'A hubristic, colossal wreck'

Can the most powerful people in the world get together and save us in climate breakdown's last-chance saloon? Or is their annual gathering just a performative, posturing circus of corruption and greenwashing? 

We’ve all heard of the COP climate conferences. Whether we’re policymakers who have attended all 30 of these events, or hardened activists who would never be seen dead at one, we all have fantasies and feelings about their usefulness or otherwise. 

Could anything matter less than the toothless agreements that emerge from these fiascos, leaving us in ruins after 30 years of abject failure? Or what if they’d never taken place at all? Might things then be even worse? And what about those who live on the front line of climate injustice? 

Hindered

Will their voices be integrated meaningfully into the COP31 in panoply in Turkey next year, or are will they just be tokenised - part of a manufacture of consent that pays lip service to dispossession and indignity while baking in the old post-colonial tenets of indebtedness and control? 

Does proximity to power give us hope of adjusting things for the better, or is it just for show? Does the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties actually enable different voices to speak and listen to each other, or is it just money, at COP, that does the real talking? 

When I was invited to screen my first feature film, My Extinction, at COP28 in December 2023, these questions felt urgent to me. Making that film, I’d hung out with activist circles, particularly with Extinction Rebellion. 

I was a participant-observer in several protests including the Tufton Street protest of 2020 organised by Writers Rebel, which did quite a bit to shed light on the Tufton Street cabal of so-called think tanks. 

So I entered COP thinking of it very much in the terms of my fellow protestors at such events – as the key get-together powering a deeply problematic globalisation agenda that had little to do with real change, and was quite possibly one of the things that hindered it. 

Aesthetics

But I’m first and foremost a filmmaker. So, really, the carnivalesque horror show I expected to find when you host a climate conference in a techno-utopian leisure-city fantasy like Dubai felt too deliciously ironic and flabbergasting to pass up as a filmmaking opportunity. 

So I smuggled a tiny selfie-stick-style blogger’s camera with me, determined to essay what I found, including my own sense of profound despair and alienation, with the dark humour that, for me at least, is necessary as both survival tactic and communication tool. 

I’m not known for being right, but this time my predictions were pretty close to the mark. 

Dubai greets you with a wall of heat, ozone and concrete dust denuded of birdsong or insect-song, a human experiment on a grand scale that is both entirely impressive and successful in its own terms, and utterly dispiriting if one is given to the least shred of ecological consciousness. 

It is a highly influential, seductive proof-of-concept of a certain vision for our human futures, and to me, that vision is not a healthy one – a hubristic, colossal wreck. When things get this existential, I immediately felt, it goes beyond aesthetics or politics. 

Ambivalence

Isn’t there something inherently polluting, not just carbon-wise but in terms of the soul, about building a megacity in the desert and then flying in 70,000 people for a climate conference, thousands of them oil and meat lobbyists caught doing side deals with the oil baron who was ‘hosting’ it?  

Or – I was trying to keep an open mind – is this just the price we have to pay to parlay with power? What does it actually feel like: the mixture of ambition, guilt, and heartbreak that attends The Meeting at the End of History?

What I felt, and hope the film Colossal Wreck captures, was something more ambivalent than I’d initially imagined. This insanity presented a metaphor for human folly at pretty much every turn – giant ski resorts in the 50 degree heat, massive desalination plants to provide water for a stunning aquarium that meant the destruction of wildlife on the actual coastline.

But also I met incredible, hopeful, highly knowledgeable and determined people from all walks of life. Development, activism, tech, science, law, finance.  

They didn’t always speak the same language, but almost all of them seemed to carry the same ambivalence in themselves, the same feeling of wondering whether anything could really be achieved in this place.  

Capitalism

Many were pained realists who explained how international organisations such as the UN can’t be expected to solve climate change, but it might still create some networking, plus some language that, while prima facie toothless, still provided a linguistic structure to cling to.  

Nevertheless, one couldn’t quite shake the sense that, understood a little differently, this conflab also betrayed the direst paucity of language. 

Everyone, somehow, be they lobbyist or activist, had their tone determined by the get-things-done business-as-usual of our everyday existences in the hyper-capitalised zones of privilege that most of us attendees inhabited to differing degrees. 

“Ambitions”, “goals”, the motive-oriented FOMO that late online capitalism generates. The adrenalized inattentiveness it leads us into.  

Extractivism

But then I met Indigenous people who brought stories of their plight from the bleeding edge of climate injustice. And this was a different register entirely, one that pierced through the verbiage the rest of us were hostage to participating in. 

One Indigenous leader, Valdelice Veron, features strikingly in Colossal Wreck making a speech that cannot fail to make you cry at the utter carnage experienced daily by her people in Brazil.

They have been brutally cleared from their ancestral lands by military police who serve the ‘landowners’ whose extractivism ultimately supplies our lifestyles in the Global North. 

Indeed, at the time we premiered Colossal Wreck this November, I was shocked - if not surprised - to hear she had been shot with rubber bullets by police in such a land clearance.  

Voices

Incredibly, she recovered enough to be able to attend COP30 in Belem, where Indigenous groups not only protested but held an alternative COP just down the road from the ‘real’ one. 

A space where their voices could have weight and dignity. We might see this as a model for us all: not to disavow or boycott the halls of power entirely, but at the same time to self-organise the body and imagination in adjacent and competing ways. It must be “both, and.”  And COP is therefore both cancer and cure.  

Protest, of course, was completely disallowed in any meaningful sense in Dubai, and likewise at Baku for COP29, in what many might call another oil-producing authoritarian state. Brazil did better. 

It is an open question how tolerant Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey will be during COP31 of the voices that offer something other than business as usual. 

This Author

Josh Appignanesi is a writer/director whose socially-conscious work spans fiction, documentary and the space in-between. His climate action documentary My Extinction (2023) screened at 80 UK sites and powered direct recruitment to a range of climate action partners. It was selected to screen to delegates at COP28 in Dubai. 

Colossal Wreck (2025) looks at COP conferences, and was itself screened at COP30. The film is out in cinemas now and will be online in 2026.  Find out more online.