COPOUT

'This is just what we need!'

-- Professor Hugh Hunt, Director of Centre for Climate Repair at University of Cambridge

'COPOUT gives a very strong sense of what the stakes are, in the climate struggle... and shows the urgent need for other nimbler ways forward as we finally face up to the existential threat now upon us’ 

-- Emeritus Professor Rupert Read, author of Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Co-Director of the Climate Majority Project

‘COPOUT exposes how global climate negotiations have failed. Culling from hundreds of interviews and conversations with climate negotiators and agitators from around the world, Nick Breeze reveals the clash of interests infecting the United Nation’s annual Conference of the Parties to address climate change. With stories drawn from his attendance at every COP since the historic Paris agreement in 2015 to the convening overseen by the head of an oil conglomerate in Dubai in 2023, Breeze traces how the UN process, despite its glamor and promise, has broken down. COPOUT is required reading for anyone relying on global action by governments to solve the planet’s climate crisis.'

-- Dr Alice Hill, former special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy at the National Security Council

'The climate crisis is the greatest challenge our civilisation has ever had to face up to.  Yet our global political process, set up to develop an appropriate response, has has manifestly failed over the past 30 years.  The UN COP meetings have taken place every year since 1992, attended each yearon average by 4,000 official negotiators from over 195 countries, and also by around 30,000 non-negotiators.  This is the first insider, personal account that lays bare this failure, taking us all the way through from Copenhagen 2009 to Dubai 2023.  It is a remarkably readable account, capturing the mood and the atmosphere at the meetings and giving important interviews with leaders from different communities.  It is a clear account of the continued failure of the political leadership to even grasp the magnitude of the challenge facing us.  This is a must-read for all of us who care about and work for a manageable future for humanity and the ecosystems that we depend on.’ 

-- Sir David King

‘Someday the history of the climate era will be fully told, and when that happens these wry and passionate first hand observations from the global climate negotiations will be essential – both for their raw data, but also for capturing the spirit of this endlessly frustrating struggle.’

-- Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature

COPOUT 'offers the stimulus of a thriller and page-turner, side-by-side with underlying horror, grief and anger' 

-- Adrian Tait, Co-Founder of the Climate Psychology Alliance (