COP28: Hits, Misses and Vested Interests | ft. Jacob Koshy       

Guest: Jacob Koshy, Deputy Science Editor at The Hindu

Hosts: Sandeep Pai & Shreya Jai

Producer: Tejas Dayananda Sagar

[Podcast intro]

Welcome to Season 3 of The India Energy Hour podcast! The India Energy Hour podcast explores the most pressing hurdles and promising opportunities of India's energy transition through an in-depth discussion on policies, financial markets, social movements and science. The podcast is hosted by energy transition researcher and author Dr. Sandeep Pai and senior energy and climate journalist Shreya Jai. The show is produced by multimedia journalist Tejas Dayananda Sagar and is presented by 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters that produces original stories from Rural India.

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[Guest intro]

This year’s Conference of Parties (COP28), hosted in the oil-rich UAE, was full of ironies. There were apprehensions over the host, which has oil wells in its backyard. The COP28 President was the CEO of the national oil company. It was expected that at least the rich nations would drive more climate finance.

But the negotiations that unfolded over the 12 days and the outcome caught many by surprise. The COP final text, for the first time, mentioned a transition away from fossil fuels. The decision was lauded, but the fine print is not that promising. There was no major uptick in climate finance; adaptation goals were left untouched, and the language towards the oil and gas sector was lopsided.

To unfold the facets of the negotiations at COP28 and their impact on global climate dialogue and global warming, we talked with Jacob Koshy. Koshy is Deputy Science Editor at The Hindu and has been writing on science and technology for more than a decade. An engineer-tuned journalist, he has worked in some of the leading news dailies in India and is known for incisive reporting and comprehensive writing.

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[Podcast interview]

Shreya Jai: Thank you, Jacob, for joining us here at The India Energy Hour. We are absolutely delighted to have you here. You're one of the foremost science writers in the country, and you've covered the climate sector, energy, everything that comes under it. And obviously, your writing has been an inspiration for, if I may say, young writers like me, really insightful. So, who better than you to explain what all this cop drama was all about? you, have covered a lot of cop. This was one of them. So I'm sure we will have a very interesting discussion with you, and thank you again for joining us here.

Jacob Koshy: My pleasure, Shreya. It's an absolute honor to be on your podcast. I've listened to it. there are some people that I respect a lot, Anil Swarup, and, some of them who I've heard conversations, and, it's a very interesting idea. I'm glad to be able to speak to you and your audiences on some of this.

Shreya Jai: Thanks. So we'll just dwell into the conversation, very quickly. It's an interesting topic, but before we jump into that, we want to focus on you. I always say whenever we have a fellow journalist on our podcast that no one knows us beyond our bylines. I'm not sure even how many people read the byline below the headline. But given the length and breadth of the work that you have done, we are very interested to understand your journey. Where are you from? How did you land up in journalism? And of all sectors that were available into science, journalism, where did you study? if you can tell us all about that.

Jacob Koshy: Thank you. Sure. So, I grew up in Ahmedabad. I did all my early schooling over there. And, I'm a very 90s kid in the sense that I did well in math, and science. So there were essentially two options available. So there is engineering and there is medicine. And for whatever reason, I couldn't draw well, I wasn't great at. I mean, I like biology, but I couldn't draw diagrams well, so I was like, medicine is certainly, not my thing. So I just went the engineering path, and, I did my electrical engineering from nationalist of technology in, Orissa. And this was electronics. And, surprisingly, when I went to, I did my engineering, I just realized that this was just an extension of school in the sense that it was a good college. And, it was for the first time that I met so many people from different states all across India here. Basically, I'm a malali boy who grew up in Ahmedabad, and so that was my limited, set of, interactions that I had with, in terms of exposing myself to the whole country. But I made so many friends and stuff like that over there. But in terms of, education, it was just lot of math, differential equations and integrals and calculus, and it was just an extension of that. Even in all, most of our semesters of, engineering and beyond some time, I kind of got the feeling that this is not really a very exciting career path to go on. Even though I was studying, doing an engineering course, I ended up doing reading a lot more english literature, actually, and, did a lot of reading on philosophy and, in a college library, met a lot of like minded friends. And, towards the end, I actually. And I was always generally quite keen on writing and going up on stage and being somebody who would just do a 1 minute presentation on stuff like that. So that's always been my general nature. I enjoyed the cultural festivals in college much more than, actual, all the engineering stuff. And, so by the time I came to final year, I kind of realized that there was literally just one sector that most of my colleagues did. Either people went abroad and did masters, in engineering or electronics, or they just joined it. And when I graduated, that was a year when there was some kind of a bust happening. It was one of those boom bus cycles, which I wasn't aware of, but we all thought it was like some major catastrophe in life, that there is an it bust happened. there are no jobs and stuff like that. But anyway, I was one of those guys. I was like, I'm getting out of this. I need to do something connected to writing now. I, wasn't the guy who would straightaway go on to write a novel or something. I hadn't written something like that, but I also wanted to do a job. And I didn't know, how do you combine writing and a job? And I, came back to Ahmedabad, for five or six months, I was figuring this out, and suddenly somebody told me, there are these colleges where they do journalism now. I was like, journalism? I had never, ever thought about it. I mean, my dad used to be an avid reader of the Times of India, and believe me, in my life, I used to always say, this is so. I used to see this black line in front of on before an article. And honest to God, I've never actually bothered to see, what is this thing called a byline? Who are these people? You just read the articles, and then you just get ahead with it. And so one thing led to the other, and I decided to take some, write some entrance exams for a couple of well known engineering, mass communication and, journalism schools. And in fact, in one of those tests, I was asked, who is your favorite journalist? And I was very keen that I wanted to do print. I wanted to be writing, but I just realized I didn't know a single journalist who wrote in the print medium. And I just kind of said, oh, I like Barkalat and Rajdeep Sardesar. So that was the level of my engagement with journalism at that point of, you, know, I got through two schools, but the school that I eventually picked was a school in Kerala. Now, Kerala was a state that I was. Even though I'm from Kerala, I have always visited the place for vacations, and I have family over there. But it was a state that presented lot of complexities in terms of its high literacy levels, high education levels, but also extreme joblessness, extreme migration patterns. And there is also the beautiful environment over there. But it is also a trait with, a history of communism and its intrafactional politics. So I just wanted to understand the state of my parents and my grandparents much, much better, because I was somebody who had essentially been a gujarati boy who's kind, of affiliated, was born in Kerala. I wanted to understand, things better. And that's how I chose to study journalism in Kerala. And it's here I met one of my most, inspirational persons ever. he was a journalism professor called K. Thomas Uman. And he was this person, he comes from a very interesting lineage. I mean, he is somebody who's taught at the time school in Delhi many, many years ago. Several prominent editors of today were his prodigies at some point of time. And he taught at the Asian College of Journalism in his founding batch. And he himself was a person who's traveled all across the world. But, after retirement, in his twilight years, he's decided to come back to his home of cottage and be in a journalism school over there. And it was just coincidence that I'd heard about him. And I thought, let me go to this. Let's see what this person has to offer. And believe me, it was one of the most life changing things because I always thought I was a great writer and I had talent with the language and I could play with words easily. But this was a person who absolutely shattered my illusions of language. I mean, he starts out our day saying that. So you all came over here and chose journalism because nobody else would accept you anywhere, right? So that was one of his starting, talks to us as young journalism graduates. But he broke us down. He taught us how to write, how to write for newspapers, how to say a lot of stuff in just 100 words or 200 words, how to edit out the superfluous. And that kind of increased my love for language, and writing precisely and tightly. I enjoyed that since then, and I have always been somebody, but that's when I kind of resolved that, okay, I really like this field of print journalism and writing. But at some point, I also had this whole thing that, hey, I've done this engineering bit that, I spent four years of m my life doing. So how do I combine these two things? And I thought, oh, I can write about science and technology and bring in these aspects, into my writing. And luckily for me, and I think this is a very unique experience, but luckily for me, every place, right from my first job, which was at the week magazine, they always were interested in somebody who was passionate about covering science and research issues like that. So I didn't actually go through a classical, entry level journalism route in the sense that you start out with a crime and the city reporting. I was straight away in a bureau, and I was straight away writing already, on science. So I was fortunate in that. And literally every other paper that I went to, I was with the Mint newspaper when they had just launched. And, one of the editors, Sukmar Ranganathan, he was an absolute science geek person. I never had to pitch a science story. I mean, he would see my listing, and it would just easily go on page one. And I had a great boss, Anil. He was somebody who recruited me just for being a science writer. So, in that sense, I feel I've had a very privileged, journey, with science and science writing. I know a lot of, people would go straight away into covering classical beats. They would be either doing politics or crime or sport or try to get into the high profile energy sectors and all that. But I've always managed to just be a little tangential in all kinds, in all kinds of writing. I do get into science deeply, and through that, then, of course, cover ministries and just get a sense of how this country works, how policy works, who are the people who, influence, happenings. And it's over that time that I have kind of, branched out into various fields. I've written about neuroscience, I've written about nuclear physics. I've written about genetic engineering, GM or early AI. I've seen several cycles of AI before. AI has now become a fashionable, term that everybody kind of discusses. yes, and of course I've covered climate purely from the sense of science, right, from co2 interactions, particle aerosols. I always had colleagues, interestingly, I never really covered the environment beat because I always had other colleagues in my paper itself who were more focused on environment. Some of them used to go for cops and I never really take a close look other than the IPCC reports, I mean, since 2007, I think that IPCC became a very big thing because it's fifth assessment report, I believe it was. and it gave this major warnings about how apocalypse is imminent upon us. And we had so many report, editors asking us how long have these IPCC reports been coming? And I said, no, they've been coming since like the 90s, but you're only looking at all of these things now. And this was something which was, but that again didn't really prompt an interest in environment. I still continued looking at climate science. Glaciers. There were so many controversies at that point of time. I started covering environment right from the time when the late 2000s, when there was massive skepticism about climate science itself. I mean there was, there was huge respected scientists who problems with the IPCC interpretation, of things. And I come from that background. So I had to unpack a lot of science, break it down into understandable good writing, for my audiences. And most of the papers maintained, the papers that I worked in, they were very particular about using, about telling well crafted stories that were high on accuracy, but were also interesting. So that's how I kind of started getting more and more into climate science. Now for the past eight years I've been with the Hindu. And Hindu is a paper that has a very long tradition of science reporting. I mean it's one of the few papers where actually there are three other people spread across bureaus who only look at science and research. So it's very rare to find papers where you have multiple reporters looking at science. And this is separate from the health and environment beats. So again, here I was looking more at policy and issues like that. But I had other colleagues who'd go for cops who just spend those 14 days looking at evolutions in policy and drafts and stuff like that. But for the last three, four years is when I really started covering the environment, the environment sector more closely in terms of from forestry angles, from the ministry angles, and looking at various of these issues for multiple reasons. And there was Covid in the middle. I've never really physically gone to cops, but it's something that I. But in the last ten, 510 years, access to it has become very, has become very simple. I mean, you can see all of the webcasts, the UNFCC negotiations, whatever you want, and you can tune in and, you get all the reports. And there are now so many agencies, there are so many, different kinds of scientific, quasi scientific, as well as policy based organizations that have, multiple experts who discuss various aspects of implications, of cop and cop negotiations, and, the politics between countries, et cetera. So I have kept myself abreast, and it was this time that I really, I thought that, okay, multiple factors came together, and I thought, let me just go and take a look at what the fuss actually is all about and whether being physically there really, makes a lot of difference. So, that's how I can summarize my journey from engineering to climate and environment and, yeah, that's how it is.

Sandeep Pai: that's great. I mean, it's so interesting to hear your journey, because my own journey is quite similar in, I was an engineer, then a journalist, then I moved to something totally different, policy, academia, and then now think tank. I feel like I'm only transitioning, but I totally hear your first switch from journalism, from engineering, to policy. One question. It struck me that over your entire career as a journalist, obviously, given your background in engineering, you do have that data, analytical way of thinking about any problem and questioning everything. But one thing it struck me is like there are so many different topics you're covering, and science, even for scientists, it's a big struggle to think about. If you are an economist, you don't understand social sciences. I, don't know if you're a scientist in the computer science, department, you have no idea the methods and other. How do you engage with so many different topics, research that comes out? Do you trust that just because something is published in a nature or even pick your journal, do you trust that? Because when you write academic papers, in the discussion and the abstract, it's a little bit more kind of easier to digest, but the rest of the stuff is so dense in many, many fields.

Jacob Koshy: So how do you digest that?

Sandeep Pai: How do you talk to these people? How do you make sure that you've got it right across so many different fields?

Jacob Koshy: The simple answer is, I just ask the scientists, reach out to the authors and ask them simply, and of course, do a lot of, background read. Because I have a natural interest in many scientific fields. I do, end up doing a fair amount of background reading before I did, now before I, before I actually approached scientists. Now this is some over time is when I've kind of honed these skills. Of course, the easy way, as you just mentioned, is if something is there in science and nature. These are of course like the top scientific journals in the world. And it would have gone through a level of that classical peer review. Plus, in most cases those papers are so beautifully written that the language is itself so accessible that you have a very fair sense of what the story is all about. And then basis that you can make a better pitch to your editors as to, hey, I'd like to write about this thing. But now the difficulty or the challenge really is as even Shreya would totally empathize with, however exotic your stories are. You are writing in a daily newsroom and you are competing with the politics guy, you're competing with the economics guy. You want story. And I've always been a daily reporter person. I am the kind of person who gets angsty if it's three days have passed and I have not done some substantial story and oh my God, I need to find something. So that's my kind of fundamental mentality. But even after you've read all this science, you have to go and explain to an editor who most cases, of course, people are enthused about science, but people are always asking what is the India angle in this or why is it relevant to, our immediate readership? So that helps you to kind of read something more closely and try to connect it to what is happening in and around the country. So I guess it's something that has now come purely by experience because I read as much politics or I read as much economics, things that I just taught myself from reading over the years. And then you just kind of start making a connection between things. Of course, another philosophy is that if something really is interesting to me, I'm pretty sure that I can convey that interest to somebody else. But if something is fundamentally boring to me when I'm reading, I know that unless I am actually told to focus on this story, I will not be able to actually convey that sense of, interest. So, once something is interesting, I can always, and like I said, I am very interested in the art of writing. I am interested in coming up with great metaphors or, I'm not very comfortable with actually this notion of simplifying the science or simplifying things for people, because I'm kind of convinced over the years that we are a country which you can have sports writers write an entire section of. There is this leg cutter that went, and the ball swung like the dew was in a particular way, and he managed a neat, square drive over long on. And I'm just mixing up some cricket terms. But sports writers routinely write these technicalities and get away with it, and they don't have to explain what these things are. So the average reader, or any reader is very aware, has more than enough capacity to understand any aspect of science, provided you just write it well enough. There's this quote by Stephen Pinker, a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist. And he said, just assume that the reader is somebody who is as intelligent or more intelligent than you, but just chose to take a different path in life. Which is why he just does not, probably is not familiar with certain terms that you use, but everybody can quickly see through whether what you're writing is engaging enough or interesting enough. So I have kept that kind of, that thing in mind, and I've generally tried to read by deep, thanks to journalism. And I used to always also do book because I always also, contribute fairly to feature sections in all the papers that I read. So book reviews were a lovely way to keep yourself engaged and abreast of things. And I've always been fortunate that being science, there have been a lot of science books that have come my way, and I've read fiction, nonfiction, and engaged with different ideas and seen some of the best science writers kind of, engage with topics and, of course, educate myself. Now, India has presents its own challenges, and as a reporter, because, number one, when I started up, this is around 2006 and seven, when I started writing science stories. The general mentality among many indian scientists is not to really engage with reporters, because they feel that once they have written and they have published in a journal, their work is done. There is no larger tendency that you actually need to communicate your science or your ideas to a wider audience. Some of them have even told me that many scientists would actually consider, think it demeaning to actually have to engage with a reporter, because they are also worried that reporters might get things wrong. They always mostly assume that these guys haven't studied science. They're probably people who have come from different backgrounds which are non science. So they will totally mess up the science that I have done so painfully and got such wonderful edge indexes for. But, this is a problem that I see is becoming less and less over time, because now there is a greater engagement where you are expected to communicate your findings. You're expected to, have a large mass audience, read and engage with scientific work. But on the other hand, I am very, very vedded to the idea of journalism. And to me, journalism means criticality. So I don't see myself as somebody who writes science articles and makes the science engaging and palatable to a wide set of audience. Now, I can question scientists, I can question their assumptions. I can, ask them, please explain to me how you arrived at this conclusion. And as you pointed out, Sandeep, many scientists are so focused on their very own narrow fond of research that many times I feel I know in certain breadth, a lot more than many of them. And it's purely, again, not because of any lack of ability on either people's part. It's just that's the nature of their field and that's the nature of my field. But, questioning science policy. And now that I've done this over time, I can see evolutions in stories that I once wrote about, about nanotechnology in the early 2010s or the early hydrogen economy. I sometimes now see, I have come full circle and I'm writing about how everybody is now, going gaga about hydrogen, et cetera. I'm like, oh, I remember this excitement from 15 years ago. I know where that went. So you can actually see patterns. And I think as a journalist, that is the best thing that we can contribute to our readers, that you can give background perspective. You can tell them how things have changed over time. And, that is what only real value add, because information is available everywhere and anywhere. There are multiple people who write, lovely, well researched stories. But to be able to give a perspective of your country, of other countries is, I think, what value weeks still, as journalists who have been in this field around for some time can really give, and, of course, write it in a way that, is engaging enough and piques curiosity. These are two philosophies that I generally abide by. Thank you.

Shreya Jai: It is very refreshing to hear you talk about these things. These are some of the basic necessities, I guess, which all journalists should ideally have. And I'm really hoping a lot of journalists should listen to this particular, episode. So thank you for spilling all these facts. I'll just now, quickly, if Sandeep doesn't have a follow up, then I like to quickly jump to the topic now. sure. As you mentioned that, this year you decided to go to cop 28 physically and see what the whole buz was all about. and it was touted to be a very contentious cop because it was happening in UAE and there were fossil fuel companies. The cop president himself is a CEO of a, company. So before we talk about the whole negotiation drama, can you tell us your experience of being there at cop? What was the atmosphere at Expo City where it happened? What was your experience? And obviously how it was.

Jacob Koshy: going to, because you're from Delhi and, I would say my first impression of going to Expo City in there was, oh, this is like a really big Pragati Madhan now. Pragati Madhan, I guess for your wider audience is this big trade fair, is this venue in Delhi where there are multiple exhibitions happening. And to me it was just five x of the scale. there are multiple booths, there are pavilions by all countries, little, little rooms. And that's when you actually realize even countries, your own country, how limited and small they are when you place them in the context of the world. Because there are small booths from everywhere, from Israel to the United States each. They will have the country representatives and they have their ministers, senior ones, who just come sit over there and are talking like regular folks. So accessing a wide range of people was an interesting experience. But other than that, I saw that there is a fair amount of cordoning of all the main hub of activity. Now, negotiations, cop negotiations are like the major, item over there, right, in terms of delegations from different countries. They are trying to craft this agreement in the next two weeks. And it is every day there are, discussions on the kind of language to use, et cetera. So for some reason, I just thought that many of these delegations and ministerials would be just a stone's throwaway. And I can just, being a classic reporter, I can just hang around the doors and there'll be some guy rushing out and then you just pounce on that guy and ask him for a quote or something. But I realized that's not how these things happen at all, because there is a media center where everybody is cordoned. all the media of the world is sitting. And the negotiations actually happen in these huge halls, which are all closed doors and cordoned off. But, the access to information, is also pretty high because in the media rooms, you have these tv screens where you can find out which meeting is happening, where at what time, but it explicitly tells you who all can attend. And most of them actually said open to everybody except press and media so, that was one of those things that I saw. But there are multitudes of press conferences. And you finally get a sense of listening to people, not just from, your own, indian experts or, people that you have been talking to for a long time, but, you get to meet people from lots and lots of other, organizations. And that really helps with getting a sense of how other people are looking at the same process, that you do. So, of course, other than that, it was extremely kind of hot. But you also, get, a sense of how much energy is being consumed, in this particular place because it's a place that it was winter and it wasn't searing hot, but, there would be some places I'd go to. And I could see that this AC is turned off so incredibly high over here. It's tundra level freezing. And I am thinking that here is this meeting where we've all gathered together, to think and ponder about wasteful cooling and how to minimize, emissions from excessive cooling or heating. So all of those contrasts and ironies were constantly hitting. But it was excellent because you see, delegations from islands like the Marshall Islands, from Samoa, activists. There are a lot of people who have come to voice their, mean. The UAE is not exactly a kind of, free media society, like, even India or many other places. And there were a few protests, here and there. But coming from India, it just felt pretty tippid. It was not as engaging as. And there were several other journalists. There are two or three of them who I know who have been covering cops for at least 1015 years. And they physically on the ground. And they said that these protests aren't really as much as what we've seen, in other places. But the interesting bit, of course, as you mentioned, was Sultan Ahmed al Jabbar, you know, and right from year one, when he was the president designate, it was literally the first thing on everybody's mind that here is this guy who was the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and he's also the cop, president designate. Now, isn't that a rank hypocrisy? And will this mean that, isn't he just opening the doors to the oil lobby and oil producers? Can we really have a meaningful, impartial assessment by the president designate of, whether he will stick to the science and be more focused towards capturing emissions and at the same time, potentially risking the economy of his part of the world? but my personal engagement with that was this was something that was there on his mind, too, even prior to the cop. He had a couple of press conferences where these questions were again and again asked of him. And, he responded. I mean, his basic argument was that it is because who I am, who I am and my position that I will be able to engage with a wider section of the world. I mean, cops are not just about delegations and ministers of countries coming in. The fact is that you have to engage with the private industry because, let's face it, they are the guys who run the companies that, trigger, all this fossil fuel emissions. And, that is how I believe this whole conversation about needing to deliver some kind of big bang on fossil fuels, actually came because it was a bit of a surprise. Because following what we had seen in Glasgow in cop 26, the conversation was all about coal. That is, you need to, again, following from IPCC reports which say that you first have to phase out, unabated coal by 2030 or 2050. And then you move on to oil and gas progressively. And of course, in Sharma Sheikh, these conversations were there in the background, but it got more focused towards the loss and damage fund and things like that. But I think that it was Sultan Ahmed M. Al Jabbar's position as this head, know, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. That kind of, I don't know, put this whole thing about fossil fuels, as a headlining, you know, the conversation. It's almost as if he, was pushed into some kind of psychological corner. That this is the way I'm going to shut all my critics up and I'm going to deliver some big bang announcement on fossil fuels. he took on a lot of press conferences on this. And even during the conferences, there were repeated stories, primarily coming out of the british media. And there was this one story somewhere in the middle that came out that they got some recording of his conversation with, some, influential activist, from a couple of weeks ago, where he said that there is no science which says that fossil fuels are absolutely essential to achieving net zero. And that was, again, another. That set off another whole, whirlwind of stories, after which he did a separate conference. And after sometime, I could see that this guy is getting a bit tired and irritated about asking and repeating the same thing, but that's just what it is. So that was also an interesting experience for me in terms of watching the world's media cover one topic over a long time. You're used to going abroad and seeing. You're used to two people, at the center, and, a press conference where people are, everybody from different countries or different representations can ask questions. You're all done in an hour, and you all go home and you file a stories. That's an experience that I've had before, but this is something where you are consistently engaged with people, over weeks, over two weeks, and, there are developments every day. People are trying to figure out what headway actually has been made. And, that was interesting. And you could see the kind of, from the questions, you could see the implicit assumptions in, what american journalists might have or what somebody from South Africa would have, what us indian journalists have. So that was quite a refreshing, experience for overall. I mean, because it was my first physical cop, I was kind of, impressed with the fact about the way it was organized in terms of, access to information and in terms of, how, you could ask all the questions that you wanted. You might not get all the answers that you wanted, but you were always in a place where you could flip between different kinds of, and actually you could do multiple stories. now, India has staked its claim for organizing cop 33. But I would say that it would be interesting that after five years, there would probably be many more reporters who actually would go to cop and cover it, other than this loaned representative from every newspaper who always goes, because it is impossible for one person to truly capture the whole thing. I mean, we have multiple reporters for a single beat in our own little ministries over here. So how can you, have just one person who covers the whole. There are many, many angles to many things. I mean, I wish I had, like, three or four more colleagues who could come and we could all just do different aspects and, give a fuller picture of how things are changing. So, yeah, that was pretty much what I, got out of my maiden trip over there.

Sandeep Pai: Great. that's a really fantastic background of what happened at this cop and kind of your own reflections of what the cop was all about and the whole issue with the presidency and all. I think partly, in my opinion, partly that is because of people's ignorance. I think they don't understand, like, 60% of fossil fuels are produced by state owned companies. And so he's like any other government official. So it's hard for a lot of people who don't get those facts clear. But, having said that, with your experience and now that the cop has ended, what were some of the key hits and misses, in your opinion, in this cop, compared to previous cops or just generally, what were some of the key hits and misses from, this cop that will be meaningful for climate action?

Jacob Koshy: So, as I've been seeing for many years, and even I was one of those people who, at some point of time, I mean, four or five years ago, I asked myself this question that, is this whole process actually meaningful? I mean, I saw that over time that there would be this classic narrative where, okay, cop has happened, and there is the initial stories by people saying, this is going on, there is this draft, et cetera, happening. There's some kind of a lull in the middle. And then towards the end you have these flurry of stories where the cop has been extended by a day and a half, and you can see people are just, doing night outs and everything is focused around an agreement. So I was a little skeptical as to really. And when the agreements come out, what is it that you see? I mean, you just see creative uses of verbs. The shah has been replaced by a could, and you just see, all kinds of adverbs in play and people claiming victory that we have used transitioned instead of phase out and instead of phase down. And then you actually look at the larger picture and then realize, what is the real difference between a phase out and phase down when there is no real deadline in sight. But apparently, it is considered, a major breakthrough. But I can appreciate over time, and I really started seeing it from Glasgow, is that I think it's still pretty hard to have 198 countries sit in one room, and you have to have everybody agree on every line of text as well as punctuation. I mean, going by how you see bilateral actions happen in the world, I mean, people just drop bombs in a, complete violation of conventions that people have labored and struggled over. So you see so much arbitraryness happening in between countries. So I think it's quite a challenging and impressive fact, once you really see it objectively, that there is this truly democratic process that's happening where everybody is, at least on paper, in terms of the final agreement, fundamentally equal. But that said, to me, hits and misses ultimately boils down to whether you're a developed country or whether you're a developing country. So, for developed country, and many times I have felt this notion that, our final cop stories essentially reflect developed country concerns. Now, developed country concerns are fundamentally geared towards focusing on mitigation. That is, they want targets on cutting out greenhouse, gas emissions. And any kind of progress, whether it practice, any kind of progress, is hailed as a major victory. So in this case, we were told that the early draft said that, oh, finally we have decided to phase out fossil fuels. and then it came down to phase down and there was contentious language and ultimately it went away from that and we came down to this word called transition. And just by that, the very fact that now fossil fuel mentioned in the text is seen as a major victory, when all the time you always assume that, it was an implicit fact that it is fossil fuels, explicitly, that had to be cut. But no, all these years, over 30 years of cops, people were just talking about greenhouse gas emissions. They were not really talking specifically about the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, which is fossil fuels. And secondly, you had this conversation that somehow coal was at a different level of villainy, as compared to, oil and gas. And today you took these two things, oil and gas have not. I mean, there is a special line of, damnation in  for coal, which in one of the lines of text it says that unabated coal must come down fast. But hey, we actually got, oil and gas at the same kind of equitable level as coal and they too must be phased out too. Now technically that is seen as the historic bit, but on the other hand, when you look at the perspective from India, sees, it as a victory when, it can get, the negotiators to agree upon language which is less, harsh on fossil fuels. So apparently the early versions of the draft, it said that you should be transitioning, away as well as be replacing your fossil fuel reserves with renewable energy. You should be tripling your renewable, sorry. You should be tripling your renewable energy sources and replace, your fossil fuel resources with them. Now that is a problem with India because that would mean that India has to explicitly cut down and stop financing new coal projects and replace them, with renewable, energy sources. Now for India's perspective, it is always seen as being talked down to. It is almost as if we have to receive prescriptions from this affluent self world that is primarily responsible for the climate cris in terms of historical, emissions. And now not only have they, caused this problem, they are also not letting large developing countries like India and China go along the same path and reach the same level of equity as, these other nations. And for India, the most important thing is that we're not getting any substantial money out of this whole process in terms of adaptation finance. Because India, with the original UNFCC charter in 1992, India has claimed credit that it was one of the leading voices that actually got this language called common but differentiated responsibility. That is, we all have a role to play in cutting down, greenhouse, gas emissions. But everybody has different roles to play. I mean, developed countries have to do much more than developing countries. So India has, whenever this language comes into question. And since Paris agreement, the Paris agreement essentially brought everybody on the same book in 2015, it said that there is no developed versus developing distinction in terms of actually having to, address the emissions crisis. Because when you set targets like keeping temperatures below two degrees centigrade, or as they call it, as far as possible, 1.5 degrees centigrade, it is not possible for any one set of countries or industries to actually do that. India has always been wary of that language, where it is expected to, actually cut out on its coal, because it also sees that many developed countries, while they might say that we must cut down coal, they're not really doing their bit on cutting down oil and gas, especially because their economies develop at it. And, let's face it, at the end of it, you might condemn the UAE and Saudi Arabia for, having their economies entirely based on oil, but fact is, somebody else is buying all that oil, right? So it is as much the USS and, any other developed countries, roles about how they, too, are contributing and continue to contribute very much, to the climate crisis. So in terms of, to me, of course, we have moved one inch, ahead in terms of equating certain fossil fuels. But ultimately, when you look at it, to me, the real goal always has been adaptation. Let's face it. I mean, the science very explicitly says that if at all, you have any chance at keeping temperatures to this ambitious targets like to, keeping temperatures below one point, two degrees or 1.5 degrees celsius, you have to take on literally very, very strong emission cuts. And this science has been known for many, many years now. But what we are seeing is that year on year emissions are actually increasing. And there's no way, I see in the next seven years or ten years, that there will be some overnight shift in the way we produce our goods or in the way the world fully, channelizes or, reformulates its, energy strategy. So we are nowhere going to be getting anywhere close to 1.5 or even two degrees centigrade. So the fact of the matter is, you have to concentrate a lot more on adaptation. You have to ensure that the world's global systems are made in such a way that the people most vulnerable, that, is the poorest or people who are living the closest to shorelines. They have to be given a chance. They have to be given a chance in a way that their livelihoods or their modes of living are slightly more protected than, what they are used to. But unfortunately, this conversation on adaptation is simply not happening. There was this whole movement that we should have something called a, framework in place on the global goal for adaptation. That is, countries must set strong targets set by 2025 and 2030. We should be implementing plans that will, demonstrate what have we actually done to make our countries more adaptable. There has been no real movement on that. There has been no acknowledgment other than lip service that, yes, $100 billion per annum should have come to different countries. Other than the acknowledgment that, oh, the world has largely failed in delivering on the 100 billion dollar goal, there is no real movement on that. And somehow these things don't really get picked up as a highlight. I mean, you never see headlines like world fails to deliver on adaptation goals or something like that. It's always about reducing emissions, or language like that. So that is why I feel those are, the big misses in terms of loss and damage. Again, one of those headline things that was announced right in the first of the cop. Now I can understand cop presidencies are also, they have got huge media and pr teams working for them, and they wrote press releases every 20, every half a day. Their success is like, they have to make their presidencies, decisions and actions look good and look like a win. So they announce big ticket things like loss and damage, where people have pledged all kinds of money. But we've seen from experience that nobody really knows is adaptation money really adaptation? Are people who most need the money actually going to get the money? And the fact is, cynical me thinks that none of these things are actually ever going to materialize. There will always be legalese and there will always be ways to ensure that money is never really directed towards places, in a form that people can easily access them and use them. So for me, it's a bit of balance in terms of what we've actually got from cop 28. And I would say many more misses rather than headline hits in my viewing of things good.

Shreya Jai: You mentioned, adaptation and loss and damage fund, because I was about to ask, on that and maybe can dwell a little deeper. You are absolutely right that it was one of the biggest miss. Adaptation has not got its due. And after what happened at Sharma Sheikh last year, where finally loss and damage fund was announced, and this year on the day one, it was accepted as well, but nothing significant came out of it. As far as I understand, there were some kind of commitments by several nations. But as you said, we are not sure what to make out of it. So if you can talk about adaptation, what did exactly anything happen? And if you can talk in terms of perspective of India, do we stand to gain anything from this whole discussion around loss and damage funds?

Jacob Koshy: Yes. So that is the, essential irony at which India, is the loss and damage fund is essentially meant to benefit small island states, countries that are not as industrialized, or don't have as much energy infrastructure as India, but they are most vulnerable to sea level rises, etc. So these are the countries who are already bearing the brunt of climate change. And these are the places that actually need most of the money for adaptation. Now, India also, has a huge population of population that will be affected by this. But at the other hand, India is also the third largest, emitter of greenhouse gases. We are also one of the top five economies, in the world, and we are burners of coal. So there have been instances in the past where smaller countries have actually said that India also must, be a contributor, not really recipient, to basically adaptation and loss and damage based funds. So India does not really see itself as a major gainer from these funds because there have been figures put out, by our, Energy Minister, by the environment Minister. Most of India's adaptation funds has been financed from its own public resources. There's also a lot of wordplay involved in terms of what really counts as adaptation. Once upon a time, you would just improve your mangrove, your mangrove defenses along your course, and it would be seen as reclamation or rehabilitation. But now you can come up with a new word called adaptation to account for it. So all this creative accounting is, of course, part of the game. But India's role always has been that it sees itself as the leader of the global south. And many countries, Maldives, Mauritius, they all look towards India's position. It has got a certain clout because of its size. It has got a certain clout in world affairs, especially at negotiations like this. So India does get to make these points, but I don't see a lot of money or benefits even from the green climate fund. I mean, billions should have come by now, but very little has actually been, transferred. And there are a handful of projects in India that have actually benefited from them. The real deal is about technology transfer. Whether will there be enough private companies or enough renewable energy startups who can get connected and who can get better access to sources of finance in the developed world. That is really what India actually is looking for, whether its own entrepreneurs are able to access even commercial deals or commercial, arrangements that help them set up new, kinds of industries, especially what we're doing with the solar pv and in the wind or in the green hydrogen sectors, at least. I've been observing in the last few years, there have been several more indian delegations of businesses, especially renewable and clean energy companies, or people who are somehow connected with carbon markets, et cetera. They have huge delegations that actually go to cop, and they go to cop for networking. I mean, they actually sign up, they set up meetings with different kinds of, oil producers, bigger clean energy people, and try to get financing and funding for their projects. So India sees its role as, the indian government sees its role as being able to facilitate this and ensure that now technology is under very big technology transfer, is under third peg of climate negotiations, which again, is very little talked about in terms of how much technology, to improve your existing power plants, et cetera, and make them less fossil fuel, emission heavy, and has, actually made its way into indian infrastructure or developing country infrastructure. That uptake has been extremely poor. The fact of the matter is, we are never going to see this. It's never, ever going to happen that develop, that there will be private commercial banks who are signing out checks and telling developing countries, here is your 3 billion, here is your 100 billion. It's never going to happen that way. I mean, the best that we can actually hope for is that we try to get loans, or commercial grants that are fairly more, accessible, fairly more affordable, and help us build our infrastructure more reliably so that we can improve, so that we can actually show up on our adaptation based commitments and our own people, that is India's poorest and most vulnerable. They can have a better quality and standard of life in this era of climate vagaries, because now everything is turned around climate, even there's a, cyclone or monsoon rainfall, there is always accompanying is this climate change, two column article that accompanies, every occurrence. So it is part of our conversation right now. And every disaster may or may not be directly into climate change as a science, as scientists might tell you, it's hard. Attributing specific events is extremely hard. But let's face it, this is the reality that we live in. And the, only way is how can we really adapt our economy and improve people's chances at, building resilience and saving. I mean, get better shelter against unpredictable climate events.

Sandeep Pai: fantastic. I think you've covered so many different topics from cop to mitigation to the politics of climate at cop. but also really important topic of adaptation and, loss and damage. let me ask you a forward looking question. there's two interesting things that I observed in this cop. And one is that Prime Minister Modi said that India will host. That India proposes to host the cop 33, in 2028. And the second is that next year's cop is happening in Baku. Literally almost the birthplace of oil, right? One of the birthplaces of oil. One can dispute which one is really, So what does these events, what does it mean that the future cop is in an oil producing nation? the next cop will it, will we see similar kind of like charged blames and counter, counterarguments about like, oh, an oil nation, is hosting this. And then how does India start creating that roadmap for its cop, for its success? I mean, India just finished its g 20 presidency, so it's a two legged question. You can go in chronological order if you like.

Jacob Koshy: So of course the oil factor is going to be talked about, but I really don't see it as occupying the same kind of conversation, I mean, level of conversation as it did in Dubai over here. Because, I would expect in Baku there is going to be larger conversation about, I don't know, Azerbaijan's questionable human rights record vis a vis the Armenians, you know, the conflict with the Armenians over there. So I would see issues like that actually, surface over there. But I think cop 28 has kind of normalized this process that you are going to have to engage more and more with oil and gas and fossil fuel, and the big producers. And whether another economy is dependent on it or not is a secondary thing because as we just earlier discussed this, the whole world is dependent on fossil fuel. I mean, if you're not a buyer, you are a seller. It is kind of a little hypocritical, actually, to say that, oh, my know, we are only addicted to, oil, but we're not addicted to coal, so that makes us better than you, or we just buy oil as strategic reserves and we are not really a,  full blown petro state as Saudi Arabia or the UAE. I think those are just very kind of morally dubious kind of angles. So I think now Azerbaijan is again, a country that will be. It is what it is. it is dependent on oil. And given that we have kind of equalized oil over here, there will be some, I mean, made at par, that all fossil fuels are equally bad. We will see some kind of conversation going ahead. But I would see that the next cop would be,  as they say, it will be more on setting up new targets for, new, and quantified goal on climate finance. I mean, as we mentioned, earlier, that the $100 billion per year that developed countries were supposed to transfer to developing countries as part of in, Copenhagen, as they realized, that was in 2009, and it has been so many years since then, and very little of that money has actually transferred. So now, not only is that money pending, but now there has been a decision or the realization that you don't need billions, you need trillions of dollars for adaptation. So I think that is going to be one of the targets, at Azerbaijan. And just as we made a lot of noise about the loss and damage fund being passed in Sharma Sheikh, I would imagine that some kind of headline statement saying that new gold worth some big unfathomable number will be the headline over there, and that will be, the measure of the success of that particular cop. Regarding India, I would see that we have five years now. I mean, there are so many decisions to be taken, because normally these decisions are only taken two years before the actual cop is hosted in the country. But I would say that a five year advance has got some levels of political overtones in that. So let us wait and see how that actually pans out, because I'm sure there are going to be a lot of issues in terms of location, venue, whether our infrastructure is great enough to have so many people converge at the same time. But I'm sure that we can, because G 20 is there. But G 20 was just ministerial people. And this time you're going to have journalists, we're going to have huge delegations parked over a really long time. So that's going to be an interesting thing to look forward to. But it would really, really serve India's interests if actually India kind of stepped out of this narrative, of going by this narrative of, mitigation, or whether we have set, out new targets for gas or oil. If India can direct conversation towards adaptation, towards kind of generating a concise, focused, statement, or commitment on actually getting countries to do more on climate finance, on getting more affordable loans towards countries that need them, if we can somehow get some kind of declaration on that. Something like how in Chile, I think that would be a true measure of success and would actually reflect the purpose of having a cop in a large, developing country like India. Of course, it's five years now, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of commentary on it, so it's something that we should wait and watch in my reckoning.

Shreya Jai: Great. what a fascinating conversation. thank you so much, and it was so nice to hear you. I didn't want to interrupt and ask something, so thanks again. It was a great conversation. I, hate to do it, but we have to close, the conversation now. But thanks again for joining us here and giving us such a different, and I would say a refreshing side of all this discussions that you are having about COP. So thanks again.

Jacob Koshy: Thanks, Shreya.

Sandeep Pai: Thank you so much. I, really enjoyed both your journey, but also kind of your reflections as somebody understanding the science but also engaging with policy and the intersection was beautiful. Thank you.

Jacob Koshy: Great. It was a pleasure, Sandeep, and thanks a lot again for inviting me, and, all the best, and I hope many people, get some kind of ideas and new insights into their daily lives based on our conversation. Thanks a lot for having me again.

Shreya Jai: Hope so, too. Thank you.

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We are on Twitter. You can follow @tieh_podcast and get in touch with 2 hosts @shreya_jai and @sandeeppaii

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