Kate Yeo

“I think COP27 broke me,” I wrote to a friend this week. 

I thought I would leave this conference feeling full of hope but instead now I’m sitting on the floor of my hotel room writing this in a state of indifference. I feel numb, like all my energy has been drained out of me. Is 1.5°C really still within reach when countries can’t even agree on that one number? Is a different way of living possible, one that moves away from free markets and competition and profits, when an entire article of the Paris Agreement is precisely about carbon markets? I don’t know… right now it all seems quite impossible to me.

It’s one thing to read about climate politics and stalled negotiations, but being in the exact same room and seeing it play out in front of your very eyes… it’s indescribable. Watching as John Kerry adamantly shut down loss and damage funds; witnessing our so-called world “leaders” walk past protests every morning without so much as a brief pause in their footsteps as environmental defenders shared about how they have lost family members to oil pollution and floods and murder. 

Do you not see their pain? Do you not hear their cries for help? Or has life hardened you so much that it no longer matters to you anymore? 

Over these two weeks I began to realise that developing countries could shout and even beg all they want, but ultimately they might still leave this COP empty-handed.

At what point do you draw the line and say, this system obviously isn’t working, it isn’t worth the time and effort and emissions anymore?

At a fireside chat among the Singapore delegation on Tuesday, a senior government representative said we have to work within the multilateral system and move forward slowly, bit by bit. 

“We’re making progress. Don’t lose hope,” he told me.

I didn’t get a chance to respond then, but this is what I wanted to say: You tell me not to lose hope but how can I not? How can I not when year on year I see the emissions climbing, when my friends in Pakistan and in the Amazon are literally fighting for their lives each day — and here you are saying we need to make do with incremental change?

In the same session, an entrepreneur in the room dismissed my remarks for saying that COP shouldn’t be a place for businesses to network and seek profit-making opportunities. Someone else implied that activists too often rely on feelings and thoughts instead of data.

I’ve never cried about climate issues in public, but that day at the fireside chat I did. I don’t know if those were tears of hurt for being repeatedly dismissed as being too idealistic, or frustration at being shut down over and over again, but I do know that I left feeling thoroughly defeated. I didn’t know how to help them see that this is existential to me — not just on a policymaking, “we have to safeguard our country’s future” level, but really something I feel so deeply in every fibre of my being.

Having grown up in Singapore I’ve long been conditioned to favour pragmatism, and many times during COP I found myself nodding along as negotiators and businesses explained their position. But my pragmatism has its limits too. When you sit in air-conditioned rooms all day making policies that harm or fly every week to cut new business deals then tell us that we have to be realistic, that’s where I draw the line.

The COP system brainwashes you into thinking there’s no alternative, that this is the only way the system can work. This is what it wants you to believe: Slow, incremental progress, or nothing at all. “We’ll establish a loss and damage fund but we won’t phase out fossil fuels.” It is a process that strips you of all imagination and creativity and hope.

These are false options. It can’t be either or anymore — not at this stage. And at COP27 I saw the worst of humanity, a waiting game for justice that only ever comes too late, but I also saw the best of it: from the negotiators who stood by their principles and fought tooth and nail for loss and damage, to young activists who showed up with joy and courage every day and exchanged hugs all the time even when we barely sometimes knew one another’s names, right down to the hotel staff who let us quietly pack food from the breakfast buffet in our lunchboxes every morning even though a sign outside blatantly said not to. Tenacity, love, community. We already have everything we need to reshape this world.

So maybe COP is broken but I refuse to believe that this fight is over. I know it’ll continue in other ways whether through SYCA or @byobottlesg or something else, because the fight always belonged on the ground anyway. I know we’re standing on the right side of history, and sooner or later, they will all see it too.