By Bill McKibben
The United Nations’ COP27 climate summit, in Sharm el-Sheikh, on the Egyptian coast, is meeting in a vast convention center marooned along a dusty stretch of desert and filled with pavilions devoted to governments, companies, and N.G.O.s all proclaiming what they’re doing to save the Earth.
Look over one shoulder, and there’s an enormous screen showing video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of India, noting that recycling has always been a tradition in that country; glance in the other direction, and there’s a metaverse booth announcing that the virtual world is helping in the fight against climate change. Many thousands of people rush between seminars and press conferences and plenary sessions, as part of an earnest annual hustle and bustle that somehow almost always manages to accomplish very little.
On November 9, though, there was one topic on many minds: the U.S. midterm-election results. People flagged me down, since I am apparently recognizable as an American, to offer congratulations, in many accents, about John Fetterman’s victory in his Senate race in Pennsylvania, and to ask if Kevin McCarthy will end up as Speaker of the House, and to generally breathe a sigh of relief that the election had not produced the predicted red wave. (Since we are on the Red Sea, there was no end of puns.)
It’s a reminder that American elections matter in many ways—that who carries a stretch of the northern Virginia suburbs, or a tract of Orange County, is necessarily of interest to much of the world. Remember, work on climate change stalled for four long years, particularly after Donald Trump announced that he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord. And Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, sank hopes for last year’s gathering, in Glasgow, by refusing to support President Biden’s Build Back Better package. Manchin’s willingness to sign off on the shrunk-down Inflation Reduction Act was the most positive climate development of this year, and delegates in Egypt feared that an emboldened, resurgent right-wing Congress might, in turn, try to sabotage that. (The rest of the world has to pay attention to obscure American political customs, such as using the debt ceiling for extortionary purposes.) So Wednesday’s sigh of relief was entirely palpable.
That was particularly true at the Ukrainian pavilion, a small affair that is all the more moving for its modesty. (It’s the first time that Ukraine has had a booth of its own at the annual climate gathering.) The main exhibit is a small section of a tree trunk full of wartime shrapnel from the town of Irpin, outside Kyiv. In a video address to the summit on November 8, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “There can be no effective climate policy without the peace.” And when that peace comes, he promises, in a wall-mounted quote in the pavilion, Ukraine will go big on “green hydrogen.” Svitlana Romanko, a longtime Ukrainian climate activist who has become a key spokesperson on the link between fossil fuels and Putinism, was relieved, too, hoping that, even if the Republicans do win control of the House, their margin will be too slim to empower isolationist members to cut off aid to Ukraine.