Transcript: COP28 — Climate summit tries to kick fossil fuel habit

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘COP28: Climate summit tries to kick fossil fuel habit’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, November 27th. And this is your FT News Briefing.

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Turkey is exporting a ton of supplies that Russia can use for its military. And an algorithm is deciding who gets an organ transplant in the UK and who doesn’t. Plus, the annual COP climate summit kicks off this week, and everyone is wondering what the future of energy looks like.

Attracta Mooney
At COP level, one of the biggest challenges is that many of the countries who are big oil-producing nations oppose the phaseout of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are a huge source of their economic wealth.

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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For years, a handful of countries have been pushing for a global agreement to phase out fossil fuels. They want to end all new oil and gas projects, but progress — it’s been slow. And now that debate will be front and centre this week at COP28. The annual UN climate summit kicks off in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday. Attracta Mooney covers climate for the FT and has been following the run-up to the conference. Hi. Attracta.

Attracta Mooney
Hello. How are you?

Marc Filippino
Yeah, not too bad, thanks. So where are we exactly in the fight to phase out fossil fuels?

Attracta Mooney
Last year at COP27 in Egypt, almost 80 countries backed a proposal to phase out fossil fuels. It didn’t get over the line in the end, but that was the biggest show of support we’ve seen so far. And that was a really big step because fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to global warming.

Marc Filippino
OK. So it sounds like some progress has been made here, but what are the main challenges to phasing out fossil fuels?

Attracta Mooney
The concept of phasing out fossil fuels isn’t about phasing them out right now. It’s about phasing them out gradually over decades so that by the time we get to 2050, we aren’t using fossil fuels anywhere near the same extent as we’re doing so right now. Our economies are still predominantly run on fossil fuels and we need to make progress on boosting renewable energy, changing how industry works. So that is all tricky. It does require a kind of huge systemic shift in economies and it needs a huge amount of money to do so. And at COP level, one of the biggest challenges is that many of the countries who are big oil-producing nations oppose the phaseout of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are a huge source of their economic wealth.

Marc Filippino
Yeah, and like I had mentioned earlier, the UAE — the United Arab Emirates — is hosting the conference this year, and it is a major oil producer. How do you think that might impact the discussions?

Attracta Mooney
Well, I think it could go several different ways. So the advocates for the UAE hosting COP28 say that the UAE comes at it with a really unique vantage point. The COP28 president, Sultan al-Jaber, is also the boss of Adnoc, the state-owned oil company in the UAE. And the idea is that he has this huge convening power. He can bring together oil and gas producing companies and nations and get them to clean up their act, get them to start investing money in greener sources of energy. But others argue that Jabar has been consistent in talking about phasing out fossil fuel emissions rather than phasing out fossil fuels. And this is the concept then that potentially we were talking about allowing the oil and gas industry to continue production for decades to come, so long as we can capture those emissions. And critics say this can’t happen because we are simply not investing enough money in those emissions-capturing technologies and won’t be able to ramp them up fast enough.

Marc Filippino
What would it take then, Attracta, for COP to approve an agreement to phase out fossil fuels?

Attracta Mooney
A full agreement to phase out fossil fuels would require a huge amount of compromise from a lot of countries in the world. And that’s pretty tricky to get. What we’re most likely to see is maybe some nudge towards creating an energy system free of fossil fuels with less of a focus on the timeline and less of a focus on how we get to that. And that might be a compromise that countries can agree to that would allow oil-producing nations to continue producing oil and gas and coal-producing nations so long as their emissions are captured.

Marc Filippino
Attracta Mooney is a climate correspondent for the FT. Thanks, Attracta.

Attracta Mooney
Thank you very much.

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Marc Filippino
Turkey is exporting a lot of goods that are vital for Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine. The FT found that from January to September, Turkey sent $158mn worth of high-priority goods. That figure is way more than last year when the Ukraine war broke out and includes materials for things like cruise missiles, drones and helicopters. This growing trade between Turkey and Russia is undermining the west’s attempt to keep Russia from equipping its armed forces. A representative from the US will visit Turkey this week. He’ll discuss how to stop Russia from getting the goods and finances it needs for its war.

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The wait for an organ transplant is often frustrating and scary. For some people, it’s even a death sentence. And in the UK, it’s not even a human that makes the call whether someone gets the transplant. An algorithm determines people’s place on a waiting list. But is that fair? Madhumita Murgia is the FT’s artificial intelligence editor, and she’s been looking into the practice. Hey, Madhu.

Madhumita Murgia
Hey there.

Marc Filippino
So can you explain the algorithm that’s making the decisions for people who need an organ transplant for, you know, something like a liver?

Madhumita Murgia
So historically, livers were allocated at a regional level. So if you lived in a certain area, the hospitals in that area and the transplant surgeons, the hepatologists, you know, the experts, would decide based on their medical knowledge, their knowledge of the patient, obviously certain biological markers. And then based on what livers were available locally, they would decide who should go to the top of the list. But when the algorithm was introduced five years ago, they were trying to make it into a national system. So you needed a statistical system to take all the numbers in and kind of crunch it. The way it works now is you have few hundred people on the waiting list for a liver, and every time a liver becomes available anywhere in the country, this algorithm has dozens of variables and it basically figures out who needs this liver the most, who couldn’t survive without this liver. And it gives you a score. And the person with the top score on the list is offered the liver.

Marc Filippino
And you’ve been speaking to someone who has been at the mercy, so to speak, of this algorithm — a woman named Sarah who is on a list for a new liver. What can you tell me about her?

Madhumita Murgia
So, Sarah has been living with genetic diseases — cystic fibrosis and another more rare genetic illness — that has really played havoc with her body. But when I met her, she still lights up when she’s talking about stuff that she’s really passionate about. And one of the things she really cares about is advocating for yourself in the medical system, and as a patient having some control over what’s being done to you. So when Sarah’s family figured out that her life was dependent partly on this algorithm, they really wanted to understand how it worked. And what they started to figure out through their investigative process really, was that somehow when they were trying to plug in Sarah’s results into a version of the algorithm, which they found through a data scientist, she was just never getting a score anywhere near the scores of people who had been transplanted before. And they were really confused about this, you know, why was Sarah never making it? And they started to realise that the algorithm penalised younger people.

Marc Filippino
That seems like a mistake. Was that the case, Madhu? 

Madhumita Murgia
This was done deliberately. And the reason for it was that biologically you would expect older people not to survive as long while they were waiting and younger people to be more tolerant of longer waits because they’re younger, their bodies are more able. But of course, you know, waiting for a much longer time for a new liver has all sorts of untold effects on the body. That means when you eventually do get a liver, you might not survive as long. You know, the algorithm wasn’t taking into account the healthy life years being lost by younger people, and also the fact that Sarah might have been an exception in this case because she had this really rare combination of conditions which meant she would have died waiting on that list if she wasn’t prioritised.

Marc Filippino
I see. So age became the determining factor in Sarah’s case, even if it shouldn’t have been. Madhu, what are some of the other issues that you learned from Sarah’s experience?

Madhumita Murgia
One issue is the system itself. Is it biased in terms of how it’s designed? Should the variables be weighted differently? Should they change how much value is given to age? That’s one question. And then the other issue was there being no appeals process. In Sarah’s case, her family felt that she was an exception to the rule of a younger person being able to wait longer. She was deteriorating very quickly, but all they were told was no system is perfect. So really my learnings from that is when we do introduce automation into something that is so human, we need to find a way to give people a voice in these systems and allow for sort of appeals and alternatives in the case of exceptions.

Marc Filippino
Madhumita Murgia is the FT’s artificial intelligence editor, and she’s co-hosting this season’s Tech Tonic podcast, which is all about AI. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Thanks, Madhu.

Madhumita Murgia
Thank you.

Marc Filippino
And a little bit of good news: earlier this year, Sarah finally got the call that a liver was available. 

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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