The Corruption of COP: Inside Climate Obstruction at the UN
Drilled
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The United Nations' climate processes were created to drive global climate action, but from the beginning they've faced organized efforts to delay progress. As COP 30 begins, Kari de Pryck (University of Geneva) and Eduardo Viola (Institute of International Relations, Brazil) join Amy to analyze how COP and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change get hijacked by those opposed to climate action, what it means for global climate policy, and what to expect at this year's COP in Brazil.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. In a little under a week, the annual UN Climate Summit, the conference of the parties. It's called that because these are all of the people who are party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or the UNF triple C. And they meet every year |
| 0:24.2 | to talk about what their governments are going to do about climate change. This is year 30. |
| 0:30.0 | And I think it's fair to say that this process is facing a real crisis of legitimacy at the moment. This year, the U.S. government has |
| 0:41.1 | barred any of its officials from attending to negotiate, so that should be interesting. For the last |
| 0:48.0 | couple years, the gloves have been completely off when it comes to fossil fuel executives being |
| 0:53.7 | involved in this process. |
| 0:56.0 | We had first COP 28 in Abu Dhabi, where the president of the national oil company was also |
| 1:02.7 | the president of the climate summit. And then last year in Baku, in Azerbaijan, where similarly, |
| 1:09.2 | loads of folks involved in the petroleum business were part of |
| 1:12.1 | the COP organizing committee, and there were just blatant oil deals happening all over the conference. |
| 1:18.7 | This year's COP is being held in the Brazilian Amazon, which is quite interesting. |
| 1:23.8 | And the Brazilian government and the conference organizing committee have really made a |
| 1:29.2 | commitment to information integrity around climate. They want to highlight this issue. They would like |
| 1:36.2 | to see something around information integrity actually being adopted into the final commitments coming |
| 1:43.3 | out of this cop. And they have made a big commitment to keeping |
| 1:47.7 | things like climate denial out of this conference. However, as we know on this show, there are |
| 1:53.0 | lots of different ways that disinformation can make its way into climate conversations. |
| 1:58.6 | And what we're going to talk about today is the way that climate obstruction |
| 2:02.8 | makes its way into international negotiations. So not just the COP, but also the intergovernmental |
| 2:08.8 | panel on climate change. These are not, you know, super objective, uncorrupted and uncorruptible |
| 2:16.5 | processes as much as they are often described |
| 2:19.8 | that way and as much as we might like for them to be. So today, a very interesting conversation |
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