COP28, OPEC, and a Mind-Blowing "Perhaps"

To read the Reuters article and to see the photo of our four CCOPers meeting with the head of OPEC, please click here: “OPEC pursues charm offensive at COP28, for youths”

by Lowell Bliss
Director, Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership, WCIU
Co-founder and co-director, Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP)

The following is an excerpt from the letter that Lowell send to the forty-one participants of CCOP2023 at the COP28 climate summit that recently concluded in Dubai. Each year, Eden Vigil Institute helps provide leadership, and WCIU provides administrative and fiscal support so that “emerging leaders from under-mobilized constituencies can have an immersive and discipled experience of a UN climate summit.” To learn more , visit www.ccopclimate.org.

Dear CCOP participants and CCOP leaders,

CCOP2023.  COP28.  Wow, what a year!

Congratulations to each of you, participant, leader, and partner alike.  I’m so proud of each of you.  You engaged, endured, persevered, and prophesied.   Well done. I want to catch you with a quick note as you transition from jetlag to the holidays and then out into the New Year. 

First of all—thank you.  You engaged.  You worked hard.   You made the most of this opportunity.  From what I could see, you were loving your constituents well (and your enemies too!)  You looked out for each other on your team.  You were supportive of your sleep-deprived leaders.   I wouldn’t hesitate to invite any one of you into any program I might organize.

This was my seventh COP and my fourth CCOP.  Whenever I return home, people ask, “So how was it?”  My response—more often than not—has been: “the COP ended disappointedly but the CCOP program was a wild success!”  This reflects that CCOP, as a program, has different goals.  The goal of the COPs is to implement the Paris Agreement and help prevent a 1.5°C or 2.0°C warming.  The goal of the CCOPs is to help launch emerging leaders from under-mobilized constituencies into climate action for the crisis as it really is, at the COPs as they really unfold, and not as we wish they might.  In this way, a COP with good outcomes or a COP with bad outcomes is not the determinant of the success of the CCOP program, which is dependant solely on how well the CCOPers engage this opportunity. 

This year, when asked, my answer is: “COP28 in Dubai ended [ambiguously; promisingly; surprisingly; etc.—I don’t know yet—I look forward to gaining some distance from it and to our analysis webinar on January 3].  Nonetheless, once again this year, “CCOP was a wild success!” 

That being said, sometimes at the end of a COP, I find myself wistful.  I often wish we could point to something that the program or the CCOPers did or said at an actual COP that made a significant contribution to the COP and to its goals.  I remind myself of Bill McKibben’s trope that the “COPs are the scoreboards, not the game.”  The game is played the remaining 50 weeks of the year, and so once again, I’m encouraged at the way CCOPers are launched into the game, that portion of the game played out in your individual constituencies.  Nonetheless, wouldn’t it be cool if at least once we could point to something at a COP and say, “That was a crucial blow and we are the ones who struck it”?

However, this year, my mind is swirling around one such possible episode: namely that occasion in Week Two when Michael, Joy, James, and Sam found themselves sitting two chairs away from the Secretary General of OPEC at a Youth Fireside Chat.  But let’s first run this incident through a filter supplied by one of Wendell Berry’s most memorable characters, Jayber Crow, in a novel by the same name.  (You are going to be tempted to misread “Jayber” as “al Jaber”— one is a sultan and the president of a consequential climate summit; the other is a bald barber from Kentucky, the character in a Wendell Berry novel.). Jayber Crow is re-discovering prayer after decades long absence.  He’s begun to pray again, motivated by the love he has for Mattie Chatham, married to another man and abused by that husband.  But prayer is a mysterious thing.  Jayber writes,

Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world. How would a person know? How could divine intervention happen, if it happens, without looking like a coincidence, or luck? Does the world continue by chance (since it can hardly do so by justice) or by the forgiveness and mercy that some people have continued to pray for? (Berry, 253)

Jayber’s point is that you never know with prayer or with incidental acts of ministry.  Something happens that you prayed for.  Is it because you—meaning YOU—prayed for it?  (How would you know?)  Something changes in a situation because you pushed on one small part of it.   Was your nudge the decisive force?  Was your snowflake the crucial one to precipitate the avalanche?  (Wouldn’t you feel silly if you ever voiced your speculations out loud?) And these are no small events either, according to Jayber Crow.  These events are “all the good that has ever come here” or “divine interventions” or the continuance of the world through forgiveness and mercy.

Consider our encounter with His Excellency Sheik Haitham Al Ghais, secretary general of OPEC.   A letter is leaked from December 6 where he urges all OPEC members to rally to COP28 lest “undue and disproportionate pressure against fossil fuels …reach a tipping point with irreversible consequences, as the draft decision still contains options on fossil fuels phase out.”   He also urges OPEC members “participating in the CoC and their distinguished delegations in the COP28 negotiations to proactively reject any text of formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.”  This is unimaginably high-level influence.  Al Ghais himself shows up on December 10 to help advance his agenda.  He conducts a “Special Day—OPEC and the Youth.”  It’s a fireside chat.   According to Reuters, “roughly a dozen young people attended.”  Four of them were CCOPers.

In the wake of that agenda, Al Ghais encounters pushback.  There’s protest out in the hallway—thank you, 350.org—but inside there are respectful questions and challenges—about Carbon Capture and Sequestration, about the false narrative that OPEC is spinning.  Our CCOPers know what they were talking about.  Al Ghais leaves.  The PR guy remains.  He is apparently frustrated—but that is because his plans have been frustrated.  What Reuters called a “charm offensive” has failed.  No one has ever likely stood up to them before in such an intimate setting.  No one has ever been given a chance to engage their falsehoods before in a dialogue setting.

Now. . . let the Jayber Crow bewilderment begin!  What if Al Ghais and his team walked into their back room for a debrief and re-evaluation?  What if his fossil fuel allies or Sultan al Jaber himself casually asked, “How did that go?”   What if they were using the Youth meeting to test out their strategy for the COP negotiations and it failed?  What if they resigned themselves that there is sufficient momentum for some sort of transition language about fossil fuels in the text, so that they need to back down a bit?  What if OPEC was determined to nail everything closed, but you proved that that was impossible?  

In other words, what if CCOPers and their challenging, knowledgeable questions struck a decisive blow that reverberated into the final text of the UAE Consensus?!

According to the Jayber framework: how would we ever know?  We can’t.  And. . . that is WHY we keep showing up.  “Does the world continue by chance (since it can hardly do so by justice) or by the forgiveness and mercy that some people have continued to pray for?” Jayber asks himself.  Precisely because we don’t know the effect of our prayers and our ministry—whether what we do is part of a necessary or sufficient cause of the changes we long for—we just continue to show up, we continue to pray forgiveness, mercy, and goodness into this world.  We avail ourselves of what opportunities fall in our lap, and then we move on in search of the next one.

While I am so very proud of our four CCOPers, let’s also recognize that they wouldn’t have been in that room at that crucial moment if it hadn’t been for the rest of Team Week Two, and Team Week One, and all the CCOP leaders whether you were in Dubai or not, and all the CCOP partner organizations, and all our constituents who were praying through our newsletters.  And let’s also recognize, that every single moment any of us participated in, and every single comment that you made at COP28, in whatever corner of the Blue Zone or Green Zone you may have been, sizzles with that same type of “perhaps all the good” possibility. The OPEC encounter may have lent itself to easier reflections about possibilities, but that is the nature of our life in Christ: whenever you show up in ministry or in prayer, the potential for consequentiality is mind-blowing. And that’s why I’m proud of all of you. Good job, everyone.  And I commend you to whatever pride, wonderment, or bemusement you might be feeling.