The world climate summit known as COP30—officially the 30th UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—kicked off in Belém, Brazil, this past Monday to such a thunderous rainstorm that the venue flooded.
There’s climate change for you.
These annual COP meetings were responsible for the groundbreaking Paris Agreement, ratified in 2016, wherein almost 200 nations made pledges intended to limit global warming to 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels—and ideally keep it to 1.5 C.
Despite considerable progress on clean energy, the world is already busting through that lower threshold. This week, two reports estimated we’re on track for 2.6 C by century’s end, which, in the words of one expert, “means global disaster.”
Meanwhile, for the first time ever, the US government is officially absent from the climate talks—as are, shamefully, four of the major US broadcast networks. President Donald Trump announced America's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for the second time—the first was in 2017, but Joe Biden reversed it—immediately upon re-taking office, and thenput the full force of his presidency into promoting fossil fuels and killing renewables.
These regressive tactics aren’t just regrettable, they are now illegal. In July, the UN’s International Court of Justice declared the climate crisis an “urgent and existential threat” that member states were bound by international law to tackle. “We’re at a legal tipping point,” Adam Weiss, chief programs and impact officer at ClientEarth, told the Guardian. “The law is going to be the power that forces us in the direction that we need to go.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California—a key Trump antagonist and likely 2028 presidential candidate, responded to the US leadership vacuum by leading an unofficial delegation to COP30, where he described Trump as “an invasive species.” Some diplomats seemed content with the administration’s absence. “They won’t be able to do their direct bullying,” explained Christiana Figueres, a former COP executive secretary.
Trump's abdication, and the EU's infighting, have left China as the summit’s top negotiator. After China's record-breaking year of emission reductions and clean energy output, the People's Republic “is staking its claim to leadership,” writes Isabel Hilton in Yale e360, “both as the steady and reliable partner in the global energy transition and the primary purveyor of the means to achieve it.”
The UN summits over the years have proved far from ideal, featuring armies of fossil-fuel lobbyists and oligarchs, host-country scandals, excluded communities, and problematic processes. But crucially, many nations simply aren’t living up to their pledges, which means the next round will have to be more stringent, and thus harder to achieve.
One thing just about every government–excepting ours–seems to agree on: The clock is ticking. “The Paris Agreement is our mandate; Belém is the test,” said former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. The treaty needs “resuscitation through action, not rhetoric,” he added. “If we fall short, we risk placing both its promise—and the people it was written to protect—in jeopardy.” —Henry Carnell and Michael Mechanic
