Bad Cops: Why the Climate Crisis Keeps Getting Worse No Matter How Many Conferences World Leaders Hold

At the Earth Summit in 1992 the world came together in Rio de Janeiro and agreed to take the health of planet Earth seriously. 

The resulting annual COP conferences on climate change and biodiversity have given governments every chance to make collective decisions to keep temperatures down and the natural world alive. 

But we keep failing. Biodiversity loss gets progressively worse, threatening whole ecosystems and the food security of billions. Global temperatures have already hit 1.5°C, the final ‘safe’ point according to climate scientists. Fossil fuel production is at record levels, greenhouse gas emissions at an all time high. 

It’s easy to point to obvious villains. Donald Trump and his cabinet will do all they can to prevent climate action, whether out of obligation to the oil sector, climate denialism or a belief that climate chaos will serve their interests. A few authoritarian leaders will follow their lead. Oil and gas companies, motivated by greed, continue to increase production.

Trump and his allies cannot stop the clean energy transition, even if they can cause trouble along the way. The transition is global, ongoing and invested in by too many leaders and countries.

Was COP29 a Cop-Out? Those Bearing the Brunt of Climate Change Say Yes

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Chris York

But that won’t be enough. The greater problem we have to solve is this: the governments and businesses who are on paper committed to do what is needed consistently act too slowly, too little and too late. 

Last month’s COP29 conference was a classic example: wealthy countries agreed to donate $300bn annually to developing nations by 2035 to help prevent climate chaos. It’s a big commitment, but fails to meet the scale of the challenge: a mere quarter of what climate scientists say is needed. 

It is also less than half the $620bn those same nations spend every year to subsidise fossil fuels. A mass switch of those subsides to renewables would be a game changer, but no government comes close. 

Business leaders too talk up climate action but fail to deliver. Take Amazon – in 2019 it established what looked like a credible 2040 net zero target, but over the next four years Amazon’s emissions went up by 40%. They are not alone – the global regulator recently removed Amazon and over 200 companies from its Corporate Net Zero Standard.

Future generations will wonder how global leaders could know the risks – and certainties – of climate breakdown yet still fail so dramatically. 

They seem to live a double reality – acting as if we can avoid dangerous climate change without doing what the task demands, which is to rapidly reduce emissions from industry, transport, energy, and food systems (primarily by cutting livestock and fertiliser use), while ramping up energy efficiency and renewables. 

Part of the problem is that too many politicians are simply unwilling to discuss hard trade offs with their voting public. 

Addressing the crisis will impact the way we live and government budgets. Emissions need to fall 7.5% every year until 2035 to hit a 1.5°C outcome. Such rapid emissions cuts – along with adapting to a changing climate – will inevitably cost money. 

Global spending must reach $6.5 trillion every year by 2030, c.6% of global GDP. Of this, $1.3tn should be finance to help developing countries pay for climate disasters, and to curb present and future emissions. 

The ask is a big one, but given the climate crisis would cost far more if left unaddressed, investing now is money well spent. “Cold-blooded economic self-interest” should be enough to make governments act, argues Patrick Bolton, Professor of Economics at Imperial College London.

COP29: The Gap Between Political Action and the Accelerating Pace of Catastrophic Climate Change Is Terrifying

World leaders are failing to commit to the dramatic action required to prevent devastating climate change, reports Mike Buckley from the COP29 summit

Mike Buckley

Failing to act now would “wipe out trillions of dollars of wealth,” says Kamiar Mohaddes, climate expert at Cambridge University. “Hesitating has truly enormous economic implications down the line.”

Yet both politicians and business leaders continue to present climate change as merely one priority among many. They argue we must continue burning fossil fuels to maintain economic growth, pointing out they still supply over 80% of total global energy. The trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets at risk with rapid decarbonisation also act as a powerful brake on climate action.

To justify business as usual, oil and gas executives promote a tempting but bogus scientific theory, suggesting we can go past any amount of warming because planet–scale carbon removal technologies will drag temperatures back down by the end of the century.

But the technologies they say will save us are for the most part mere fantasy. They also fail to acknowledge the harm that would be done to ecosystems and humanity in intervening decades. Pursuing this path “risks catastrophic levels of climate change; it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which exist only on paper.” 

Some experts argue the idea of net zero is itself part of the problem; it allows emissions to be clawed back as well as not emitted in the first place. Continuing to focus on net zero by 2050 allows governments and businesses to make grand pledges without taking concrete steps to meet them. Instead climate experts now call for ambition to be refocussed on emissions reductions this decade as the only meaningful measure of progress, allowing today’s politicians and business leaders to be held to account. 

The COP process has also come in for criticism, following years of mixed results. Experts have called for reform, asking the UN to exclude as host nations “countries who do not support the transition from fossil energy” or which lack rules against fossil fuel lobbying, and for a greater role for scientists and more accountability between COPs.

Others put forward a range of short term measures which would bring swift results: curbing methane, a potent greenhouse gas; a rapid switch from livestock farming to other protein sources; a wholesale switch of fossil fuel subsidies to renewables; more nuclear; rapid investment in nuclear fusion and incentives for developing nations to prioritise conserving nature above destroying it for profit. 

Some of these goals are more achievable than others. But the principle is sound: all climate policies must be based on what can be done in the real world now, or in the very near future. 

Admitting our current efforts are failing does not mean giving up. To make progress we need to admit where things have gone wrong, and act to change them. That starts with confronting politicians and businesses when they claim sustained fossil fuel use is compatible with climate goals, and with holding leaders to account for actions taken now, instead of pledges made for outcomes decades into the future. 

The truth is the transition is underway. We just need to go further, faster and with more collective commitment. That means a ruthless focus on emissions cuts, and a refusal to let governments or business leaders get away with unfulfilled pledges or claims that business as usual is enough.