On Wednesday evening a wall collapsed in the Australian pavilion in the sprawling campus of the United Nations climate talks in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh during a talk about decarbonising our transport system.

Loading

Nearby, in the ceiling high above a Pacific pavilion, a small electrical fire broke out and was doused.

It was hard not to get the sense that the wheels were starting to come off.

These annual climate talks have a rhythm all of their own, and things often start to get rough 10 or so days in.

This is when the COP president, normally a senior political figure of the host nation, would ideally issue clear instructions, or if necessary, demands to lend purpose and haste to the work of the hundreds of negotiators beavering away in up to 50 separate rooms on various parts of a final COP decision.

This year that man was Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry.

“He is opaque,” said one senior official of a foreign delegation on that fraught Wednesday. “He is a f---ing disaster,” said another. Criticism of the presidency became more strident as the week went on, with many claiming he was failing to provide the direction the negotiations needed.

Egypt’s role

Given Egypt’s aversion to free political speech, it’s hosting of an event that has become the world’s biggest annual political talkfest was always going to present special difficulties.

As COP began, international attention focused on the nation’s highest profile political prisoner, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who marked the start of COP by intensifying a hunger strike he had begun in April.

But it wasn’t just the political climate that was off at the start of the talks.

On the first day of talks, sewage burst from a pipe and formed a creek between two halls of pavilions. The food and drinking water ran short. Leaving to buy supplies was difficult because there were no shops within walking distance; buses were crowded, security lines long and taxi drivers prone to prolonged and enthusiastic bargaining.

Foreign security experts advised the 40,000-odd delegates not to download the event’s app, which was created by Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, for fear it was capable of tracking private data. Egypt denied this.

Soon some journalists were unhelpfully labelling the COP a “green Fyre Festival”, but there were more serious criticisms made than the questionable execution of an impossibly difficult task of organisation.

With an energy crisis flaring across the world, the industry spotted an opportunity, and more than 636 oil and gas lobbyists registered to attend the meeting, according to a group of organisations including Corporate Accountability, Corporate Europe Observatory, and Global Witness, who analysed the UN’s provisional list of attendees.

Some secured positions on national delegations, where they could potentially impose themselves on negotiations, and before and during the COP gas deals were announced.

“There is a lot of oil and gas companies present at COP because Africa wants to send a message that we are going to develop all of our energy resources for the benefit of our people, because our issue is energy poverty,” said Namibia’s petroleum commissioner, Maggy Shino, Reuters reported. “If you are going to tell us to leave our resources in the ground, then you must be prepared to offer sufficient compensation.”

Wael Abul-Magd, Special Representative of the COP27 president, denied this, saying fossil fuel industry voices needed to be in the talks as part of the solution to climate change, and those accredited had to demonstrate their commitment to tackling climate change.

Either way, soon the conference that had been sold as the Africa COP and compared with the Fyre Festival was being labelled the Gas COP.

Funding facility

By earlier in the second week positions were hardening. The developing world, represented by a group of 134 countries known as the G77 plus China, wanted the final decision to include an agreement to create a new funding facility.

It would be a vehicle by which rich nations would pay poor ones for damage caused by climate catastrophes.

Many rich nations, and in particular the US, trenchantly opposed the plan, fearing accepting liability for climate change, and claiming other facilities already existed, and that they wanted to be able to direct finance to the most needy.

There were other clouds over the negotiations, too. Some petro-states wanted to remove any language about phasing out any fossil fuels from a final text. This would be a retreat from a key achievement at last year’s Glasgow meeting, which called for a phase-out of coal.

That in itself would be catastrophic in the eyes of many observers.

India said it was unfair for rich nations’ preferred energy – gas and oil – to be quarantined and coal targeted, and called for all three to be named. This had the potential to blow up any chance of consensus.

What about Australia?

“We’re back!” Chris Bowen told everyone who would listen at COP, and by the end of his week there it appeared people were listening.

He was enthusiastically welcomed by US climate envoy John Kerry at the start of a panel session in the US pavilion, and US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm swung by the Australian pavilion for a coffee and a meeting.

He was warmly welcomed at a function at a Pacific islands pavilion, where the secretary general of the Pacific Island Forum, Henry Puna, declared Australia was now “walking the talk” on climate.

Making Australia’s national statement to the COP he said Australia was now “a constructive, positive and willing climate collaborator”, and emphasised that Australia’s commitment was to hold the world as close as possible to 1.5 degrees of warming – a telling line at a conference where some nations were seeking to retreat from that position.

He was also asked by the COP presidency to co-chair some of the more sensitive negotiations at the conference with his Indian counterpart, the first time Australia has been asked to engage in such work at the heart of the conference in nearly a decade.

All of this bodes well for the government’s bid to host a COP of its own in 2026 with the Pacific, but it does not suggest that praise was universal.

Climate advocates and some vulnerable nations remain frustrated that Australia would not advocate more strongly against fossil fuels.

If Australia wanted to be a true ally to the Pacific, said Tuvalu finance minister Seve Paeniu as negotiations dragged into Saturday, “they would join with us in pushing for a phasing out of all fossil fuels to be included in the cover text”.

For good or ill, Bowen has succeeded in buying credibility without selling the farm.

Before and during the conference it signed up a handful of international agreements on initiatives such as cutting methane emissions, backing clean shipping and accelerating offshore wind farms. Each are free and non-binding.

Bowen avoided rejoining the Green Finance Fund – abandoned by the previous government – without copping significant approbation. Similarly, he did not end Australia’s public financial support for offshore fossil fuel projects, though he has not ruled out doing so in future.

He also won praise for championing language restating the Glasgow Pact’s determination that the world should still pursue efforts to hold warming to 1.5 degrees.

Was COP a success?

Well, that depends on what you care about most – raising funds for vulnerable nations or cutting emissions for a warming world.

For those most concerned about the latter, there was little there and nothing to add to the Glasgow agreement signed a year ago.

A push to have oil and gas added to coal as energy sources that needed to be phased out fell out of the text in the dying hours of negotiations, though a reference to holding warming survived after a bitter rearguard action from nations including Australia.

“The best you could say about this COP is that we have not gone backwards. Much. And even that was a struggle,” says Bill Hare, an Australian climate scientist who is head of Climate Action Tracker and advised the Alliance of Small Island States during the talks.

Nicki Hutley, an Australian economist who attended the talks for the Climate Council, agreed but added that given the urgency of the crisis even holding the line should be seen as a failure.