Index
COP30 Weakens Carbon Commitment; Follow The Money?
25 November 2025
Peter Coffee
Sometimes, a phrase on a screen stabs into the reader’s eye like a red-hot needle. The COP30 UN Climate Change Conference, held last week in Brazil, appears to be declaring that
“The Conference of the Parties… Acknowledges that the global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.” (Italics in original, boldface added)
My eye still hurts from reading that phrase, “is irreversible”: to be ‘irreversible,’ doesn’t something have to be moving forward with something resembling intention and speed? Hasn’t ‘reversibility’ already been demonstrated, just last week, by the change from an earlier draft of that statement?
Yes, we have the receipts. Just three days earlier, language being proposed had included as a possible option:
“Encourages all Parties to cooperate for and contribute to…global efforts…to develop just, orderly and equitable transition roadmaps, including to progressively overcome…dependency on fossil fuels” (again, my boldface)
with an immediately following clause reading,
“Urges Parties to work together towards phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible” (ditto)
with still another option later on that would have said that the Conference,
“Decides to establish an annual consideration [of various reports] accelerating action around…transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade.” (ditto)
The most remarkable change from the earlier draft to (what appears to be) the final language is literally a single word: the word ‘fossil’ is entirely absent from the later text. Completely gone, not appearing even once in those seven pages, and people noticed: “A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality, it is complicity,” said Panamanian representative Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez – adding, “and what is happening here transcends incompetence.”
Before this news broke over the weekend, I had been looking forward to writing something about carbon capture – the actual sequestration of carbon, which some hope will offset the (now newly demonstrated) difficulty of getting nations to commit to emitting less. OPEC representatives, in particular, have long urged that carbon capture be viewed as lessening the urgency of carbon emission reduction – and carbon capture has been discussed since at least as long ago as 2009, when the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute was launched as an international effort led by Australia.
As of last month, though, estimates MIT’s Technology Review, “hundreds of companies that have spun up in recent years have disclosed deals to sell some 38 million tons of carbon dioxide pulled from the air…roughly the amount the US pumps out in energy-related emissions every three days. And they’ve only delivered around 940,000 tons of carbon removal. The US emits that much carbon dioxide in less than two hours.” As noted on this site last week, scale matters, and carbon removal efforts have yet to achieve it – making it all the more important to maintain, not to slacken, the pace of reducing carbon emissions.
We may have to hope that the profit sector will demand that governments take action to coordinate a global transition, and there are emerging hints that this might happen: in September of last year, according to a survey by Deloitte,
“Seventy percent of the survey respondents said rising emissions and global temperatures will have a ‘high or very high’ impact on operations…and 45% said they are changing their business model to reduce emissions and prepare for a low-carbon economy… Nearly all the respondents, 92%, said they can continue to grow their company while shrinking its carbon footprint.”
Even a short-term, purely self-interested argument is clearly gaining strength: as noted by the World Economic Forum in September,
“Companies in the S&P Global 1200 index will face $1.2 trillion in annual costs from physical climate impacts by 2050. Most of the index’s market value lies in the United States, with most losses stemming from extreme heat, manifesting as lost labour productivity, accelerated asset depreciation and higher energy costs, among others.”
Yes, COP30 may have been “the deadliest talk show ever”—in the words of Harjeet Singh, at India’s Satat Sampada Climate Foundation—but what diplomats were too diplomatic to accomplish may instead become a domain of economics…and engineering, which was where I was planning to go this week. More, we may hope, to come.