Skip to content Skip to footer

Naomi Klein Calls for a “True People’s Summit” in Wake of COP27 Failure

Klein urged groups to boycott the 2023 COP after this year’s summit concluded without concrete action on fossil fuels.

Participants arrive at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Convention Centre, during the COP27 climate conference in Egypt's Red Sea resort city of the same name, on November 17, 2022.

Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein on Monday urged civil society organizations to boycott the 2023 COP climate summit in the United Arab Emirates — one of the world’s largest oil producers — after this year’s summit concluded without any concrete action to phase-out fossil fuels, despite the best efforts of campaigners from around the world.

Listing off some of the marked failures of COP27 — from the host government of Egypt’s refusal to release political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah to the “weak climate agreement that protects polluters” — Klein argued in a series of tweets that “now is the time to decide not to do this all over again next year, when the summit will be in the UAE. Of all places.”

“Civil society should announce a boycott + instead hold a true people’s summit,” Klein wrote. “One gathering per continent to limit flying. Links to the official summit by video.”

“There can be lobbying sessions built into the COP28 program with governments who will obviously go to the UAE,” she continued. “But why should civil society expend the carbon, money, and time to join them just to declare it a failure all over again? Let’s try something new.”

Klein’s call for a new oppositional approach to the annual United Nations climate summit came in the wake of a gathering at which civil society was harassed, surveilled, and sidelined by Egypt’s authoritarian government as lobbyists from Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel giants responsible for record-high greenhouse gas emissions swarmed the summit, fighting off efforts to include a fossil fuel phase-out in the summit’s final text.

As the Financial Times reported, “The final hours of the summit were marked by a push from dozens of countries to include a pledge to phase down all fossil fuels, which was ultimately unsuccessful.”

Klein was hardly alone in lamenting the repeated failures of COP summits to directly confront the industry driving the climate crisis and stressing the urgent need to develop alternative avenues toward achieving ambitious climate action — particularly as COP28 in the UAE appears set to deliver more of the same.

“It is extraordinary that in 30 years of U.N. climate negotiations, eliminating the primary cause of global heating has never been mentioned in the decisions,” Damian Carrington, The Guardian’s environment editor, wrote Sunday in a postmortem on the Paris climate accord’s critical 1.5°C warming target, which continues to slip further out of reach as fossil fuel extraction proceeds apace. “Given that next year’s U.N. climate summit will be hosted by a petrostate, the United Arab Emirates, it is hard to see how a crackdown on fossil fuels will happen there either.”

“It remains imperative to get off coal, oil, and gas as rapidly as possible. Every tonne of CO2 that remains in the ground means less harm to lives and livelihoods,” Carrington added. “Can the U.N. climate talks deliver this at speed? It does not look that way. It is too easy for the fossil fuel states to hold the consensus-based negotiations to ransom, threatening to blow up the whole thing if their black gold is so much as mentioned by name. There were more fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop27 than delegates from the Pacific islands, which their industry is pushing below the waves.”

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy