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Travellers have been stranded in Paris and London due to train cancellations as swathes of Europe are hit with flood warnings.

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Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing. To the pizza-deprived, the world’s most beloved food probably wouldn’t sound all that special. What’s so great about the combo of bread, cheese, and sauce, after all? The alchemy among the three creates something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts—but I don’t have to tell you that, thankfully.

In 1949, the writer Ora Dodd had a much tougher challenge. In her story for The Atlantic, simply titled “Pizza,” Dodd sought to introduce Americans to a strange new food taking over Italian neighborhoods:

The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie. There is a plural, pizze, but no one ever uses it, for pizza is a sociable dish, always intended to be shared. Two people order a small pizza, about a foot in diameter. A large pizza is twice that size. Don’t imagine an American pie blown up to about two feet, however; a pizza is a nearer relation to a pancake. It is very flat, made of raised bread dough, with the filling spread on top.

Dodd’s story is the closest you’ll ever feel to an alien hearing about pizza for the first time. How does the pizzaiolo stretch the dough? “He places this large flat pancake on his closed fist, like a floppy hat, and twirls it round and round. The elastic dough becomes thinner and thinner. A skilled pizza-maker knows exactly when to stop twirling: when the cake is at its thinnest, just before it breaks through.” What do you put on top of a freshly cooked pie? “Garlic and chopped orégano (wild marjoram) are the seasonings, used as the customer may request.”

At that point, when President Joe Biden was in grade school and The Atlantic was almost a century old, pizza was completely unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. We began to evolve beyond the days of “orégano (wild marjoram)” only in the 1960s, when pizza became synonymous with takeout and delivery—a cheap, delicious, and customizable food for the masses. One pizza joint in Ypsilanti, Michigan, DomiNick’s, focused on delivering to nearby college students. In 1965, it changed its name to Domino’s, and within 24 years had ballooned into 5,000 locations. Now America’s love affair with the dish has reached such heights (some 3 billion pies are eaten each year) that imagining a time before pizza feels as unnerving as imagining New York without the subway or Paris without the Eiffel Tower. So much of the American diet has followed the same arc: Food we now eat all the time and take for granted probably wasn’t available even a few decades ago.

We all know that computer mainframes the size of rooms gave way to laptops and iPhones, but that same kind of “disruption” has also infiltrated our meals. Decades before the rise of pizza, spaghetti and meatballs—a dish that did not exist in Italy—became an American favorite. How that happened is one of the “few fundamental questions” that Corby Kummer explored in “Pasta,” an 11,000-word Atlantic cover story from 1986. (Bring back the one-word headlines!) In the early 1900s, new arrivals from Italy had limited access to some of the fruits and vegetables that went into dishes they’d slurped up back home. But they did have meat. So much meat. The meatball, born out of necessity, just made sense. Other American takes on Italian food from that era now sound revolting at best: Mushy pasta cooked in a sauce of canned tomato soup and Worcestershire sauce. One early recipe for baked ziti, Kummer writes, called for “one and a half pounds of meat, one pound of ricotta, a half pound of mozzarella, and two cups of white sauce for one pound of pasta.”

America’s changing tastes are because of immigration, yes, but also because of the grocery store. In the ’70s, the average supermarket stocked approximately 9,000 items. You might have found a few flavors of yogurt, if that. Now when you head to a supermarket, you can find 60,000 options and choose among blueberry, strawberry, and peach kefir. The modern grocery store is a triumph of science and technology. Why are brussels sprouts no longer a metaphor for stinky grossness? Partly because plant breeders figured out how to eliminate a compound that turned them bitter. Hear me out: American life is more delicious now that the Red Delicious apple has given way to the holy Honeycrisp.

Over the next 70 years, the food we eat will continue to change. Silicon Valley is on a quest to perfect the pizza robot, which could cook up a pie inside a truck while it’s on the way to your home. Maybe we will soon be eating more pawpaws, an enigmatic fruit native to the eastern United States and Canada that somehow tastes tropical, like a mix of mango, pineapple, and banana. Once an all-American favorite, the pawpaw disappeared from our diet because it’s hard to grow and ship—but now food scientists are working on a version that might survive a journey to Whole Foods. As my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, the fruit aisle is getting trippy—starting with yellow watermelon, pink pineapples, and white strawberries. In the future, we may eat more chickpeas. And MSG. And yerba mate. And … gluten-free pasta made of durian seeds.

Perhaps, actually, science has gone too far.

In October, a Communist Party–run television network in the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program called When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the ancient Chinese sage pontificate on their doctrines and discover that their ideas are in perfect harmony.

“I am longing for a supreme and far-reaching ideal world, where everyone can do their best and get what they need,” Marx says. “I call it a communist society.”

“I also advocate the establishment of a society where everyone is happy and equal,” Confucius responds. “I call it the great unity of the world.”

The program’s message is that modern Chinese culture should be a synthesis of Marxism and China’s traditions—a fusion achieved by another great philosopher, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “There has been endless debate about how traditional culture should be treated,” one scholar on the show explains. But finally, thanks to Xi’s wisdom, “the problem was truly solved, and people’s bound thoughts suddenly became clear.”

[Read: The most dangerous conflict no one is talking about]

The Marx and Confucius show is just one small part of Xi’s campaign to fashion a new ideological conformity in China. Its apparent aim is to foster unity in preparation for struggles at home and abroad—but with the ultimate purpose of tightening Xi’s grip on China. Chinese leaders “want to have a very powerful, socialist, ideological framework that can congeal the population, and this is of course under the party’s control and guidance,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. “What’s a more powerful way to centralize power than to control people’s thought?”

Xi’s push for communist conformity might seem anachronistic in the age of social media and the global digital commons. But it’s only one way he is dragging China back into an older, darker time. He has reversed decades of market liberalization in favor of renewed state intervention in the economy, returned to Cold War–style confrontation with the West after a period of fruitful cooperation, and reestablished one-man rule to a degree unseen since the days of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder. Now he is attempting to restore the intense ideological indoctrination of earlier years of Communist rule—the era of Mao’s Little Red Book—in a quest for national “unity,” as he defines it, and total Party dominance.

In this sense, China is in the throes of a culture war—one that the state has been waging against society for some time, using the measures of repression available to its leader. Xi has already intensified censorship and strangled private education. Now his campaign is picking up pace. In October, he unveiled a framework he calls Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, the latest installment in a growing corpus of his “thought” meant to direct foreign affairs, the military, and other aspects of policy and private life. With this pronouncement, according to the state news agency Xinhua, Xi’s aim is to “provide a strong ideological guarantee, spiritual strength,” and “a socialist ideology that has the power to unite and inspire the people.”

[Read: China changed its mind about World War II]

Nor is this indoctrination meant to stop at China’s borders. “Profound changes in the international landscape prompt an urgent need to increase China’s cultural soft power and the appeal of Chinese culture,” Xinhua noted. In a related move in March, Xi introduced the “Global Civilization Initiative,” a manifesto in which he advocates “respect for the diversity of civilizations” and that “coexistence transcend feelings of superiority.” Countries, he adds, should “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others.”

That’s Xi-speak for denying the existence of the universal rights and values that undergird the global primacy of democracy. Xi’s culture war has geopolitical implications in this regard: In seeking to undercut the West’s cultural influence abroad, Beijing appears to realize that winning its battle with the United States will require not just missiles and microchips, but media and messaging as well.

Chinese leaders have a long history of trying to control thought. In 213 B.C.E., the first emperor of the Qin dynasty became irritated with scholars who compared him and his policies unfavorably to rulers of the distant past. His solution, so the story goes, was to confiscate suspect texts on history, philosophy, and other subjects and burn them. He did this, one ancient historian commented, “in order to make the people stupid and ensure that in all under Heaven there should be no rejection of the present by using the past.”

Two thousand years later, Xi Jinping is attempting something similar. In October, a Chinese book distributor recalled a recent reprint of a biography of the Ming dynasty’s last emperor from sellers without a clear explanation. The Chongzhen emperor, as he was known, hanged himself when his dynasty collapsed in 1644. Perhaps the book’s cover language, which advertises that “Chongzhen’s repeated mistakes” had “hastened the nation’s destruction,” could be construed as an implicit criticism of Xi amid the country’s mounting economic problems and geopolitical tensions. Whatever the reason, today’s censors, much like the Qin emperor, seem to prefer that readers not compare present and past.

Xi’s vision for China’s present includes old-fashioned and supposedly “socialist” morality. In October, the Chinese leader shared his view that women’s proper role in Chinese society is to stay home and have babies to reverse the country’s population shrinkage, brought about, in part, by his party’s misguided policies. He urged women to follow “a new trend of family” and stressed the need to “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing.” In a sign of the times, Lisa, a member of the K-pop group Blackpink, was recently suspended from the Chinese social-media platform Weibo for unspecified reasons; the ban came after she had performed a burlesque show in Paris that was controversial in China. The Hong Kong celebrity Angelababy was also banned, perhaps because she may have attended the performance.

Others with lifestyles that the state considers unhealthy for communist society have also come under pressure, most notably members of the gay, lesbian, and transgender communities. In 2021, censors barred imagery of “effeminate” men from local television and closed dozens of social-media accounts associated with LGBTQ groups. Just this month, the government’s top internet watchdog announced a crackdown on short social-media videos that have sexual content or images of cross-dressing.

[Read: Chinese Leaders Are Scared of Their Country’s History]

Ethnic minorities have fared still worse in this ideological framework. Xi has used his notion of national culture, largely defined by the Han Chinese majority, as a bludgeon for forcibly assimilating the country’s Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other such groups. Touring Xinjiang—home to the Uyghurs—in 2022, Xi made the case that minority societies were all part of a greater “Chinese culture,” because they have been connected to Chinese civilization from time immemorial.

That narrative is inaccurate. Uyghurs and Tibetans, for instance, have their own languages and religious practices. Their societies have distinct cultural roots and have been governed by entities largely independent from China for most of their histories. Xi nevertheless instructed local officials that his version of the relationship had to be taught more concertedly in order to “firmly forge a China heart and Chinese soul” across the region’s diverse peoples. This effort to amalgamate minorities into a single category of “Chinese”—as opposed to “citizens of China”—may be behind the severity of Xi’s suppression of minority traditional life: The government has smothered Uyghur culture by destroying religious sites; curtailing the study of Uyghur culture, literature, and language in schools; and associating the practice of Islam with extremism. A 2020 policy reduced the study of the Mongolian language in favor of Chinese in schools in northern China, leading ethnic Mongolians to protest.

The West is subject to a parallel erasure. In a recent video that went viral on Chinese social media, Jin Canrong, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Renmin University, in Beijing, argued that “there is a question as to whether Greece and Rome existed.” Aristotle, he claimed, is a fabrication: No single person could have written so much on so many topics. Even the writing materials for such a volume of words would have been unavailable in antiquity, he claimed. By contrast, ancient Chinese works were relatively short—and, by implication, more likely to be real. His listeners got the point. “It’s just common practice for European leaders to make up philosophies and philosophers in order to rule and spread their ideology,” a commenter on Weibo opined.

During China’s decades of reform, culture and ideology took a back seat to national development and the pursuit of wealth. Xi has apparently seen fit to reverse this pragmatic turn, and to do so by promoting a new concoction of Chinese traditions and socialism. Promoting this cultural fusion, he said in a recently published speech, “is the strongest assurance for our success,” because “only with cultural confidence can a nation stand firm and tall and traverse great distances.”

Xi’s government isn’t just urging the public to adopt his new culture. He’s imposing it. In October, China’s rubber-stamp legislature passed the Patriotic Education Law, which mandates the intensive teaching of ideology, national defense and security, “ethnic solidarity,” and the “deeds of heroes” in schools, according to Xinhua. The purpose, a spokesperson for the legislature told local media, is to “guide people to deeply understand the trinity of loving the country, the Party, and socialism.”

Such heavy-handed efforts might seem poorly matched to the times. Sources of information abound, and large numbers of Chinese people travel and study abroad—surely the government can’t restrict them to state-approved ideas.

But only a small proportion of the Chinese populace possesses the interest, language skills, and resources to seek out information beyond the censors’ firewall. The majority still depend on Chinese media and other sources of state-sanctioned information. Chinese authorities use this extensive control not just to keep undesirable content from the public’s eyes, but also to actively shape what people believe. Throughout the crisis in Gaza, for instance, Chinese state media have fed the public a steady stream of pro-Palestinian messaging that has contributed to an upsurge in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel discourse online. Censors could easily suppress such sentiments, but they don’t, because they help build domestic support for Beijing’s foreign policy.

The potential consequences of Xi’s culture war should worry the world. An ever more isolated, indoctrinated, and politicized Chinese populace could become that much more hostile to the West and more supportive of nationalist causes, such as a military assault to claim Taiwan. Xi’s quest for social control presents risks for the Communist regime as well. Though some Chinese people may find Xi’s conservative and nationalist values appealing, the segments of the population that do see beyond the firewall, or that have grown accustomed to a more open environment, are likely to bridle. As a result, “you might see some significant polarization within Chinese society,” Mary Gallagher, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Michigan, told me.

The precedent for such tensions is not encouraging. Back in 1966, Mao’s Cultural Revolution convulsed the country in violence, as radical Red Guards sought to stamp out ideas and practices they saw as corrupting. That campaign, too, was the work of one man determined to preserve his power.

Thomas Bach says Ukraine is "one war among 28 wars and conflicts going on this world".

This morning in Dubai, after a long night of consultations, the world struck a deal that will guide countries’ commitments to fixing climate change. For the first time in the nearly 30 years of the Conference of Parties, a COP document managed to directly address reducing fossil fuels. The text “calls on parties” to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”  

The deal still leaves significant allowances for fossil fuels to linger into the future, and includes language recognizing the utility of “transitional fuels,” which is code for natural gas, and “abatement,” which is code for carbon capture and storage, widely considered too expensive and unproven to be a meaningful solution. Still, it manages, however subtly, to “loosen the industry’s grip” on COP’s outcome, former Vice President Al Gore, who had railed against an earlier version of the text, said in a statement. After bringing down the gavel, Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company and the COP president, congratulated the countries on a job well done, christening the new document the “UAE Consensus.” Now the oil-rich country will forever have its name on a major climate deal, fated to be repeated over and over in diplomatic spaces for years to come.

After Al Jaber finished his speech, Samoa’s Anne Rasmussen, a lead negotiator for a group of 39 small island states that form a powerful bloc at COPs, took the floor. “We are a little confused about what just happened,” she said. COP is supposed to end in consensus, but Al Jaber had finalized the text before the representative of the island bloc, which had been most critical of the text being passed, even arrived. These small island states have repeatedly said that their countries risk uninhabitability beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. In their view, the agreement is missing strong timelines for peaking emissions and has a “litany of loopholes” for fossil fuels; it will lead to only incremental shifts even though they need transformational change. “We’re crossing oceans and getting drops of ambition,” Drue Toshiko Slatter, of Fiji, told me the morning the final text was released.

Every year, some version of this disappointment plays out. Over and over, COP produces texts that, however much they are trumpeted, fail to match the urgency or scope of the climate crisis. Without 2015’s Paris Agreement, the last notable COP result, the world would be in a much worse position, and still, eight years later, the most ambitious actions that the deal prompted leave the world far short of its goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

And yet, the agreements that emerge from this strange process have substantial sway. They may not be legally binding, but countries do, haltingly, move in the direction that they point. This COP will nudge the world toward pumping and buying less oil “this decade”—doing anything less would now be archaic. Ultimately, the COP process is not the expression of the world’s maximum ambition on climate change. It’s simply the new floor.  

COP is riddled with mismatches between rhetoric and reality. At its pavilion, Saudi Arabia displayed a wall of plants with lit-up block letters spelling out KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA embedded in the foliage, while, along with a few other countries, threatening to block any text that included a phasedown of fuels. About once a day in the United Nations–administered Blue Zone, activists staged a meticulously planned and rehearsed protest. At the first one I happened upon, a man with a bullhorn said, “Okay, now the action is going to start, if the people in the front could sit so the people in the back could see.” The U.S. pledged $17.5 million for the newly established loss-and-damage fund but declined to join a coalition to end fossil-fuel subsidies.

Along with the UAE, the European Union, and plenty of others, the United States also celebrated the fossil-fuel language that did make it into the final agreement. An earlier version of the text, which had no language on fossil fuels at all, had sent delegations into disbelief and tearful deflation: “We will not sign our death certificate,” Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, Samoa’s minister for natural resources and the environment, said to reporters on Monday. But the U.S. plans to drill for ever more oil and gas; this year is expected to break records in terms of domestic production. President Joe Biden recently approved the $8 billion Willow Project, which will drill oil from a pristine Alaskan ecosystem for decades to come.

  

For all these shortcomings, COP is the only system we’ve got to work out these knots. The obstructionist theatrics of a few OPEC countries in Dubai revived the same debate that seems to resurface at COP every year: Should this really all be done by consensus? Majority rule might have gotten the words phaseout of fossil fuels into the final text. But calling for “transitioning away” from the fuels is hardly a meaningful difference. In that respect, multilateralism worked, and under majority rule, states such as Samoa and Antigua and Barbuda might never be the moral forces they are in the process now. Larger powers have to listen to them and work to earn some trust, because they can single-handedly hold up the entire process. (Or not, if the gavel comes down before they’re in the room.) Of course, that means Saudi Arabia can hold deals hostage too.

Spending two weeks at COP did feel like entering another dimension. Day after day in Dubai, we returned to the sprawling, futuristic campus, our world conducted in boxlike buildings housing the country pavilions and carpeted plenary rooms, all set around a glowing geodesic dome. Some decorative foliage was real; some was fake. It was like being trapped on the set of Pleasantville, if Pleasantville had an air-quality index of 157 and more overt surveillance technology. But people who might otherwise never have a chance to confront one another were all in the same place. I spent some time with Gloria Ushigua, an Indigenous leader from the Sápara community in the Ecuadorian Amazon, who has resisted attempts to drill for oil in her territory. We visited the OPEC pavilion—it shared a building with the Indigenous pavilion. Ushigua was partly in traditional dress and was wearing a free hat she had gotten from a nuclear-energy group parked nearby. She had used red and black Sharpies on the hat to black out the word NUCLEAR with a geometric Amazonian design. The person at the OPEC booth suggested that the Indigenous group must use their oil; it will get them things they need, like glasses, which are made of plastic, a petroleum product.

This argument is one I heard again and again from fossil-fuel representatives: that we still need oil and gas. And the final agreement does reflect this idea; it specifies that the world move away from fossil fuels in energy systems alone. The gathered countries pledged to triple renewable-energy capacity and double the rate of efficiency improvements in energy systems, which, if actually done, will get us a good part of the way to the Paris Agreement targets of halting warming “well below” 2 degrees. But for the islands and other developing countries, the near-total lack of substantive language on climate finance in today’s final agreement hobbles their chances of phasing out their own fossil fuels. “It’s easier to get investment for a $100 million [liquid-natural-gas] plant than for a $20 million solar project,” a delegate from Antigua and Barbuda said on the plenary floor. Countries stuck in debt must still exploit their oil reserves to make payments. And, of course, oil burned anywhere adds up to more warming everywhere. The financial part of this picture will no doubt loom large over the next COP, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, which is notably also a petrostate, with two-thirds of its government revenue tied to the fossil-fuel sector.

At one point, on the way to one of Dubai’s man-made palm-shaped islands, I passed a building that looked almost exactly like the Chrysler Building, in New York, then a second, identical quasi–Chrysler Building right beside it. I started thinking about what Dubai’s soaring skyscrapers would look like if we never stopped burning oil, and the UAE became too hot to live in. The sand dunes would eventually take back the 10-story parking garages attached to each of their bases, but they could never make it 80 floors up, the height of many buildings here, and certainly not to the top of the Burj Khalifa, which is some 80 floors higher than that. These would be here, likely forever, like the pyramids and ziggurats, poking out of the desert.

Then again, would Dubai ever be too hot to live in? Most Emiratis already spend all summer indoors, in constant air-conditioning—if we continue to burn oil, Emiratis would likely stay very oil rich, and could pay to live sealed in cooled buildings. Roads would have to go underground, sure. But you can live indefinitely in the desert if you have enough money. Maybe Dubai would be the last city on Earth.

Yet conference-goers did see the UAE pledge $100 million to the “loss-and-damage fund” and push in speeches, over and over, for keeping a science-based commitment to 1.5 degrees. Despite its shortcomings, COP28 signaled clearly that the fossil-fuel age is, starting now, slowly coming to an end. All told, humanity’s experiment with oil may not last that long. Hydrocarbons have defined our energy culture for several generations; will it change fast enough to save the next few? Right now that still depends on where people live. But the floor has been raised.

An Afghan refugee is making his mark in the Paris fashion scene.

In the climate-change era, everyone who has oil wants to be the last one to sell it. Oil-producing countries still plan to increase production in the near term, and very few economic incentives exist to press them in any other direction. As long as someone else still has oil, they’ll sell it to your customer in your stead. Oil-industry insiders have said this point-blank throughout this year’s United Nations climate talks in Dubai, which are scheduled to end tomorrow.

The economic disincentives to phasing out fossil fuels have been the “elephant in the room,” according to Susana Muhamad, the environment minister of Colombia’s first-ever leftist government, who has emerged as a vocal leader in the meeting’s plenary rooms. Some of the countries most dependent on income from oil and gas are also among the ones most indebted to foreign banks, and so they keep drilling to stay current with payments. Countries such as Ecuador are exploiting their reserves—even in protected rainforest ecosystems—to service their painfully high debt. (Ecuadorians voted this August to block drilling in at least one part of the rainforest, for now.)

As one of South America’s biggest oil producers, Colombia is—or should be—another case like Ecuador. The country has a lot of international debt, so according to traditional economics, it had better keep pumping that oil. Instead of falling into that “economic trap,” Muhamad told me, over an espresso in an Emirati restaurant inside the sprawling COP campus, the country decided to veer radically off course. It announced in Dubai that it would sign on to a novel attempt to fix this seemingly intractable logic, one that has been gaining momentum outside negotiating rooms: a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation agreement.

Modeled in concept after the nuclear-nonproliferation deal signed in 1968, the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty is not official COP business, but is at the center of a growing side conversation. Like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the fossil-fuel treaty aims first to take stock of each country’s resources; the organization Carbon Tracker Initiative has already begun compiling a registry of fossil-fuel production and reserves. Then agreements could be made to mutually halt expansion. So far, 12 countries have signed on to support the deal; Colombia is the second oil-and-gas-producing country to join. (Timor-Leste, an island nation in Southeast Asia with a struggling oil economy, was the first.) Ultimately, the treaty’s signees intend to have it recognized by international law and be legally binding.

Tzeporah Berman, a longtime Canadian environmental activist and the chair of the group pushing for the fossil-fuel treaty, has had “an out-of-body experience” watching the treaty take on a life of its own, she told me when I caught up with her at the conference. “Last year, we walked into COP with one country,” she said. The tiny island nation of Vanuatu called for the fossil-fuel treaty on the floor of the 2022 UN General Assembly. Now, in addition to those 12 countries, 95 cities and subnational governments have signed a call for nonproliferation, along with 3,000 academics and scientists and 101 Nobel laureates. Mark Ruffalo is a fan. Those other entities can’t be party to the treaty when it ultimately forms (only countries can do that), but Berman sees their collective support as a force to move public opinion—much as the nuclear-nonproliferation movement started by turning the moral tide on nuclear weapons. If everyone who thinks that fossil-fuel expansion is morally unacceptable backs a single treaty, that could have major political ripple effects, she thinks.

Berman spent a number of years as a provincial-government appointee working with the Alberta oil-sands industry on climate policy. Though their goals are at odds, she is still friendly with a number of oil-sands executives, and in Dubai, she happens to be staying in the same hotel, so she greets them in the lobby in the morning. Canada put 28 oil-and-gas-industry employees on its official roster for the climate talks. “The industry has made $2.8 billion in profits every day for 50 years,” she said. “They’re trying to hold on to that.” After working with them, she clearly understood one thing: “Anything that out-and-out constrained the production of their products, they would not support.” They have maintained this position in Dubai, where Exxon Mobil’s CEO and others have expressed their preference for agreements that focus on limiting carbon emissions generally—not on limiting fossil fuel production specifically.

Berman saw a similar reticence from countries when she started coming to COPs in 2007, she told me. “I was told by governments, including my own, that oil production was not a climate issue.” When a blockbuster climate deal finally emerged from a COP in 2015, she said she “searched the Paris Agreement for oil, gas, and coal,” but the words weren't there. Every country had committed to tackling climate change, yet none of them officially planned to cut fossil-fuel production. And since then, production has gone up.

So Berman began talking with academics, looking for a political strategy that had worked in the past to break this type of standoff. The nuclear-nonproliferation movement stood out. It was a case much like climate change: The threat at hand had the potential for mutual assured destruction, a danger that many agreed was unacceptable, yet no country wanted to go first in eliminating its part of that danger.  

With a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation treaty, countries could share information on their oil and gas reserves and agree to a mutual drawdown schedule that reflects their individual situations. “It’s also an instrument to look for better and more fair conditions for countries like Colombia,” Muhamad, the environment minister, said. The country has roughly seven years’ worth of oil reserves left, and is expected to run out of gas in this decade. Changing course, she said, would save the country from being locked into a downward spiral of aggressive oil drilling and then a financial crisis when it ran out. Plus, to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals, Colombia can’t possibly unearth all its oil. With so many cities and subnational governments also signed on to support the nonproliferation agreement, economic dialogues might be possible among more entities. Muhamad pointed to California, which has supported the nonproliferation treaty. “But who buys 50 percent of their oil from Ecuador in the Amazon? The state of California. So what is California going to do about it? This is the discussion that we have to have.”

Ecuador has not yet signed the treaty, but Colombia, Ecuador, and similar countries are, as Muhamad put it, “not Saudi Arabia,” with its seemingly endless reserves. Colombia and Ecuador will run out of oil. Which means they have less to lose, long-term, from agreeing to leave it in the ground. “We don’t have resources for hundreds of years. We are the ones right now who could do this transition,” she said. But their short-term financial needs are too pressing to leave the oil there for nothing in return. Plus, when her country does try to move in this direction, it is punished in the markets, she said. After Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that the government would cease issuing new permits for oil exploration, the value of its peso dropped immediately. The financial system needs to change, Muhamad said, or countries like hers won’t be able to take meaningful climate action. “And a treaty could be the place where we could negotiate now, not in 15 years, when nobody wants our oil.”

Of course, that logic won’t work for mega-producers such as the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, or even for smaller countries such as Azerbaijan, which gets two-thirds of its wealth from oil and gas, and which was just announced this week as the host of next year’s COP. But, Berman argues, treaties change the culture, even in the absence of the biggest players. The nuclear-nonproliferation deal had limits—the five major nuclear powers, including the U.S. and Russia, still have their arsenals—but it did change the trend of unrestrained weapons production. More recently, a UN treaty banned nuclear weapons outright. No nuclear power signed on, but such treaties can succeed nonetheless: The Guardian notes that the U.S. never signed a UN land-mine treaty, yet aligned its land-mine policy to match. The dangers of using oil are more diffuse than the dangers of nuclear weapons, and the incentives to use it are constant. Decoupling those things will take a monumental effort—something treaties are designed to do.

Ministers at COP28 have spent nearly the past two weeks sitting in large, carpeted rooms negotiating a text that, up until today, contained a call to phase out fossil fuels altogether. John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, had said during the conference that he thinks the world needs “largely a phaseout of fossil fuels in our energy system,” a distinct difference from the less forceful “phase down” language the U.S. previously supported. China said it would commit to some language on fossil fuels, which was better than no language.

For a few days, it felt like a radical new approach to oil and gas might be possible. But Saudi Arabia and the head of OPEC had been attempting to block the phaseout proposal, and today COP President Sultan Al Jaber released a new draft of negotiated text that eliminated the possibility, instead leaning on the much softer language of “reducing” fossil fuels. The European Union has said it will not accept this version of the text, leaving open the door to restoring some stronger language. Yet even the discussion of a phaseout at COP represented a change in the rhetoric of some powerful countries: Once, Berman told me, talking about oil production at all was a nonstarter. Diplomacy might have limits, but it can bring ideas once treated as impossible dreams into the mainstream. A treaty to stop expanding the frontier of fossil-fuel production could go the same way, or further. “At the beginning, it seems to be something on the periphery,” Muhamed said. “But maybe from the periphery, it goes to the center.”

The owner has said she left the ring on a table in her hotel room but when she returned it was gone.

The French government has established 10 temporary regional centres to relocate the homeless from the streets of Paris. More than 60 French organisations have condemned it as "social cleansing" and an attempt to boost the city's image ahead of the 2024 Olympics, at the expense of the homeless.