The Guardian

11/24/2025

The 30th conference of the parties (Cop30), the annual climate summit of all nations party to the UNFCCC, just ended. Stakeholders are out in the media trying spin the outcome as a win. Simon Stiell, climate change executive secretary for the UN is, for instance, praising Cop30 for showing that “climate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a liveable planet”. But let us be clear. The conference was a failure. Its outcome, the decision text known as the Global Mutirão or Global Collective Effort, is, in essence, a form of climate denial.

This failure is all the more bitter because Cop30 had initially sent out so many hopeful signals that it would finally tackle the “transitioning away from fossil fuels” pledge from Cop28. Speaking ahead of the conference, the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said that the world needs “roadmaps that will enable humankind, in a fair and planned manner, to overcome its dependence on fossil fuels”.

Lula’s call was backed by about 90 other nations. “This is a global coalition, with global north and global south countries coming together and saying with one voice: this is an issue which cannot be swept under the carpet,” said the UK’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband.

After a press conference where 20 ministers and climate envoys demanded that the proposed language on the roadmap in the first draft text be “strengthened” and adopted, the EU circulated its own proposal for incorporating the roadmap in the final text.

By Friday, the number of countries supporting the roadmap to fossil-fuel phaseout rose to 89. Yet any reference to it disappeared from the second draft that dropped on the same day. Thanks to Cop30, the fossil fuel era will simply continue.

It seems clear that the petrostates, led by Russia and Saudi Arabia, fought against fossil fuel phaseout and won. If they feel the phaseout is an existential threat to their economies and their sovereignty, perhaps they should consider how the climate crisis is rendering the Middle East uninhabitable. The very week of Cop30, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, announced that Tehran, Iran’s capital city of 16 million, would need to be abandoned and re-established elsewhere, because, after years of climate-fuelled drought, its water has finally run out.

Surely these states are being supported in their fossil-fuel authoritarianism by Donald Trump, who is the president of the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels and who calls the climate crisis a “con job”. Even though the US was officially absent from the negotiations, Trump’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, and seeming affinity for Russia, underwrites their ability to advance their own energy interests.

Yet would this power be as great if the world’s “climate leaders” had more courage? It is remarkable that at the very moment the EU was supposedly fighting to include a roadmap to fossil fuel phaseout in the Cop decision, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, was telling a press conference at the G20 that “we are not fighting fossil fuels, we are fighting the emissions from fossil fuels.” Not only does this statement directly undermine her own negotiators’ positions, it is in itself nonsensical – akin to saying “we are not giving up eating ice-cream, we are giving up absorbing the calories from that ice-cream.”