Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

I'm VJ Vaitis Warren. I'm the Global Energy and Climate Innovation Editor at the economist.

How many cops do you think you've covered at this point?

Too many is the answer.

There's no good number to cover.

COPS stands for Conference of the Parties.

It's the UN's annual summit on climate change.

This year's cop in Sharmel Sheikh Egypt

is the 27th one.

The most memorable one probably was in the Hague in the Netherlands a couple of

decades ago when I was standing near Frank Lloyd, the US negotiator who had a pie thrown in

his face and I can still taste the custard.

Vijay argues that not all cops are created equal.

There are big ones and there are little ones.

So every five years or so is a big cop, meaning there's something quite substantial on the agenda,

a major breakthrough. We can think about the Paris Accord, which was reached, of course, in France. That was a big cop. There's a lot that people had to negotiate for. And then a number of years went by and then we had the Glasgow Cop.

That was a little more than five years because of the pandemic.

But that's the rhythm of these UN conferences of the parties.

Vije says that this year's Cup, Cup 27, is a little cup.

But that doesn't mean that nothing is going to happen and there is one very explosive

issue which I'm sure we'll talk about, which is reparations. Climate reparations, what the UN calls loss and damage. That would mean

rich countries, big emitters like the United States, would pay developing nations for the damage they've

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