About as much use as a chocolate fireguard

Another year another Cop. The negotiations always go to extra time given how fraught the entire exercise is. So it was no surprise that the text Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change was not agreed until the sun rose over Belem on Saturday 22^nd November. I was asked by a number of journalists for my take on this. On Sunday The Guardian used:

Despite the host’s best efforts, Cop30 will not even be able to get nations to agree to fossil fuel phase-out. This shameful outcome is the result of narrow self-interest and cynical politicking.

The following week someone asked me what I thought about the Cops and the UNFCC process. My reply was “about as much use as a chocolate fireguard”. But then what is the alternative? I’m reminded of that quote from Churchill that is sometimes trotted out during such despairing times:

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

We could discuss whether democracy has really been tried. e.g. the sort of representative democracy we live within in the UK has resulted in an highly centralised system of power that regularly ignores the wishes of a significant majority of the electorate with the ‘first past the post’ system.

When it comes to getting international consensus on climate change, there do not seem to be any more plausible alternatives than the UNFCC.

Let’s remind ourselves of some fundamentals. For us to have any hope of limiting warming to 2°C then we must produce a rapid phase out of fossil. That’s the simple arithmetic of carbon budgets. Some more simple numbers: Oil and gas accounts for 55% of the Saudi Arabian government’s entire revenue. Net income of oil and gas companies in the United States in 2025 was $301 billion. What these numbers shows is that a rapid fossil fuel phase out represents an existential risk to the current Saudi government, perhaps even nation. The US could continue to prosper in a post-fossil fuel world, but many of the existing centres of economic and political power would vanish. Is it any surprise that these and other fossil fuel reliant nations continue to thwart climate action?

This year of course, the US was absent. There was some performative pointing at empty spaces with the Blue Zone in the conference centre and lamenting the absence of the world’s most powerful nation. But in the end it didn’t need to be there to wreck the negotiations, as Saudi Arabia proved to be more than capable. The draft text proposed by the Brazilian presidency on the 18^th November featured fossil fuels.

The final agreement of the 22^nd doesn’t even mention fossil fuels once, let alone point out the glaringly obvious that we  must stop burning them.

So what is the point of these Cops? One reason to not ditch the process is these annual events provides a mechanism whereby those nations most vulnerable to climate change can exert some sort of power on much wealthier nations. They do that by joining together to try and produce a louder collective voice. This doesn’t make them immune from bullying from the United States, but it can help. 

Pointing out some of the fundamental problems with the UNFCC is nothing new. One argument is that instead of cajoling every single nation on Earth to agree to do something, we should instead focus on multilateral negotiations to produce coalitions of the willing. Stop trying to get Saudi Arabia to stop pumping oil and gas, and instead focus efforts on getting other nations to reduce their demand for fossil fuels. This could be done with treaties and economic incentives to, for example, accelerate the deployment of renewable energy systems that would replace legacy fossil fuel energy generation. We could go further and suggest that by reducing total energy demand, the job becomes easier. That’s one of the starting assumptions ofpost-growth economics. 

The counter to that (I often hear) is that we need growth to power the innovation that the energy transition needs. What is being argued for here is really a maintenance of economic and political systems. The sort of post-growth proposals being presented seem to require quite large redistributions of wealth and power. Why is that more likely than the Saudi's waking up one day and rushing to unplug their oil and gas wells?

The response to that question, is that while we cannot force petrostates to stop being petrostates, we can reduce our demand for fossil fuels, and work with other communities and nations to help them reduce their demand too. Deep decarbonisation is going to require deep change - system change if you will. I cannot say how that will happen. But this is something that we can begin to work together to achieve within the systems we can affect. It certainly will not happen if we do not even try.

We shouldn't be surprised with the outcome of Cop30. We have three decades of failure that shows us where this road leads to. It's time to change course.