For almost two decades, whenever governments sat down to argue over how to stop cooking the planet, he was usually near the front of the room. Peter Betts (1959-2023), a British civil servant, ran Britain's climate negotiating team for thirteen years.
Six of those years, he was also the EU's lead negotiator. Betts wrote this book The Climate Diplomat – A Personal History of the COP Conferences in the last eighteen months of his life, dying of a brain tumor, and you can feel that fact on almost every page without the book ever quite becoming sentimental about it. It is an insider account of what he saw and did at the various Conference of the Parties (COP) – annual United Nations climate change conferences – but his real achievement is that he refused to let his diagnosis soften his judgement.
Betts starts his narrative from Rio in 1992 – the "Earth Summit" that produced the UN climate convention which has served as the foundational cornerstone for modern international climate change agreements and environmental diplomacy. Then Kyoto in 1997, where a much younger Betts helped the United Kingdom (UK) broker binding targets for more than thirty rich countries while everyone else signed up to nothing, a lopsidedness that would cause trouble for the next twenty years.
There is a good but bitter chapter on George W. Bush pulling America out of Kyoto in 2001, and on the UK government's decision -- against the instincts of nearly half of Whitehall bureaucracy -- not to leave along with the Americans. COPs at Bali (2007) and Poznan (2008) are discussed briefly, partly because Betts had moved out of climate-related departments for seven years by then and only came back in 2008, just in time for what everyone was calling "the big one."
Copenhagen in 2009 is where the narrative really gets going and the best chapter in the book is about it. The negotiating text ran to hundreds of pages because China, India and Saudi Arabia kept blocking any attempt to trim it. The Danish hosts underestimated how many people would turn up, so delegates from tropical countries stood in the sleet for hours.
A leaked document embarrassed the Danish hosts during the talks. Betts strongly suspects the Chinese delegation leaked it themselves, even though they denied it to his face. He is also honest about his own side's failures – the EU went in stubborn and came out with almost nothing, something that still visibly annoys him years later.
After the chaos of Copenhagen, the 2010 talks in Cancun were calmer, more of a rebuilding year. Betts takes real pride in one thing that came out of it: he helped start an informal group called the Cartagena Dialogue, where rich countries and poor, vulnerable countries talked to each other directly, instead of only through the usual rigid camps of "developed" versus "developing" nations. It sounds like a small, unglamorous thing. However, Betts argues this quiet relationship-building eventually grew into a much bigger alliance of about a hundred countries, and that alliance was a key reason the Paris Agreement came together five years later.
Durban in 2011 brought the famous late-night ministerial "huddle.” Doha in 2012 planted the seed of the loss-and-damage fund; Warsaw (2013) and Lima (2014) are mostly plumbing. Paris in 2015 is the payoff Betts had spent his career chasing. Marrakech in 2016 turns cold fast, with Brexit and Trump's first win landing almost together. Glasgow in 2021, the last COP he lived to see, ended on a mixed note – more adaptation money, and the first COP text ever to name coal, though softened from "phase out" to "phase down" after India objected.
The book does recount events in a chronological order but it can also be grouped by themes: first, the rules and structure of the UN climate process; then the personalities who shaped or wrecked individual summits; then the political troubles of Brexit and Trump; and finally, Betts's suggestions for what should happen next. He admits climate progress has been far too slow for the scale of the crisis.
Still, real gains have been made renewables and EVs are now cheap, and technologies like offshore wind are fully proven. He also argues that global talks like the COPs, though messy, remain essential: they still push – the world further than it would go alone, driving emissions targets, finance pledges, and fossil fuel commitments, even with the constant risk of being watered down or hijacked. His final point is simple: patient, long-term diplomacy pays off.
The writing itself is clear and engaging, but this is not really a book for someone who does not already know the basics of how COPs and the Paris Agreement work. It is at its best when it moves past the technical details and focuses on people like Betts himself, a fireman's son from South London who ended up brokering deals between the US and China, or the doomed but capable Danish team running the 2009 summit. His widow's account of his late-night phone calls home from these conferences, and the notes describing his illness and how the book got finished after he could no longer speak clearly, are hard to read but add a lot to the book.
The final section lays out his suggestions, worth checking against the four COPs since he died. Some of his suggestions were adopted during the subsequent COPs: Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022 set up the loss-and-damage fund, Dubai in 2023 got it running, and Baku in 2024 tripled the old $100 billion finance target to $300 billion, with a longer-term goal of $1.3 trillion. There was also stronger language in 2023 about moving away from fossil fuels than any previous summit had managed. But his other ideas fared worse. His call for regular check-ins on countries' climate pledges, instead of waiting five years, never happened. Neither did he hope that China and the Gulf states would start contributing more, like rich countries do. The fossil fuel language actually got weaker afterward – dropped completely in 2024, and still missing in 2025- blocked by the same oil-producing countries that appear throughout the book.
His deeper worry was not a line of text but that climate would get swallowed by culture-war politics on both sides of the ideological spectrum in the developed countries like the United Kingdom, leaving the worst-behaved countries to fill any gap left by retreating major powers. That fear has aged badly in the sense that it proved right: Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement again within days of taking office in January 2025. Betts did not live to see it, but reading his final chapters now, his final plea about pursuing " the art of the possible" versus turning climate into a culture war does not read like a pep talk anymore but like a prediction that came true.
The book's sympathies stay with the negotiators managing the developing world's demands, not with those making them. The $100 billion finance pledge, admitted "shamefully never...met in full," gets a single buried sentence. India's equity argument – that the rich world got rich by burning the carbon budget first is met mostly with Betts calling it "an alibi" for growth, rather than highlighting the injustice behind it. He flags the imbalance himself, but this remains a memoir of the room, and that room was rarely African, South Asian, or Pacific. The perspective of developing countries or the Global South is missing from the book. Despite all its flaws, The Climate Diplomat is an exceptional and unrepeatable document: a dying man's determination to leave behind not comfort, but usable knowledge.
The reviewer is an Islamabad-based international development professional.
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