dubai was attended by an astonishing 80,000+ people. Expenses have also sky-rocketed along with attendance numbers.

One of the stated goalsof COP30 was "refocusing efforts on action and implementation by translating words into transformative actions on the ground." Yet the main action and implementation we see each year when countries send hundreds of delegates across the world to attend the conference, incurring huge expenses for taxpayers, is a massive expenditure of energy, and related carbon dioxide emissions, blatantly contradicting their own dogma that air travel has one of the worst impacts on climate change. Even Microsoft CoPilot AI, generally a supporter of all UN climate activities, prepared the image to the right when I asked it to create an image to show the emissions impact of 60,000 delegates flying to COP30.

We can get a sense of typical expenses involved by analyzing the expenses from recent COPs. Here are some examples: