Economic Times to COP: 'Enough of COP Jamborees'

The Economic Times has a blunt message for the annual UN climate conference circuit: enough of the jamborees. In a piece published Monday, the business daily took aim at the COP process itself, framing the summits as spectacle-heavy gatherings whose returns are hard to pin down.

The headline says it plainly. "Enough of COP Jamborees." No hedging, no diplomatic throat-clearing.

The timing matters. The editorial ran as the latest COP session was underway, with delegations again haggling over finance, adaptation and the pace of emissions cuts. For Indian readers, the question the paper raises is a familiar one: what does the country actually get out of these meetings, and at what cost?

Why the skepticism lands

India has walked into every COP with the same core demands. Money for adaptation. Technology transfer on fair terms. And a recognition that a country still lifting millions out of poverty can't be held to the same emissions timeline as economies that industrialised a century earlier.

Those demands haven't moved much in years. The summits produce declarations, pledges and text. The follow-through is slower.

The Economic Times piece leans into that gap. Its argument, in short: the travel, the pavilions, the photo opportunities and the sheer scale of the annual gathering have become an end in themselves. The negotiating text is where the real work sits, and that work keeps slipping.

It's a fair point to press. A COP that ends with a weak final document costs more than it returns. And the carbon footprint of flying tens of thousands of delegates to a new city each year is not nothing.

The counterargument isn't trivial

Supporters of the process would push back, and their case has weight. The Paris Agreement came out of a COP. So did the framework that got nearly every country to table a national climate plan. Without a recurring deadline, governments tend to let climate slide down the priority list.

Smaller, poorer countries rely on the summit stage in ways that are easy to miss from New Delhi or Mumbai. For delegations with little diplomatic muscle, the COP is one of the few rooms where their concerns get a hearing at all.

None of that erases the paper's complaint. It sharpens it. A process that matters this much should be judged on what it delivers, not on how many people show up.

What Indian readers should take from it

The editorial lands in a busy stretch for Indian energy policy. Solar capacity keeps climbing. The EV market is finding its feet. Grid storage and green hydrogen are moving from pilot to plan. The domestic work is real and it's happening regardless of what a COP communique says.

That's the practical read. India's clean-energy transition will be built at home, through policy, capital and execution. The summits can help by unlocking finance and keeping pressure on rich countries to pay up. They can't substitute for the work.

The Economic Times isn't calling for India to walk away from the table. It's asking for a harder look at what the table is worth. That's a question worth asking every year, not just when the planes are booked.