Article

Comment

Sustainability

28 November 2024

6 min read

Does COP make any difference?

When climate deal makers and justice seekers meet.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A speaker holds two fingers up while sitting in front of a backdrop reading 'United Nations Climate Change.

Brazilian politician Geraldo Alckmin addresses COP29.

Vice-Presidência da República, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This year’s UN climate talks have come to an end with a headline-grabbing figure, reports of deep divisions and cries of failure. How do we understand the legacy of these negotiations for us now and for the generations to come?

COPs bring together negotiators from almost 200 nations, along with tens of thousands of people from across business, civil society and local communities. They gather to make decisions about this crisis that touches every community and part of our lives and our world, though not equally (which is part of the issue). The annual negotiations are the culmination of months of action and diplomacy. The negotiators pore over draft texts to understand the implications of a new set of brackets, they search for sources of free coffee to power them through the increasingly sleepless fortnight, and scrabble at the end to land on a consensus.

At COP29 this year, the key things at stake were a new finance deal that was three years in the making and a wave of 2035 national climate targets. Lurking amongst discussions were the implications of the US election results. The pressure was on to land strong decisions before Donald Trump – who withdrew the USA from the landmark Paris Agreement on climate last time he was in office and has stated his intention to do so again – returns to the White House.

What did we get at the end of all of this?

Finance in the spotlight

The new finance goal of at least $300 billion per year by 2035 for lower-income countries seems like a big number, but is around a quarter of what is needed, $1.3 trillion. For what was dubbed 'the finance COP', wealthier nations came with a distinct lack of actual money, despite their obligations towards those countries least responsible and hardest hit by climate change. The $300 billion could be spun as a tripling of the previous commitment of $100 billion a year – but taking into account inflation, it’s nowhere near that in real terms. And it’s not just about the quantity; much of that money is likely to be loans, driving already strapped countries even further into debt.

When lower-income countries argued for that $1.3 trillion, this wasn’t them trading Pokemon cards in the playground. It was about the very existence of people and whole communities. Climate Action Network, a global network of over 1,900 civil society organisations, labelled the outcome a betrayal, while India's delegate Chandni Raina called the final text “little more than an optical illusion”.

To build meaningfully from this, the last-minute addition about using the next 12 months to develop a roadmap towards that $1.3 trillion needs to be a priority. This finance could come from sources such as taxes on shipping, aviation and the wealthiest in society. This money would be an investment in the world we need – more secure and stable in the face of growing climate chaos and more frequent flooding and storms.

Emissions reductions left in the dark

The other key test of this COP was meant to be the countries’ national climate commitments which are due to be updated and strengthened by February next year at the latest. Despite this, the UK was one of just a few countries to come with a new target. In Baku, nations had the opportunity to collectively agree how they will implement the commitments from last year to transition away from fossil fuels – but kicked those decisions to next year. This is in the context of plateauing action to curb warming; since 2021 we have been on a path toward 2.7°C by the end of this century. (This analysis suggests the recent election of Donald Trump could add 0.04 °C of warming due to rolling back US climate policies; not good, but not the derailing some feared. The potential impact on collective action is as yet unquantified.)

A mirror to the world

Questions are inevitably being asked about these COP events: are they “no longer fit for purpose”? Is it time for something else to deliver the scale and urgency of action required?

I was struck by the words of Alden Meyer, with his 40 plus years of experience in climate policy:

“COPs are where the world holds a mirror up to itself to see how well it is doing in the fight against climate change; when the image in the mirror is ugly, it does little good to blame the mirror.”

We do not like what we are seeing. Two weeks of tough negotiations culminating in imperfect outcomes expose our frustration with the rate of our change. They magnify our longing for COP to solve this crisis that frightens and overwhelms us.

But COPs are only as good as the governments, businesses and people that will turn the agreements into lived reality. That’s why those national climate plans due next year matter so much. This mirror indicates that climate seems to have slipped a little down the priority list, despite the growing urgency.

The mirror analogy is a good one – but we also need to recognise where there are vested interests who would obfuscate what we see and what is decided. Among the thousands who descended on Baku were 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists — more than all delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable countries. This is part of a recent trend of outsized influence by those who would invest against our collective future for the profit of burning more fossil fuels.

Weeks like last one remind us of the flaws in the COP process – but the answer is not to ditch the whole thing. COPs are the only forum where every country is heard on this global issue. Existing power imbalances are reflected and needed to be addressed; a concrete finance figure only appeared on the last scheduled day of negotiations, putting lower-income nations were under pressure to accept it as clock ran down. In the final hours, several delegations walked out of a meeting to express their frustration with what was on offer.

COPs provide a space for civil society, youth activists, faith and community leaders to speak into global decisions and shape the world and our future. Getting the agreement we got is in part testament to the advocates who kept finance solutions on the agenda.

The COP processes need to be made fairer and more accountable, to steer a clearer way forward for climate action of the scale and speed we need. But if we scrapped them, we’d only need to create a different space for international diplomacy in their place – and we certainly don’t have time for that.

We see only in part

Ultimately, our disappointment with COP shines a light on our longing for a more hopeful future. It would be easy to let weeks like the last one harden or discourage us. But legacies are hard to see in the moment. Prior to the 2015 Paris Agreement, we were headed for at least 3.5℃ of warming by the end of this century; a catastrophic change to our world and inheritance for future generations. COPs have played a key role in shaving almost a degree from that trajectory. It still isn’t enough, but it isn’t nothing.

COPs show us something of the world as it is – messy, broken and yet suffused with people devoting themselves to justice again and again. For many, there’ll be some much needed rest to catch up on, because this is a race for the long haul. We live and act and speak for justice knowing that legacies don't fit nearly into a headline or media quote. They are slower to be realised and understood. The challenge to us all is to keep sowing faithfully, knowing we may not be the ones to reap in our lifetime. To keep acting in love and hope – even when the end is not in sight.

One of the early church leaders, Paul, wrote in a reflection on love: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

Article

Character

Comment

Justice

Music

2 July 2025

6 min read

A fan’s eye view of the fall of Sean Combs

We believed he was a good guy because we wanted to believe someone was

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

Sean Combs, 2019.

Justiceonthebeat, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the weeks-long trial of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs draws to an end, the world at large has seen an insight into his life that we wish we hadn’t. Combs has just been convicted of transportation to engage in prostitution. Combs had pleaded not guilty and vehemently denied all allegations against him.

Podcasters and influencers have kept us up to date with every twist and turn of the prosecution’s case, along with a jury member being dismissed and a bizarre visit from Kanye West. Trials of powerful, successful men (and it invariably is men) have become a semi-regular occurrence in the last few years. The #MeToo movement brought justice for victims of abusers like R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein. But something about the Diddy trial feels different. For hip hop fans of a certain age, the accusations against Diddy were both shocking and hard to accept. Let’s take a deep dive into why that might be.

For fans who are forty or older, one night looms large in the history of hip hop; the 1995 Source Awards, which distilled the entirety of the East/West coast beef into one evening. West coast rap music was in the ascendence, and New York, the birthplace of rap music and hip hop culture, was not coping with it very well.

The atmosphere was further exacerbated when a red-shirted man, as big as a house and twice as broad, took to the stage. Marion ‘Suge’ Knight was the head of Death Row Records, a West coast label that had been hoovering up talent like Snoop Dogg, 2pac and Dr. Dre. Suge was an intimidating presence to say the least. His red shirt was a sign of his affiliation with the ‘Bloods’, the notorious L.A. street gang. It was an image of notoriety that Suge leaned into and it was well-earned. In his award acceptance speech, Suge said the most infamous lines he was ever to utter:

“Any artist out there wanna be a’ artist, and wanna stay a star, and don't wanna – and won't have to worry about the executive producer try’na be all in the videos, all on the records, dancin’ – come to Death Row!”

This was widely perceived as an attack against Sean Combs, ‘Puffy’ or ‘Puff Daddy’ as he was known back then. As the head of Bad Boy Records, Puffy was not content to simply be behind the scenes; he constantly interposed himself into the songs and videos of the musicians on his label. Whilst these interventions might seem annoying to some, the success that Bad Boy’s artists had achieved couldn’t be argued with, and as a New York native, the audience at the Source Awards saw Suge’s words as an attack on one of their own. So, when Puffy took to the stage later, a response to Suge’s barbs was hotly anticipated.

But on that occasion, Puffy took a different approach. He acknowledged that he was the executive producer in question, and added: “contrary to what other people may feel, I would like to say that I'm very proud of Dr. Dre, of Death Row and Suge Knight for their accomplishments... and all this East and West [conflict], that needs to stop. So give it up for everybody from the East and the West that won tonight. One love.”

In this interaction, we saw the aggressive antagonist Suge be met with nothing but love and respect from Puffy. It seemed like a refreshing antidote to the perception of rap music being only violent and misogynistic. Without wishing to overstate the point, Puffy showed that hip hop could be measured, mature and positive. This was an image that, until recently, had held for decades. Yes, there was a fair amount of hedonism thrown in to his public image, but that is priced-in to the cost of being a fan of famous rappers –the excess comes with the territory. For decades we have been dealing with this false dichotomy that Suge Knight was the ‘villain’, and Puffy was the ‘hero.’

This image of Puffy as, at the very least, a decent man, was further underscored following the deaths of Tupac ‘2pac’ Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. aka Christopher Wallace. The murders of those two impossibly talented, painfully young men, less than a year apart, represent the point from which all other historical events are judged as ‘before’ or ‘after’. One of the things that came after was Puffy’s release of I’ll Be Missing You, a song in honour of B.I.G, his most popular artist and friend. Sampling The Police’s Every Breath You Take and featuring Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, on the chorus, Puffy evoked explicitly biblical language with lines like:

“It's kind of hard with you not around, / know you in heaven, smiling down / watching us while we pray for you / every day we pray for you.”

These combined with the images in the video, hands in prayer, candles, children dressed in white all served as a fitting tribute. It could have been mawkish, but it met the moment and consolidated Puffy’s good guy image in our heads. We believed he was a good guy because we wanted to believe someone was. Other hits followed, with videos filled with shiny suits and relentless dancing; it was fun, and served as a counterbalance to the grit and grime of gangsta rap. For over two decades, Puffy, now going by ‘Diddy’, had an image that fans still associated with lightness and positivity. Critics like Murs from HipHop DX led conversations painting Diddy as the Superman to Dr. Dre’s Batman. Rumours about Diddy would occasionally surface, but without the mainstream media devoting much time to them, they were easily dismissed. That was until Cassie Ventura, Diddy’s ex-girlfriend, filed a civil lawsuit.

If there are any lessons to be learned by his fans, they’re lessons that have sadly already been learned by fans of countless other powerful and successful men.

In late 2023, Cassie’s lawsuit accused Diddy of rape and sex trafficking. These allegations were explosive, but just one day later, both parties reached a settlement. The fire of Ventura’s accusations was dampened down by the release of the joint statement a day later. It seemed as if the whole thing was over and done with before many hip hop fans could even hear the news, let alone process it. Fans of Diddy clung to shreds of denial, whilst noticing that no-one else from the hip hop community seemed to be springing to his defence. Almost as if the people who knew him in person had a very different image from that of the persona he cultivated.

But Cassie’s lawsuit was the first crack in the dam. Law enforcement agencies began investigating, Diddy’s property was raided and by the time CNN got their hands on the surveillance video of Diddy attacking Cassie, the dam had well and truly burst. The video from a Los Angeles hotel dated March 2016, shows Miss Ventura attempting to leave one of Diddy’s freak offs 'parties'. Only to have Diddy chase her down the corridor, grab her and violently assault her. Each kick, drag and object thrown at her slammed another nail into Diddy’s reputation. The ensuing apology he posted on his Instagram was completely invalidated by his earlier statement that his accusers were making false claims in search of a “quick pay day.”

For those that loved Combs’ music and what it meant to us, it felt like something repellent had crawled into it and died, forever tainting those songs by association. If there are any lessons to be learned by his fans, they’re lessons that have sadly already been learned by fans of countless other powerful and successful men. Firstly, the more powerful a person is, the more they can hone and control their public image, and that they must be taken with a grain of salt. Secondly, always be ready to question a dichotomy. Is this really a hero versus a villain? Or in this case, an example of two demonstrably evil men, one with substantially better public relations.

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