View / COP parties head below deck

Negotiations may be off to a slow start at COP, but the after-hours party scene is alive and well. On Wednesday night, the caipirinhas were flowing past midnight at a party co-hosted by Google and Octopus Energy and well attended by an eclectic mix of journalists, venture capitalists, and NGO leaders. Google’s chief sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, told me she tried not to take it too personally when numerous news outlets reported this week that top corporate leaders had stayed away from COP.

And what good would a conference on a coastline be without a good party on a billionaire’s yacht — in this case, the ammonia-powered Green Pioneer of the Australian iron giant Fortescue and its chairman Andrew Forrest. The ship is a kind of globe-trotting demonstration project, meant to prove that major shipping vessels could one day run on fuel derived from renewable electricity. Real green hydrogen remains in short supply, so for now the ship runs mostly on conventional ammonia of the kind used in fertilizer. (Ammonia is toxic even in small concentrations, so when the ship pulls into port for cocktail parties — as it has done from Singapore to London and many stops in between in recent months — it has to offload the fuel and run on normal diesel instead.)

Perhaps the most headline-grabbing “party,” of sorts, was the rush on Tuesday night of Indigenous protesters through the UN security checkpoint at the conference entrance, which produced the biggest stampede of cops and camera-toting TV journalists I’ve seen at a COP since Leonardo DiCaprio popped into COP26 in Glasgow. Even though there’s a strong community of Indigenous rights advocates here in Brazil, they continue to be mostly marginalized in the talks and, from what I saw, kept out of the Green Zone area that is meant to be open to the public.