Inside the COP27 Showdown

11/09/22 • 37 min

This week, climate negotiators and world leaders from around 200 countries are descending on the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el Sheikh for COP27—the twenty-seventh gathering of the 197 nations that signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change back in 1992.

As proceedings get underway, a huge question mark hangs over this year’s climate summit. Rich nations are pushing for poor countries to announce greater cuts to carbon emissions, but developing countries claim that their developed counterparts have stiffed them when it comes to climate finance.

To make sense of this dynamic at this year’s gathering and to explore the unique role India plays, journalist Bill Spindle joins Milan on the show this week.

Bill is the climate and energy editor at the new journalism start-up, Semafor. He’s also a ten-year veteran of the Wall Street Journal, where he served as South Asia Bureau Chief from 2016 to 2020. Bill has spent the last year crisscrossing the length and breadth of India reporting on the transformation of India’s energy sector—a journey he documented on Substack.

Bill and Milan discuss the developed vs. developing country deadlock that imperils the COP27 proceedings, India’s opportunity to play a leadership role, and the continuing uncertainty over U.S.-China relations. Plus, the two discuss Bill’s year-long adventure traveling 8,000 kilometers across India by train.

Semafor “Climate” newsletter by Bill Spindle.
Bill Spindle, “Energy: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, June 14, 2022.
Bill Spindle, “

To make sense of this dynamic at this year’s gathering and to explore the unique role India plays, journalist Bill Spindle joins Milan on the show this week.

Semafor “Climate” newsletter by Bill Spindle.
Bill Spindle, “Energy: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, June 14, 2022.
Bill Spindle, “

Previous Episode

India’s Hidden Treatise on Statecraft

Regular Grand Tamasha listeners will recall that Milan had the scholar Rahul Sagar on the podcast several months ago to talk about his new book, To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours.

That book was a look at the nineteenth-century intellectual roots of India’s foreign policy strategy and its approach to great power politics. And now Rahul has another book out—this one is called, The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government.

Rahul returns to the podcast this week to talk to Milan about an important but largely forgotten set of lectures that represented the first treatise on statecraft produced in modern India. Plus. Milan and Rahul talk about the legacy of India’s princely states, the unique historical figure of Madhava Rao, and why the latter’s treatise has been largely ignored—until today.

“What Kind of World Power Does India Want to Be (with Rahul Sagar),” Grand Tamasha, June 1, 2022.
Rahul Sagar, To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth-Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours (Juggernaut, 2022).
Ideas of India, online database curated by Rahul Sagar

Next Episode

How Rising Powers Can Make—Or Break—International Order

Why do rising powers on the global stage sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, yet at other times support an order that constrains them? This is the core question motivating a big, new book on international order by political scientist Rohan Mukherjee.

The book is titled, Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions, and it is a comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena. The book focuses on how international institutions shape the choices of rising states as they pursue equal status with established powers.

Rohan is an assistant professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. To talk more about his new book, Rohan joins Milan on the show this week from his office in London.

The two discuss China’s surprisingly cooperative behavior in the post-Cold War era, India’s grievances with the liberal international order, and the importance of status concerns in international relations. Plus, Milan and Rohan discuss India’s approach to the nuclear nonproliferation regime during the Cold War, U.S. policies to restrain China, and the implications of a more isolationist U.S. foreign policy for rising powers.