The idea of loss in damages has been a real focal point of the 27th conference of the

party. The annual UN climate negotiations happening in Egypt. Last year in Glasgow,

global North countries fought to keep the topic off the agenda. When it was made, this

was host country Egypt vowed to put it on the agenda early and keep it there and they've kept

that promise. But I've been seeing a lot of big gaps in the media coverage on this issue.

Global South countries are often treated like a monolith and the discussion around how to handle

countries that are both on the front lines of the climate crisis and a major target for oil

production is almost non-existent. It's something I've been thinking about a lot because we've been

reporting a new season for the past two years on Guyana and that country's emergence as an oil

producing country. But also because I've spent so much time looking at the history of climate

policy and how certain narratives have been shaped. The remarkable news out of this year's

COP is that negotiators, including those from the US, which has historically been a big blocker

to loss in damage, agreed to officially establish a loss in damage fund. But there are still a lot

of lingering questions around how the global North and the global South can move forward on a

dressing climate together. There's the failure of negotiators to agree to include any language

in the final agreement around phasing fossil fuels out, of course. But there are a bunch of other

conversations that need to happen to you and those are all mostly informed by a history that seems

to be widely unknown or just ignored. Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervalt. In this episode,

we're going to get into that history and unpack some of the messier details around COP and loss

in damage. That's coming up after this quick break.

We have to ask ourselves, can we ever attain the ultimate objective of the convention, which

is to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with a climate system? By failing to meet the objective

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