As a law student, I was very excited to witness the bureaucracy of global governance firsthand at the COP. I did not really know what to expect. I have read about these conferences since I was in high school; I have studied the Paris Agreement and researched its impact; and, as a climate activist, I have always been intrigued by the international legal dimensions of the issue. To travel halfway across the world and see everything, in full form, felt incredibly surreal. At no other time in human history have delegates from every country in the world sat around a table and developed universal treaties together. And yet, while this is emblematically the height of global, liberal democracy, the context surrounding it could not have been more disquieting. The United States just elected a President that attempted to violently overthrow the nation’s last election; committed to imprisoning his opponents and killing asylum seekers, calling them animals, thieves, and criminals; and openly vowed to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry for a billion-dollar bribe. More bombs have been used to kill Palestinians in Gaza than were dropped in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. The war in Ukraine is still being waged. And natural disasters, droughts, heat waves, and famines are destroying communities and taking people’s lives at record levels every successive year.
I knew going in that COP was not the solution to any of that. But it is difficult to see everything progress as normal when these challenges really demand so much more. The most important thing I took away from the conference this year is that a new political alignment is necessary. There is an incredible dissonance you feel walking through the halls of the conference, but for anyone who gets the opportunity to attend a future COP the one thing that you will notice is just how many people are there with you. There are thousands of young people, thousands of experts and activists and scientists. The will and the energy are not lost. The institutions, as they currently exist, might be. COP might be a solution in the future, it might not be. But the impetus for trying that system was important. It still resonates. Millions of people are organized and demanding something different and the conference is just one location where solidarity within that movement can be felt and formed.
When you participate in this program, your role as an active force in history begins. Everything you see that is unjust or too slow or too ineffective or too captured: that is your project. Even if you fear that the institutions tasked with solving a problem are ineffective, it is always important to recognize where power is, how it is being used, and to develop theories to wield it more effectively. One of the most impactful tools of the legal profession is the power to decide what is legitimate and what is not. That can be weaponized, or it can be used earnestly to protect people, but the worst thing we can do is ignore it because it is failing at the latter. COP itself is a legal institution with the power to legitimize a path forward. And everywhere you see unity; people fighting for what is just, in spite of violent opposition; defending one another; and traveling thousands of miles to make their voices heard, that is where you build the resilience to take on those fights. That is how we create a politics for a more impactful, just, and democratic international governance. The will to create that is there and I am so grateful for the experience of attending COP because it gave me the opportunity to bear witness to all of that. More clearly now than ever, I know where I need to put my energy.
Colin Rosadino is a law student at the UConn School of Law.