Some 70,000 people are expected to attend the meeting in Dubai. That’s twice the number that attended COP27 last year in Egypt. The surging number of attendees shows that the business of climate change, is, well, a business. As my friend, Roger Pielke Jr., observed on Sunday:

Climate is now a full-scale industry, with fortunes and careers to be made, and perhaps lost. That in itself is not necessarily good or bad — health, defense, finance and so on are also industries. It goes with the territory of being an important policy and political issue. Along with the climate industrial complex comes massive vested interests, ranging from the financial to the professional to the political.

Roger also reported on a new study by Masahiro Suzuki, Jessica Jewell, and Aleh Cherp. (If you haven’t subscribed to Roger’s Substack, you should do so now.) The study found that despite all the hoopla around climate meetings, they’ve had little discernible impact on energy policy. Here are the critical lines from the report (as with the above, emphasis is added):

Climate policies are often assumed to have significant impacts on the nature and speed of energy transitions...We find that climate policies have so far had limited impacts: while they may have influenced the choice of deployed technologies and the type of transitions, they have not accelerated the growth of low-carbon technologies or hastened the decline of fossil fuels. Instead, electricity transitions in the G7 and the EU have strongly correlated with the changes in electricity demand.