COP28 in Dubai, Russia Crackdown on Journalists, China Illness Spike, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, the COP28 climate summit gets underway in the UAE and the latest Russian detention of a U.S. journalist raises concern. It's November 30th, 2023 in time for The World Next Week. I am Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins. So Bob, let's begin in Dubai. Today is the start of COP28, the annual UN Climate Change Summit. There are going to be some sixty thousand participants including scores of world leaders attending and this year one of the main outcomes is a so-called "global stocktake." And this is the first formal assessment of progress or lack of progress the world has made toward mitigating global warming since the Paris Agreement was first negotiated in 2015. There's a lot of concern that we're falling further and further behind the 1.5°C goal. And there's also concern about this year's host, the UAE is a major oil and gas producer. And the BBC reported earlier this week that they had seen some briefing documents that showed that the UAE was cynically planning to use the conference to discuss fossil fuel deals with more than a dozen nations. So was this really disturbing as it sounds or are they going to make some progress?

MCMAHON:
So the atmospherics around the COP28 this year are not the greatest, Carla. Been raised in many places and the ironies abound, but we should still look at this as an important gathering that could still hold some indicators about the trajectory of climate policies. And it's a vast array of policies. It starts with though this ability to limit slow zero out eventually emissions and having an official in a country which has larger oil and gas deposits than Russia hosting does not seem to bode well. The report you mentioned has gotten a lot of attention about the documents indicating there was going to be a lot of deal making going on was denied by the chair Sultan Al Jaber, who's also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE's state oil company.

ROBBINS:
Who better than he to chair a climate change summit.

MCMAHON:
His disclaimer included, aligned something to the effect of that, "Well, we would not need a climate summit to do such deals. That's sort of nonsense." So that's a disclaimer. We should also mention there's also going to be a lot of numbers flying around. There's going to be a lot of numbers that are somewhat confusing as well to note. Let's just be clear, there are clear facts. Anybody who's lived through this year on the planet knows that there were climate extremes that we had not seen, at least people who are living today had not seen before in 2023. 

The UN's Weather Agency said 2023 is now certain to be the hottest year on record. It has all sorts of implications for increasing floods, wildfires, glacier melt, heat waves in the future. And that the average temperature for the year is up close to that figure of pre-industrial times, that limited figure. So 1.5°C, it's getting very close to that. It's about a one tenth of a degree Fahrenheit under the target limit for the end of the century as laid out by the Paris Climate Accord in 2015. 

The stocktake you mentioned, or a report card, however you want to term it, is important. It's going to be important for the countries assembled to go over that. And this year it's going to be very important about whether there's going to be commitments that some countries are pushing for to start to set some firmer deadlines for phasing out oil and gas production. It's important to note the United States, which has certainly made strides under the Biden administration to move towards cleaner energy and under the Inflation Reduction Act, huge initial investments in that realm, but it's also extracting a record breaking amount of oil and gas. The numbers are really high and as long as you're extracting that much, you're going to be using that much. And these are also business models. And so there's business decisions that are made based on what guidelines and what regulations countries are allowing. 

So that's a long way of saying we're going to be looking to this gathering for some signs that there'll be some real meaningful slowing down in a shorter timeline of oil and gas emissions. It's really difficult target to hit. And also further acknowledgement that changes are happening already. Countries are facing enormous damages already. Countries that have had very little to do with emissions are facing the biggest damages, Pacific Island nations. So the summit kicked off today, we're taping this on Thursday with the confirmation that there will be the Loss and Damage Fund, the scope of which is still going to be defined starting in the course of this summit, which runs until December 12th.

ROBBINS:
And so this Loss and Damages Fund has been discussed. And even before that, there was this Green Fund. There's been lots of money that somehow never shows up. And it is not just for damages, it's also to help countries mitigate. And certainly some countries are just going to be underwater. Other places are suffering disproportion, but also for adaptation. So there was some talk about a hundred billion dollars by 2030. Other people are saying it's going to have to be trillions, and there seems to be a mismatch between the EU is talking about billions and billions and billions. The United States seems to not even be there and we're certainly a very wealthy country. Do you have any sense of the scale and is this gap between what the U.S. is thinking about and what the Europeans thinking about, that doesn't seem to bode very well for success on that?

MCMAHON:
No, and it's a ongoing disconnect in some ways. First of all, I think the UN has estimated something like $387 billion, with a B, is going to be needed annually to help developing nations that are most vulnerable, adapt to climate change. And as you said, these are Pacific Island nations that are disappearing, that are going to have to consolidate their populations on higher atolls and things like that.

ROBBINS:
But it's not just those countries. I mean there's-

MCMAHON:
It's not just those countries.

ROBBINS:
Countries in Africa which are blistering heat and crops being destroyed and people being dislocated, huge numbers of climate migrants.

MCMAHON:
There's any number of things. And we talked about somewhat previously on this podcast, there's the how do you adapt to extreme heat? Do you bring in air conditioning systems in countries that just don't have them at all. So that 130° heat, you can survive it and then not only survive it, but then what does that mean for livelihoods and other things? So yeah, across the board there are many things that need to be addressed. And it's not clear when a U.S. administration is going to be able to commit to meaningful amounts of money for something like this. Biden administration definitely seems to be intent on trying to support it in ways it can, but ultimately meaningful money comes through congressional authorization and the U.S. Congress is not there yet. There are a lot of Republican lawmakers who still will not make the connection between human caused reasons for climate change or that there is climate change in some respects.

So that's going to be continuing problem. Remember the previous Republican administration under Donald Trump removed the U.S. from the Paris Accords and defunded some of the things the U.S. had committed to. So there's a reversibility to some commitments as well on the U.S. side and the Europeans, they in some cases have been slow in following through on some of their commitments. It's not to say other things aren't happening, there's a lot of interest in private sector involvement, but this gets to other issues beyond the mitigation one. The mitigation one seems to be something that is going to need to have countries involved in really committing to bolstering and committing to some norms and how communities are developed, how coastal communities are developed among other things. While it is definitely disproportionately hitting the weaker countries, the rich countries are dealing with their own issues too.

ROBBINS:
So the two largest emitters are China and the United States. And we did see a few weeks ago we talked about it, that there was on the sidelines of APEC, that there was an agreement between the Chinese and the U.S. to make some progress on greenhouse gases and Chinese for the first time we're talking about methane. Everybody seemed to be somewhat heartened by this, but neither President Biden nor Xi Jinping plans to attend the summit. Do we know why that is and how much progress can be made if those two leaders are AWOL?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I don't know if they had ever fully planned to go to the summit. It was always mentioned that John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy and Xie Zhenhua, if I pronounce that correctly, the Chinese envoy were going to be there and trying to follow on some of the dialogue that had been seemingly had some momentum on the sidelines of the APEC summit earlier this month. And that presidents will go when they have something to kind of cap off or point to. And I don't know whether there's enough going on there. For example, if the U.S. and China had come to some common cause on phasing out coal-fired plants or something like that, for example, just to cite one example, that could be the cause for coming together or some sort of commitment to renewable energy that the two sides were going to come together on.

But I don't think there was a there there for them to come to and just kind of fasten onto, not that they don't for their own reasons, see this as important, but I think wasn't a big enough reason for them to come. There are some leaders there, obviously President Lula of Brazil is going to be there. Rishi Sunak of the UK also King Charles is going as well. And the new foreign secretary, David Cameron there. So there's a big UK contingent.

ROBBINS:
And the pope is going, right?

MCMAHON:
Pope was going to go.

ROBBINS:
He's not going.

MCMAHON:
He's not going. He's been in poor health most recently. This was on his calendar for a while and he has been an unusually a strong voice from the Vatican on this issue, including papal encyclical on climate change. So it's lost a bit of that luster. This is a long summit though. Can't rule it out. If for whatever reason there's a bit of a momentum gets flowing and we come into next week and it's like, Hey, guess who's coming? So it's still something to watch, but I think it's a remoter prospect right now, and it's more like what are some of the nuts and bolts things that can emerge from this? We've heard of carbon sequestration and things that private sector can get excited about, for example, and then alternative energy investment. Maybe there's some sort of boost there. 

But the overtone here, back to your original framing of the question, Carla, is that it's a heavy fossil fuel reliant country hosting this. There are an enormous amount of members of the fossil fuel business community attending the largest ever attendance I think of any COP by the way. So it does not seem to present a great deal of hope that we're going to look to 2023 as any sort of a tipping point in global policy.

ROBBINS:
Not a tipping point in global policy even though we are very close to the tipping point of what Paris committed to, which is holding it to 1.5 above pre-industrial levels. And we are, as you said, just a teeny, teeny, teeny bit away from it. One would hope that that stocktake would be the real wake up call. And I understand that presidents were very conscious about deliverables, but there is something to be said for leadership and maybe just by being there, they could make a difference. I'm really surprised that Biden in particular who put so much political commitment to it and who right now politically at home is having a hard time with young voters, he's missing this opportunity. I understand he sent his vice president, but honestly and truly, I really think you should be there.

MCMAHON:
Yes. And we'll see again whether there's any sort of a really true summit level kind of pressure that comes to bear in this conference or whether it's a kind of a talking shop that leaves people feeling a bit blah at the end, Carla. We'll pick it up though on this podcast and take stock ourselves in a couple of weeks. 

Carla, I want to change gears and talk about something else, which is a clamp down on journalists in Russia. In particular, there is an upcoming pretrial detention date for next Tuesday of Alsu Kurmasheva, who is a journalist employed by the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Carla, full disclosure, I was a former longtime employee of RFE/RL in Prague. So Kurmasheva, she's been in Russian custody since October. She's the second U.S. citizen, by the way, she's a joint U.S.-Russian citizen, but she's a second U.S. citizen detained after Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal. And he's had his sentence extended, I think I can't remember the most recent-

ROBBINS:
His pretrial.

MCMAHON:
His pretrial detention continues to be extended and previous cases of detainees of U.S. citizens tended to end up in some sort of a swap type of arrangement potentially. We saw that happen with the U.S. basketball player, Brittney Griner most recently. But what do we know about the chances that Alsu will even have a trial, let alone a fair one?

ROBBINS:
Well, as we've seen with Evan Gershkovich, things move very slowly and very disturbingly. And it is really tough to be a journalist in Russia, whether you are an American journalist or a Russian journalist. It's a bad place to be practicing our profession right now. Also Kurmasheva or is it Kurmasheva? Is a Russian-American journalist and editor, as you said, from RFE/RL of their Tatar-Bashkir Service-

MCMAHON:
Which by the way, is based in Prague.

ROBBINS:
Yes, based in Prague and in May, and her family is there. Her husband also works for, she's head of the, is it Current Time?

MCMAHON:
Current Time TV, yeah, Pavel Butorin. Yep.

ROBBINS:
And in May she traveled to Kazan, which is a city about 500 miles east of Moscow to visit her elderly mother. And two weeks later, while she was trying to fly back to Prague where she lives, she was stopped by Russian authorities for failing to notify them formally about her United States citizenship. And they seized both of her passports at the time. But the hope was that she could pay a fine and be done with all of this. And it was just your basic harassment. But nothing in Russia, especially when it comes to journalists is simple. Months dragged on. And then in October, the Russian government announced that she was being charged with something far worse, "failing to register as a foreign agent." And this is a legal designation that Russia has used for more than a decade to shut down civil society groups, and since the invasion of Ukraine, to go after independent media. If convicted of this, she could face up to five years in prison. So she's now being held in a pretrial detention as Evan is.

MCMAHON:
She's being held in Kazan.

ROBBINS:
In Kazan. And I'm told that the conditions are pretty difficult. Her cell is really cold. There's very little sunlight. At times, they've moved three, four additional people into the cell. Some of them have been unmedicated mentally ill prisoners, people who do not have the best hygiene and some of whom appear to be threatening. There's been requests by American consular services to meet with her, which have been denied. While the Russians have repeatedly told her that the American embassy has shown no interest in her case. So they're playing the psychological games with her as well. 

This next court appearance is supposed to review that detention, but as we have seen with Evan Gershkovich repeatedly, such attention periods are extended with no apparent end in sight. She is of course the second American journalist to be arrested. Gershkovich has been held since late March, which is nearly eight months on ginned up espionage charges. And his pretrial detention, as you said, was just extended to the end of January. The U.S. government has designated Evan Gershkovich as "wrongfully detained," which effectively means that the American government considers him a political prisoner, which kicks in all sorts of bureaucratic and diplomatic efforts. Brittany Griner was designated that way as well as has Paul Whelan, who was a former U.S. marine and a corporate executive who's been serving a sixteen-year sentence on espionage charges that the United States also says is totally politically motivated.

So far, they haven't used this designation with Alsu and the Committee to Protect Journalists and dozen other press freedom and freedom of expression groups this week called on the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, to designate her that way. And I know that RFE/RL is pushing this really hard, and I don't know why they haven't come up with this designation. It seems there are resources, there's bureaucratic attention. I don't know why they're not pushing this up very well. She's an American citizen and she deserves the full attention and support that American citizens and that journalists deserve for this. She's clearly wrongfully detained.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and not only for all the reasons you said, Carla, also, it's worth pointing out what she works for in its role in the current situation. Certainly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, what had been a bad media situation has gotten much worse. Russians have very narrow prison to get information. There's some various sort of telegram outlets and other shadowy media sites that play cat and mouse with Russian authorities that are able to get information through. But Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty with 24 hour service in Russian and in-

ROBBINS:
And many other languages.

MCMAHON:
Video and in many other languages that are understood by members of the vast Russian collection of ethnicities, which includes Tatar-Bashkirs has been an effective place for gathering information, disseminating in various platforms. And their journalists face a lot of intimidation across the board in the region, in the authoritarian countries that are still in much of the former Soviet Union, but especially Russia. So it's important signal, I would think, for the government to say, "Hey, we got your back on this." Even though she wasn't over there collecting information per se, she was there on a personal trip. But Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty also broadcast to Iran. We've seen this happen to journalists going to Iran or Americans going to Iran. It's an important signal, and I think you're right, it should follow through. There are journalists that RFE/RL employs in Belarus that have been seized as well and other places.

ROBBINS:
They have two journalists in Belarus who are in jail as well as the wife of one of these journalists who's been in jail and a former RFE/RL journalist who's also been in jail for helping the families of this. And RFE/RL also has a journalist who's been jailed in Russian occupied Crimea. Listen, it's really dangerous to be a journalist to work in any of these countries. And clearly working for our RFE/RL is hugely dangerous and deserves all of our attention the same way Evan Gershkovich's case deserves all of our attention.

MCMAHON:
And one more thing on RFE/RL, it's worth noting. This is the U.S. a main soft power tool as has been called in the past, but a tool by the U.S. to support journalism in these regions where there are vacuums and real need for information. The way these countries, especially Russia and let's say China deploy their journalists are very much as information warfare. And they're not committing journalism. They are out there spreading propaganda. They're taking part in disinformation as the case may be, and they're very much towing the state line. So this is a very unbalanced playing field to say the least. But you really need to support the free exercise of journalism as much as possible because it is a mission that the U.S. supports and should get behind.

ROBBINS:
So Putin, of course, had been shutting down independent media for years and years before the Ukraine war, but once the war started down, they put a law in place that criminalized even the use of the word War, insisting this is a special military operation. And there is no independent media left there. And as dangerous as it is for RFE/RL and for American journalists working there, it's hugely dangerous for anybody trying to do the independent exercise. 

And just in the last few months, Russian court meted out a ten-and-a-half and nine-and-a-half-year prison sentences to journalists from an independent investigative website. And another in October, a Russian blogger was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years on charges of spreading false information about Russian military actions in the Ukraine war. Something he says...these people basically do local reporting and they said they had nothing to do with Ukraine. They're just going after people right and left. And which then puts even more of a premium, whether or not it's somebody working for the Wall Street Journal or the BBC or somebody working for RFE/RL. People in Russia need to know what's going on and people in all these other countries need to know what's going on and Alsu needs to be brought home as Evan needs to be brought home. And we need to remember what's going on with all the journalists inside of Russia.

MCMAHON:
Yes. So we'll continue to follow this and we'll see what happens on Tuesday, Carla.

ROBBINS:
Yes, certainly.

MCMAHON:
Well, we've talked ourself into the audience figure of the week part of the podcast, ding. This is the figure that listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. This week, Carla, our audience selected the "WHO Asked China for Info on Spike in Illness." Uh-oh, is this a December 2019 flashback?

ROBBINS:
Well, certainly that was the fear when the independent Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases reported a spike in respiratory illnesses and particularly clusters of pneumonia in children in northern China. And there were also these reports that the main Beijing Children's Hospital was being overwhelmed with patients. But this time, both the WHO and the Chinese appeared to have done things by the book. WHO asked the question, the Chinese immediately answered the questions, which is what's required under WHO rules. The Chinese reported that they've not found any unusual or novel pathogens, and the WHO has put that out there. And what they're saying is there is an increase in pneumonia due to a bacteria for mycoplasma pneumoniae and a rise in influenza, adenovirus, and RSV. And all this is being explained by the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, this notion that there's something like an immunity debt. And we saw that in the United States as well when we lifted the restrictions here and we saw a lot of kids getting RSV.

So whether this by-the-book transparency is a sign that Beijing and the WHO have both learned their lessons from the early days of COVID, which you recall, China blocked access to critical information. Things like they were seeing human-to-human spread of COVID, just outrageous things that they did, and the WHO enabled that. So whether they have gotten religion on this or whether the Chinese are willing to share the information because there are no problems here, so they can afford to be that transparent; we have no way of knowing. But right now, if you believe the Chinese and you believe the WHO, this is not deja vu all over again. It's winter and it's bad infections and let's hope that's all it is.

MCMAHON:
Well, it's significant. Our audience seized on it as the figure given that those concerns still linger out there. And while this instance may not be anything serious, there's been warnings about other potential for pandemics, both originating in China and elsewhere out there. So any sign that there's some sort of lessons learned or more cooperation should be welcomed, I guess.

ROBBINS:
So I talk to my students a lot about this sort of the lessons of global governance that came out of COVID or didn't come out of COVID. And these international institutions like the WHO, on paper, they have a huge amount of responsibility to raise alarms. And countries have signed on and made commitments that they're supposed to within twenty-four hours when asked, respond to questions that they're sharing information. And certainly you can see with the pandemic why it would be in everyone's interest for countries to be transparent. And there was a time, certainly with SARS when the head of the WHO bullied the Chinese into sharing information. The harder time with Ebola, not with the Chinese, but with African countries. So a lot of it has to do with the leadership because in fact, they don't have troops to go in and invade a country and demand the information. So part of it is norm setting. Part of it is the willingness of a country to do it.

MCMAHON:
It's kind of like the UN itself. You have a coalition of the willing that can seize. Sometimes you have a UN agency that takes the lead, but sometimes there's just strong individual nations.

ROBBINS:
And strong individual leadership of the institution itself. And we still have the same leader of the WHO that we did with COVID. And so we don't know if the transparency this time is because they've learned their lesson and this probably is going to be tested again. We'll see how soon. Let's hope not too soon.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's our look at the world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Brazil takes over the rotating G20 presidency for a year. Venezuela holds a referendum on claims to a oil rich region of Guyana. And, Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visits Athens and meets with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Keep an eye on that one.

ROBBINS:
I love the way you pronounce that. Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it, we appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. And please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous and Kaitlyn Esperon for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria, and this is Carla Robbins saying so long and wear a mask if you think somebody's sick around you.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon echoing that and saying goodbye and have a healthy week.