Today at WPR, we’re covering the far right’s recent victories in Argentina and the Netherlands, as well as Indonesia’s upcoming presidential election.

But first, here’s our take on today’s top story.

COP28: The United Nations COP28 Climate Change Conference begins today in Dubai, where thousands of attendees, including leaders from nearly every nation in the world, will discuss ways to keep the planet from heating too much by the end of the century and take stock of the progress made so far on existing climate goals, including reducing emissions. (New York Times)

Our Take: In recent years, the COP summits have come to highlight the growing divergence between climate action and climate diplomacy.

On the one hand, states have taken increasingly unilateral action on mitigating the effects of climate change. That’s a direct result of the Paris climate accords, signed in 2015, which set broad climate goals, but left it to each state to voluntary determine the measures it would adopt to reach them.

But in response to geopolitical shifts over the past decade, the action taken by many of the world’s richest countries to accelerate the green transition has been based on economic competition, with an emphasis on industrial policy by governments—including the U.S.—that have long championed free-market economies. The hope is that the payoffs of the green transition in terms of job creation will win out over the political backlash to its short-term costs that is already gathering in Western democracies.

On the other hand, climate diplomacy has become characterized by growing divisions between the Global South and the Global North. Those divisions are on stark display at COP28, and not just between state parties. Climate activists from the Global North have decried the choice of the UAE, a top exporter of fossil fuels, as the conference’s host and called for an immediate phaseout of fossil fuels.