What Is Anyone Really Doing at COP?

The size of COP28 is hard to comprehend, even from the ground. More than 97,000 people have registered, according to the massive spreadsheet of expected participants, enough to populate a small city. The campus and its temporary denizens feel like a city too. Meetings are spread out across nearly 100 buildings, all with the freshly built feeling one expects from Dubai. During the day and into sunset, the main promenades look like the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan at rush hour; they spoke outward from a giant geodesic dome that emits spa-like tone sounds and glows different colors at night.

Thousands of the people here are country delegates, and thousands more are climate experts in various capacities—representatives from Indigenous communities in full traditional regalia, policy people, activists, nonprofits, journalists. At least are fossil-fuel lobbyists, according to one estimate. Milk lobbyists are evidently also here, because two dairy-trade organizations held a on Tuesday to extol the virtues of animal-sourced food. The aviation