By Kennedy Maize
Most of the headlines at the end of the United Nation’s 30th “Conference of the Parties” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Belem, Brazil, to address global warming and climate change were similar. They highlighted COP30’s studied lack of jeremiads against fossil fuels in the conference report. The New York Times headline was typical: “Oil Producers, but Maybe Not the Planet, Get a Win as Climate Talks End.”
The Washington Post reported, somewhat wistfully, “Nearly 200 countries agreed Saturday to step up efforts to adapt to global warming and warned about the risks of inaction, but rejected proposals to directly address the fossil fuels warming the planet.”
The headlines and hand-wringing missed the real point. COP30 ripped off the disingenuous veil that has been obscuring the reality of a worldwide attempt to create a unified approach to the fact of a warming climate. The nations of the world have never reached agreement on how to confront the problem, — or in some cases — whether a warming world is much of a problem at all, let alone how to deal with it.
The “200 countries” the Post reported is a fig leaf figure obscuring the truth, which the Times got: “Around 80 countries, or a little under half of those present, demanded a concrete plan to move away from fossil fuels. Outside of Europe, they did not include any of the world’s major economies.”
The roster of those formally represented at Belem totaled 193 countries and the European Union. The U.S. was not among them. President Trump — although far from all the important figures in his administration — believes that climate change is a “hoax,” a word he frequently uses when he doesn’t want to admit the truth about something he finds inconvenient or embarrassing.
COP30, held for the third consecutive year in a major oil producing county, clearly demonstrated that dealing with a changing climate is not something that can be done in large gatherings with rhetorical flourishes and magical claims. A prime example of such hubris is the one from outside of 2023’s COP28 in Dubai. A group of nations, gathering outside of the formal proceedings, hyped a commitment to triple worldwide nuclear electricity by 2050. Those favoring the notion didn’t bother to take it to the formal delegates, later claiming it as an outcome of COP28.
During the wrangling over the final document, a delegate from Nigeria told the crowd truthfully, “We will not be in support of any climate change implementation response that would lead to our sudden economic contraction and heightened social instability.” The event featured over 56,000 delegates and reports of a shortage of beds and “sky-high” accommodation costs.
An unplanned and perhaps symbolic event interrupted the meeting. At 2 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 20, a large fire broke out, Bloomberg reported, “near country pavilions inside the sprawling COP30 venue, an area where dozens of nations mount trade-show-like presentations and sometimes hand out free coffee to delegates. As smoke spiraled up, firefighters sprinted through the series of tents that make up the summit venue at a former airport on the edge of the Amazon. Some yelled, Saída! Saída! Get out! Video on social media appeared to show the fire blowing a hole through the tented ceiling.” While 13 people were treated for smoke inhalation, there were no injuries from the fire, local officials reported.
COP30 also marks the acknowledged failure, a decade later, of the 2015 “Paris Agreement,” where the world pledged to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5-degrees C through aggressive actions to reduce CO2 emissions, primarily from coal, oil, and natural gas. As a practical matter, that 1.5-degree goal is not achievable, as U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has acknowledged.
Grist commented, “The viability of the planet may come down to a few degrees Celsius of warming, but in Belém’s fluorescently-lit negotiating rooms, everything ultimately came down to dollars and cents.”
Where to go from here? Perhaps the entire concept of concerted, worldwide action to “global decarbonization” is fallacious. Climate realist Roger Pielke Jr. asserts that “global and national climate policies may have done many things—such as encouraging the redirection of investments toward low-carbon technologies and pushing countries to report on their emissions reduction targets—but accelerating the pace of global decarbonization is not among them, no matter what tall tales are told.”
One place the world may go from here next November looks like Turkey for COP31. Even that seemingly simple decision was enmeshed in controversy. Australia and Turkey engaged in a nasty political slugfest over the location for the next gabfest as COP30 ended.
The BBC explained, “Under the UN rules, the right to host the COP in 2026 falls to a group of countries made up of Western Europe, Australia and others.” Australia was pushing to hold the meeting in Adelaide, “arguing that they would co-host the meeting with Pacific island states who are seen as among the most vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels.
“Turkey felt that they had a good claim to be the host country as they had stood aside in 2021 and allowed the UK to hold the meeting in Glasgow.
“If neither country was willing to compromise then the meeting would have been held in the German city of Bonn, the headquarters of the UN’s climate body.”
A pseudo-Solomonic compromise was reached. A pre-COP31 meeting will be held on a Pacific island. Turkey will host the main event, with Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate minister, presiding.
The snarky “greenleft” web site commented, “Australia and Türkiye, neither of which takes climate action seriously, are vying to host the Conference of Parties (COP) for 2026 — an event that does more to emit greenhouse gases than resolving to limit them.”