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'Only the Beginning': Santa Marta Summit Heralded as New Dawn in Fight to End Fossil Fuel Era
“Amid a tense geopolitical context and worsening climate extremes, Santa Marta helped spark a feeling of renewed energy, but delegates must now follow through to deliver action, not just words," said a senior climate adviser at Greenpeace.
Apr 30, 2026
Environmental activists are hopeful after a six-day climate summit in Colombia resulted in a coalition of more than 50 countries agreeing to start developing plans to move away from planet-heating fossil fuels. But they say action must now follow talk.
In marked contrast to the annual United Nations climate summits, which have been routinely overrun by oil and gas industry lobbyists and concluded with agreements that largely ignore the imperative to divest from fossil fuels, Shiva Gounden, the head of Greenpeace's delegation this week in Santa Marta, said the conference that concluded Wednesday "was a breath of fresh air, a real sign that the wind is finally shifting."
The 59 nations that attended the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels did not ultimately end with a binding agreement to transition away from fossil fuels within a specific timeframe, which activists say is urgently necessary as global heating rapidly approaches 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
Many of the world's biggest polluters—including the United States, China, and India, as well as petrostates like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—were also absent.
However, the summit did end with attendees, nearly half of whom are fossil fuel producers and who represent more than half of global gross domestic product, agreeing to form tangible "frameworks" for how they plan to transition away from a fossil-fueled model of capitalism that Colombian President Gustavo Petro decried as "suicidal."
Perhaps the single biggest breakthrough at the conference was France's unveiling of a national roadmap to phase out fossil fuels in the coming decades. It became the first developed nation to lay out such a plan, with the goals of removing coal from its national grid by 2027, phasing out oil by 2045, and fossil gas by 2050.
The French climate envoy, Benoit Faraco, described it not only as an obligation but an opportunity: “This process has made us realise we want to be an electro-superpower,” he said, according to The Guardian. “We want to be the electricity Saudi Arabia of Europe, selling green electrons to the UK, Ireland, Germany, and other countries.”
Many attendees also agreed that any collective movement away from fossil fuels would require addressing the debt crisis in the Global South, which many countries—especially those in Africa, where national debts have doubled in the past five years—have found themselves cranking up fossil fuel production to cope with.
While the conference concluded without any binding plan for debt forgiveness, which many delegates from developing countries had proposed, the participants agreed that poorer countries would need support to move out of debt and finance a green transition.
"Fossil fuel dependency deepens economic instability, fuels conflict, and traps countries in cycles of debt," said Bronwen Tucker, public finance lead for Oil Change International. "As long as Global South countries remain locked in this system, while Global North governments write the financial rules, public resources will continue to flow away from people and toward the systems driving crisis."
Laura Caicedo, the campaigns coordinator at Greenpeace Colombia, described the conference as "an important space to put the just energy transition on the agenda ahead of the Climate COP," which will take place in Turkey this coming November.
"There is willingness and a sense of fresh momentum that is worth celebrating," she said. "But this is only the beginning: more time is needed for this process to mature into a true platform for dialogue that can inform decision-making in this and other cooperation spaces on key energy issues."
The next conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels is set to occur early next year in Tuvalu, a low-lying Pacific island nation that is at risk of becoming uninhabitable within decades due to sea-level rise.
While climate activists were heartened by the progress made in Santa Marta, Gounden said countries need to come to Tuvalu with concrete plans.
“When we get to Tuvalu, the conversation has to change," she said. "We can’t just bring more ambition; we have to bring proof of implementation."
This week's conference took place against the backdrop of the US and Israel's war in Iran, where US President Donald Trump has suggested a key goal is to "take the oil" controlled by Iran. The obstruction of oil shipments has become a critical piece of strategic and economic leverage and simultaneously inflicted chaos upon the global economy, disrupting humanitarian aid for some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people.
"Amid a tense geopolitical context and worsening climate extremes," said Rodrigo Estrada, Greenpeace International's senior climate adviser, "Santa Marta helped spark a feeling of renewed energy, but delegates must now follow through to deliver action, not just words."
While the war has sent energy companies' profits soaring, the climate advocacy group 350.org estimated this week that the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz could cost households and businesses an additional $600 billion to $1 trillion.
"It’s never been clearer that fossil fuel phase-out is imperative for stability and peace," Tucker said. "Every step away from fossil fuels weakens the outsized power and wealth that allows the US to wage illegal wars in the name of energy dominance."
At the next conference, she added, "The richest polluting countries must show they are serious. Canada, Norway, the UK, and the EU must make real plans to accelerate their fossil fuel phaseout at home and come to the table with real economic collaboration."
Mariana Paoli, the climate policy lead for Oxfam, said the lack of action by rich countries was "disappointing" and needed to change.
"Wealthy governments have still not stepped up to provide sufficient climate financing for poorer countries, which face the brunt of the impacts of the climate crisis," she said. "Rich countries hold the historical responsibility for the climate crisis, therefore they must not only move first and faster but also provide finance at scale for others to follow them."
"A just transition," she said, "must make rich polluters pay for the crisis they have caused."
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'Leaving the US Behind,' 50+ Nations Gather in Colombia to 'Phase Out Fossil Fuels'
"Word on the street is NO fossil fuel lobbyists at the Santa Marta, Colombia 'Transition Away' conference," said one climate journalist.
Apr 24, 2026
Representatives of more than 50 countries on Friday kicked off the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia, a hopeful summit that comes amid a worsening global climate crisis and fossil fuel-producing nations' efforts to block a clean energy transition.
Organizers of the conference—which is taking place in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta and is co-hosted by the Netherlands—said participants aim to "initiate a concrete process through which a coalition of committed countries, subnational governments, and relevant stakeholders can identify and advance enabling pathways to implement a progressive transition away from fossil fuels, creating sustainable societies and economies."
"This process will be informed by the experience and perspectives of national and subnational governments, academia, Indigenous peoples, peoples of African descent, peasants, civil society, workers, the private sector, and other key actors at different stages of the transition," the organizers added.
The conference comes amid widespread disappointment and frustration over what climate defenders called a "shamefully weak" draft text—called the Multirão Decision—produced at last November's United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Brazil. The final document removed all mentions of fossil fuels amid pressure from oil and gas-producing nations like the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and the presence of a record number of industry lobbyists.
“When multilateral processes move slowly, concrete alliances of the willing can take us a long way," German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week at the 17th Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Hesse state, where high-level representatives from around 40 countries discussed "concrete steps towards overcoming the climate crisis."
I've worked on #climate and fossil fuels for almost 30 years and the Santa Marta Conference is definitely one of the most hopeful things I've seen. Finally some governments are exploring solutions that meet the scale of the crisis. Good explainer 🧵👇
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— Patrick Reinsborough ❌👑 (@giantwhispers.bsky.social) April 24, 2026 at 7:57 AM
The Santa Marta conference, which will run through April 29, will focus on three main areas:
- Overcoming economic dependence on fossil fuels;
- Transforming energy supply and demand; and
- Advancing international cooperation and climate diplomacy.
Major fossil fuel producers including Angola, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, and the United Kingdom are among the 54 nations represented in Santa Marta.
Notably absent from the conference are some of the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluters, including the United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan. Their absence is fine with Colombian Environmental Minister Irene Vélez Torres, who told The Guardian that “this is not the space for them."
"We are not going to have boycotters or climate denialists at the table,” Vélez said.
Also missing by design are the legions of lobbyists who increasingly swarm COP conferences.
Word on the street is NO fossil fuel lobbyists at the Santa Marta, Colombia 'Transition Away' conference. But it does have some of the best climate scientists in the world for an advisory panel.
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— Bob Berwyn (@bberwyn.bsky.social) April 24, 2026 at 11:15 AM
Former Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who heads the World Wildlife Fund's global climate division, said in a statement that "changing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels isn’t a slow problem with a slow solution: We need a rapid, global shift to renewable power, smarter grids, and efficiency, so emissions fall fast and stay down."
"And we need a ‘coalition of the willing’ to show us the way," he added. "Santa Marta is an inflection point and an opportunity that we should not miss.”
The absence of the United States surprised no one, given the Trump administration and Republicans' promotion of oil, gas, and coal. Big Oil invested $445 million during the 2024 election cycle in efforts to elect Trump and other Republicans and promote fossil fuel-friendly policies.
Trump, who ran on a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy, has signed a series of executive orders aimed at boosting fossil fuel production, including by declaring a fake “energy emergency” in a push to fast-track permit approvals. He also tapped former fossil fuel executives to head the Department of Energy and Interior Department, which have pursued a policy of opening up more public lands and waters for fossil fuel development.
At the same time, the Trump administration dropped out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time and moved to roll back the modest climate progress achieved under former President Joe Biden.
Melinda Lewis—who directs the Global Trade Watch program at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen—is attending the Santa Marta conference, where she is working to dismantle the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system. The enforced mechanism empowers multinational corporations to sue governments before panels of corporate attorneys and has been denounced by opponents—especially those in the Global South—as a novel form of colonialism.
"While it is tragic that the United States government is failing to meet this critical moment for climate action, we are encouraged that the rest of the world has recognized that it’s high time to take bold action to remove the arcane ISDS extra-legal instrument buried in trade and investment treaties that has been used as a cudgel by fossil fuel and extractive industries to stymie government actions that might reduce their profits," Lewis said on Friday.
As Canadian researcher Joseph Bouchard recently wrote in a Common Dreams opinion piece, "Colombia is especially exposed" to ISDS harm, as "the country has 129 oil and gas projects covered by ISDS provisions, leaving it vulnerable to a wave of potential claims as it pursues its energy transition."
Lewis noted that Colombia's government, led by leftist President Gustavo Petro, "recently announced its intention to renounce its treaties that include ISDS as part of the full package of needed action to usher in a clean energy transition."
Indigenous leaders said more must be done to ensure a just transition.
“We are very concerned. We talk about a just transition, but in practice it is not true,” Oswaldo Muca, General Coordinator of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, told Inter Press Service. “Mining continues. Extraction continues. Deforestation continues. The territories and Indigenous peoples continue suffering this problem, and it is becoming more serious every day."
Muca added that benefits from resource extraction "do not reach Indigenous territories, but they destroy the territory and leave the damage."
On Friday, more than 250 legal experts from around the world asserted that "phasing out fossil fuels is not a political choice—it is a legal obligation."
The jurists noted in an open letter that "the International Court of Justice (ICJ) unanimously confirmed that every state must use all means at its disposal to prevent significant harm to the climate system, including by avoiding the principal activities driving it: fossil fuel production and use."
The letter's signers include former Irish President Mary Robinson and Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer from Guam who played a key role in winning the ICJ climate case.
"The phaseout of fossil fuels is not just scientifically necessary to prevent catastrophic and irreversible harm to the climate system, all peoples, and ecosystems; it is legally required," they wrote. "It is also socially, economically, and environmentally beneficial for present and future generations."
Ultimately, countries participating in the Santa Marta conference will draw their own individual roadmaps with the help of scientists and other experts.
“If we think about it," said Vélez, "the conference is that turning point where, collectively, we decide to be on the right side of history."
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When Women Forced Global Climate Talks to Face the Truth
Daniela Durán González’s words felt less like a procedural objection and more like an oracle speaking truth in the court of self-appointed climate policy gods.
Mar 08, 2026
The final moments of United Nations climate summits usually follow a familiar script. In the closing plenary, decisions are gaveled through, despite several powerful objections stated by delegates from climate-vulnerable countries and quietly noted by the Conference of Parties presidency, and the appearance of full consensus by all governments is carefully preserved—no matter how compromised the outcome actually is.
At COP30 in Brazil, that script was nearly held with business as usual.
By the final plenary, meaningful references to fossil fuel phaseout, pushed by a growing number of countries, had already been stripped from the presented outcome text. Many months of organizing and campaigning by civil society, increasingly dire scientific warnings, and pressure from leaders in Brazil and some of the most climate-vulnerable nations had been erased. The fossil fuel omission left behind a painful awareness of the continued death and destruction of communities and land that will inevitably result from this inaction. The disappointing outcome was sadly to be expected, but that didn’t make the moment any less heavy.
Civil society engages in COPs year after year, not because we believe these negotiations will save us, but because they are sites of power, and nonengagement would signal the loss of resolve. We come to stop devastating outcomes from getting worse, to confront decision-makers face to face, to hold governments accountable in real time, and to intervene with sustainable and equitable solutions that are rising from frontline and grassroots communities.
The climate emergency is a mirror, reflecting back to humanity that how we are living with the Earth and each other is existentially flawed.
But something unusual happened in the final COP30 plenary that many of us were thrilled to witness. The climate negotiator from Colombia lifted her flag and spoke out.
Daniela Durán González, head of international affairs at the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, raised a procedural objection and disrupted the final conference procedures. The mood in the room shifted instantly, and what had felt preordained suddenly felt like a seismic eruption. I remember exchanging glances with my colleagues as we rose to our feet, cheering as the weight of the moment sank in. For a brief, electric moment in time, the machinery of managed consensus was forced to stop.
Throughout COP30, negotiators wrestled with the need to scale up finance—especially for adaptation; commitments to mitigation efforts; and deep political divisions over whether and how to confront the root causes of climate change, including by advancing just transition pathways. At the center of those divisions and heated discourses were fossil fuels—the source of most global greenhouse gas emissions. Despite support from roughly 80 countries for including language on a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels, opposition from major producing nations and others prevented the inclusion of any explicit mention of fossil fuels in the final outcome text.
Instead of addressing the source of the crisis, the agreed outcome text tinkered only on the margins with some vague commitment to tripling adaptation finance by 2035 and a focus on advancing voluntary implementation initiatives, while abandoning a direct confrontation of fossil fuel phaseout that many delegates had sought.
COP30 unfolded amid a growing and dangerous consolidation of power further aggravating and entrenching inequity. Many of the world’s wealthiest governments and global elites are well aware not only of the accelerating climate crisis, but simultaneously of biodiversity collapse and social instability. Because they are dependent on the fossil fuel economy for their wealth and power, these leaders are willing to do anything but stop the extraction of coal, oil, and gas. Rather than changing course (and exploring other energy sources), many major players are preparing to survive the polycrisis that they themselves are inciting, by escaping to fortified enclaves, privatized resilience, and militarized borders—while the rest of the world absorbs the fallout.
Science offers no room for denial about where all of this is heading. Under existing climate policies, global warming could reach nearly 2.8°C. While countries have strengthened current national climate pledges, even if honored, the world would still be moving toward 2.3-2.5°C of global warming. Any of these scenarios is a catastrophic overshoot. What we call “climate disasters” are, in truth, interlocking ecological, social, and economic crises unfolding simultaneously. Every fraction of a degree of warming deepens the wound that’s inflicted on forests, oceans, ice, and human communities alike. We are talking about forests that breathe life into the Earth, rivers that carry the water of life, soils that sustain our food.
The world’s richest corporations and governments have built their wealth on fossil fuel extraction and domination, and they will not suddenly stop these operations on their own. More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists roamed the halls of COP30, their presence outnumbering every party’s delegation except Brazil’s and setting a new deplorable record. Throughout the conference, fossil fuel-producing countries worked to revert the negotiations back to narrow discussions of emission reductions alone, protecting their expansion agenda while presenting the appearance of action. This is why organizing and resistance by civil society are so essential.
The climate crisis is a symptom of deeper, interlocking crises—racial, economic, ecological, and spiritual—rooted in an ideology of supremacy that treats land, water, life, and people as disposable. Indigenous, Black, brown, and Global South communities have borne the brunt of this deadly logic for centuries, and climate breakdown is an acute and tragically visible manifestation of this ideology.
It was into this constructed reality that Daniela Durán González made her forceful intervention in the closing plenary, reminding us that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva officially designated the COP30 climate summit in Belém as the "COP of Truth."
The "COP of the Truth" cannot support an outcome that ignores science. According to the IPCC, nearly 75% of global CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels. There is no mitigation if we cannot discuss transitioning away from fossil fuels with means of implementation in a just, orderly, and equitable manner… Denying the best available science requires us to not only put the climate regime at risk but also our existence.
The hall erupted as civil society cheered her on.
Her objection to adopting the mitigation text—registered through a formal point of order—caused the entire plenary proceedings to come to an abrupt stop, which is an exceptionally rare act in a space defined by diplomatic choreography. The COP Presidency temporarily halted the plenary to deliberate the point of order, which inevitably served to bring further attention to the powerful objection. But what followed, as the session reopened, exposed even more about the culture of power dynamics inside these negotiations.
Rather than engaging substantively, a senior Russian delegate took to the floor and admonished González and other objecting nations (who were also represented by women leaders) to “refrain from behaving like children who want to get your hands on all the sweets.” Delegates from Latin America (also women leaders) immediately rebuked the comment as offensive and inappropriate. The exchange laid bare how patriarchal and colonial logics continue to shape climate discourse—where women, particularly women from the Global South, are met with ridicule rather than respect when they speak truth to power.
In that moment, Daniela Durán González’s words felt less like a procedural objection and more like an oracle speaking truth in the court of self-appointed climate policy gods. To hear a strong woman, unbowed, articulate what Indigenous peoples, frontline communities, and global climate advocates have been demanding was to glimpse a different futurity—one not dictated by patriarchal, colonial inertia but shaped by those who have lived the consequences first or deeply care about our collective future.
The climate emergency is a mirror, reflecting back to humanity that how we are living with the Earth and each other is existentially flawed. To address it, we must also confront questions of leadership, equity, justice, and care. Every negotiation, every summit, every treaty is not merely a political event—it is a new opportunity to take part in writing and choosing our future by confronting power imbalances and inequities.
The UN climate process operates by consensus, meaning every party must agree before a decision is adopted. In theory, this is meant to protect equity. However, in practice, it amplifies the power of fossil fuel states and entrenched economic interests, diluting ambition and sidelining voices that challenge the status quo. In recent years, civil society has advocated for reform in the UN climate summit process to limit the power of the fossil fuel industry and elevate the solutions and advocacy of climate justice leadership.
Yet, González’s intervention did not disappear from the proceedings. When the closing plenary resumed, the COP30 President, Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, acknowledged the need for further work on fossil fuel phaseout by proposing a Presidency-led one-year road map process. He suggested the same for deforestation, as both of these critical—and interconnected—issues were absent from the formal text.
This acknowledgment was also recognized and was in support of another significant breakthrough heralded at COP30. Colombia, alongside the Netherlands, announced an April 2026 international conference focused entirely on fossil fuel phaseout, informed by years of advocacy from climate justice movements and the vision of a civil society initiative called the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Throughout COP30 women leaders, including Daniela Durán González reminded us that leadership is not an inheritance of patriarchal privilege but responsibility to the living, those yet to be born, and the sacred agreement between humanity and Earth.
The April conference in Colombia comes at a pivotal time and demonstrates just how many countries are ready to move forward on a phase-out plan. At COP30, more than 80 countries called for language in support of a transition away from fossil fuels, and there are now 18 countries that have endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. These countries recognize what is at stake, and the criticality of their upcoming dialogue cannot be overstated. To arrange this conference is to formally acknowledge that no matter how many technological solutions might be developed, if we do not stop the source of climate collapse—coal, oil, and gas—we will not be here to carry out the next steps toward rebuilding as a human community.
It needs to be stated that the parties’ adoption of a new Gender Action Plan and agreement to develop a Just Transition Mechanism were real victories at COP30, ones that were hard fought for and should be truly celebrated, even if details—and dedicated funding—for their successful implementation are yet to be elaborated. They are crucial mechanisms the climate justice movement can utilize to drive change from within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process, even as it seeks to reform the UNFCCC to better fulfill its mandate and promise. Nevertheless, what was delivered at COP30 is profoundly insufficient. It falls short of what is urgently needed in collective action for the millions already living through climate-fueled devastation and for ecosystems being irreversibly damaged by fossil fuel expansion and deforestation.
Whether we like it or not, and despite the shortcomings of the process, the COP negotiations remain an important part of how we show up and how we collectively work to make our way out of the climate disaster. They provide the access to governments we need to make our demands turn into action. Yet, we can also remember that hope does not live in negotiated text—it lives in people’s movements globally. Communities continue to rise with clarity and courage, advancing real solutions grounded in Indigenous knowledge, feminist principles, climate justice frameworks, and frontline leadership. Communities are insisting on a world shaped by care, consent, justice, and liberation.
Indigenous women leaders from Brazil were clear from the beginning that the COP30 conference should take place in the Amazon. The rainforest biome is at a critical tipping point, and the entire world ecologically depends on the survival of the Amazon. The women wanted the world to hear the voice of the forest and the voices of Indigenous Peoples calling for protection against fossil fuels and other extractive industries.
Specifically, Indigenous women explained that they wanted the global community to experience the spirit of the Amazon because it is time to reforest our minds. “We are here not only to negotiate,” they said, “but to remember.”
Reforesting the mind is an invitation to undo the dead matter logic that governs modern systems—the belief that separation from the Earth is natural, that endless extraction is progress, and that the future can be postponed. It is a call to restore relationship, memory, equity, reciprocity, and responsibility as living principles.
COP30 revealed the crisis with painful clarity. But it also revealed the power of women’s voices to interrupt dangerous narratives and insist on truth. Throughout COP30 women leaders, including Daniela Durán González reminded us that leadership is not an inheritance of patriarchal privilege but responsibility to the living, those yet to be born, and the sacred agreement between humanity and Earth.
Sitting in the plenary with colleagues from all over the world—vigorously applauding both González’s intervention and the COP30 president’s favorable acknowledgement of the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia (a process outside of the UNFCCC)—it was impossible not to feel that history had briefly opened, offering a pathway for new opportunities.
That is why, ahead of the upcoming conference in Colombia, the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network is organizing the Women’s Assembly for a Just Fossil Fuel Phaseout on March 31, the last day of Women’s History Month. At the assembly over 20 global women leaders will convene to advance strategies, proposals, and projects to call for transformative action in Colombia. All are welcome. Now, we need to work toward reforesting our minds and using that opening to ensure a better, more just future.Keep ReadingShow Less
Frontline Groups Have the Solutions to the Climate Crisis, Not Corporate Profiteers
As people throughout the globe prepare for the First International Conference for the Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April, a frontline-led just transition must be given center stage.
Feb 17, 2026
On February 12, 2026, the US Environmental Protection Agency repealed the Endangerment Finding, a key determination for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. This decision follows the EPA’s January 2026 announcement that air quality protections will be determined based on corporations’ bottom lines, not people’s health. These harmful decisions join a dizzying number of other regulations essential for environmental justice that have been dismantled, deregulated, or destroyed.
In these times, it would be easy to despair about how the tireless movement organizing labor that made these strides possible over many years has now been eroded. However, we cannot accept defeat. My decades of frontline organizing with workers and environmental justice communities toward a just transition shows that transformations come from our collective power. No matter the obstacles, we have the real solutions needed for the crucial work ahead, including during the upcoming Santa Marta conference.
Last year marked a huge moment for just transition. This movement and the principles that inform it often took center stage in grassroots organizing and during the United Nations Climate Summit in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025. The popularity of this concept, practice, and process reveals both promising and harmful co-opted outcomes for Indigenous Peoples, frontline workers, and fenceline communities. The language can be amplified by those most impacted, used to communicate their demands and desires, and it can be used as a tool for trying to undermine the hard work of community organizations and frontline communities.
At COP30, while we welcomed progressive news media coverage and the labor of journalists to cover such an intense few weeks of climate justice and just transition advocacy, we also witnessed reporting by some Global North journalists and news outlets that worked to minimize the credibility of frontline groups and community-based organizations, while amplifying the voices and positions of false solutionists and disaster capitalists.
Unlike some researchers who argue that the negotiations can be improved by using generative artificial intelligence for creating treaty drafts, we know who has the real solutions and who must be centered in building pathways toward just transition.
Much mainstream coverage of COP30 has not adequately addressed the indispensable role of grassroots organizing in pushing toward the successful implementation of a Just Transition Mechanism within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Several days before the official start of COP30, the Movimiento de Afectados por Represas held the IV International Encuentro (Meeting) of People Affected by Dams and the Climate Crisis. This global gathering resulted in the launch of an international movement. Similarly, the Peoples’ Summit, including a just transition axis, was integral in building relationships and movement power. These mobilizations and knowledge sharing spaces worked synergistically with the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, which occurred on November 15, with people of the world overflowing into the streets of Belém. It was these preceding and concurrent gatherings that energized Just Transition cross-constituencies and that shaped the direction of the Just Transition Work Programme negotiations and the resulting Just Transition Mechanism.
Many celebrate the institutionalization of just transition as one of the greatest successes at COP30. However, much work remains in the implementation process for the new mechanism to actually advance a just transition. Without a commitment to and practice of Indigenous Principles of Just Transition and Just Transition Principles, this mechanism will become another failed effort and abuse of the labor of frontline peoples and grassroots groups who have fought so hard for so long.
Unlike some researchers who argue that the negotiations can be improved by using generative artificial intelligence for creating treaty drafts, we know who has the real solutions and who must be centered in building pathways toward just transition. Groups practicing agroecology and Landback, as well as waste pickers and many other frontline workers, are creating collective power that brings together the most affected workers and environmental justice communities, rather than pitting them against each other.
Additionally, as knowledge holders, Indigenous Peoples and Afro-Indigenous Peoples hold inherent and collective rights; accordingly, they should not be conflated as part of “civil society.” We know that Indigenous Peoples and civil society members must be the ones consulted and centered in these key United Nations negotiations and texts, not the corporate profiteers and their political cronies who pollute just transition possibilities at every COP and at many other conferences.
This year marks 35 years since I served on the drafting committee of the Principles of Environmental Justice and 30 years since I contributed to the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing. These principles and the relationships and lived experiences that gave them life continue to inform and fortify our movements toward just transition and a livable world where we all can thrive. Let’s not forget these principles and the frontline peoples who made them possible.
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'We Are Running Out of Time': 2025 Keeps Hot Streak Alive for Global Temperatures
"Governments know fossil fuels are the cause of climate breakdown, yet they keep stalling on the transition."
Jan 14, 2026
Increasing fossil fuel extraction helped make 2025 the third-hottest year on record and marked the third straight year of “extraordinary global temperatures,” according to a major new report on the climate crisis.
On Wednesday, the European Union's Copernicus climate agency published a report based on data from climate-monitoring organizations, including NASA and the World Meteorological Organization.
Based on billions of weather readings from satellites, ships, aircraft, and weather stations, the report found that, for the first time in recorded history, global temperatures over a three-year period have exceeded the critical threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
At current rates of heating, the report found, the Earth could surpass the Paris Climate Accord’s target of 1.5°C on a long-term basis by 2030, more than a decade sooner than scientists' projection when nations negotiated the pledge to reduce emissions back in 2015.
“Atmospheric data from 2025 paints a clear picture: Human activity remains the dominant driver of the exceptional temperatures we are observing,” said Laurence Rouil, the director of Copernicus’ Atmosphere Monitoring Service. “Atmospheric greenhouse gases have steadily increased over the last 10 years.”
(Graphic from the Copernicus Climate Change Service)
As with previous years, 2025 was marked by a series of disasters fueled by rising temperatures: From a historic heatwaves that killed an estimated 24,000 people in Europe, to typhoons across Asia that displaced millions, to the wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles area roughly a year ago and were one of a record 23 disasters in the US that exceeded more than a billion dollars in damage.
The Copernicus report was released as Australia suffered what DW News called possibly its "first megafire of the climate change age" in Victoria, which had charred over 350,000 hectares (more than 864,000 acres) of land as of Sunday and forced thousands to flee their homes.
(Video: Sky News Australia)
"Extreme weather isn’t rare anymore—it’s driving up food prices, insurance premiums, water shortages, and upending daily life across the globe," said Savio Carvalho, the managing director for campaigns and networks for the climate activist group 350. "Governments know fossil fuels are the cause of climate breakdown, yet they keep stalling on the transition. We don’t have the luxury of wasting time or taking side paths—we are running out of time."
The past year was marked by yet more disappointment for those hoping to see collective global action to reduce carbon emissions.
The most glaring setbacks occurred in the United States—the globe's largest historic polluter—where President Donald Trump has virtually halted renewable energy expansion, pushed to crank up fossil fuel extraction, and sought to end the "endangerment finding" that allows carbon emissions to be regulated on the basis of their harm to the climate.
But even in the absence of Trump, the past year's global climate summit in Brazil, COP30, once again fell well short of a cohesive international action plan, ending with no global agreement to wind down the use of oil, gas, and coal. Eighty nations failed to submit global emissions pledges, and many of those that did failed to make commitments that would likely bend the global temperature curve in a favorable direction.
Where scientists once urged nations to take swift action in the hope of passing the 1.5°C tipping point, Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus, said following Wednesday's report that "we are bound to pass it."
He said, "The choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences on societies and natural systems."
But an overshoot is intolerable to many on the front lines of the crisis.
"In the Pacific, climate disasters are costing us billions of dollars in recovery and rebuilding," said Fenton Lutunatabua, 350's program manager for the Pacific and Caribbean. "A world beyond 1.5°C would devastate our resources even more."
"Entire villages in Fiji are being uprooted and relocated, losing connection to traditional lands and fishing grounds," he added. "Atoll nations like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands are grappling with both adaptation and addressing the reality of potential forced migration. To give up on 1.5°C is to say that any of these realities is acceptable."
In Indonesia, where unprecedented flash floods in November killed 1,100 people, Suriadi Darmoko, an activist in Bali who is suing his government following an International Court of Justice ruling allowing states to be held legally accountable over climate harms, agreed that complacency is not an option.
“Entire communities are still buried in mud. Thousands of families are still grieving and struggling to have their basic needs met. We refuse to be treated as mere climate disaster victims," he said. "Our leaders have kept the world hooked on fossil fuels even as they knew decades ago it would lead to such tragedies."
Carvalho, too, rejected the notion that extreme warming is something the Earth must accept. Despite setbacks to collective action, 2025 also saw certain actors on the global stage make great strides toward a renewable future.
In large part due to massive investments by China, renewable sources generated more power worldwide than coal for the first time, and solar energy generation grew by 31% in the first half of the year, outpacing demand growth.
"We need to do what’s right now: a global phase out of fossil fuels is urgent," said Carvalho. "We already have the renewable energy solutions we need—what’s missing is the political will. We can prevent the worst if we act now."
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The Renewable Energy Revolution Is Unstoppable
By every measure, shifting from fossil fuels to electrification, renewables, and energy efficiency and conservation is far more beneficial to most people than following the same fossil-fueled road.
Jan 04, 2026
There’s good news and bad news on the climate front. Unfortunately, the bad news is horrific, as accelerating extreme weather-related events and other unfolding climate catastrophes show. But there are signs of hope. We just have to stop dragging our feet.
“We are already facing danger,” a scientists’ statement from the November COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil warned, adding, “COP30 has a choice—to protect people and life or the fossil fuel industry.”
Too many governments, including Canada’s, appear to be leaning toward the latter.
“We need to start, now, to reduce CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, by at least 5% per year,” the scientists wrote. “This must happen in order to have a chance to avoid unmanageable and extremely costly climate impacts affecting all people in the world.”
The only ones who benefit from continuing to exploit polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels are greedy industry profiteers and short-sighted politicians who would trade human health, economic resilience, and survivability for a handful of short-term jobs and limited economic boosts.
Studies show that “rising heat is killing roughly one person per minute, and air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels claims an estimated 2.5 million lives every year,” DW news reports. It was also “costing as much as $304 billion in global economic losses last year.”
We’ve already passed one climate “tipping point,” with warming oceans causing irreversible mass coral reef die-offs, and we’re nearing others, including Amazon rainforest devastation and collapse of crucial ocean currents.
Coral reefs support one-quarter of all marine life, and the Amazon rainforest has more animal and plant species than any other terrestrial ecosystem. It also regulates global climate and weather and holds one-quarter of the planet’s available freshwater. Ocean currents also regulate global climate and weather.
Even though emissions continue to rise as the world refuses to halt fossil fuel development and forest and wetland destruction, investments in and growth of renewable energy technology are exceeding expectations, now outpacing fossil fuel investments.
DW reports that “in 2024, the world experienced its largest-ever increase in renewable energy generation, which now provides 40% of global electricity. In the first half of this year solar and wind exceeded all demand growth for electricity, surpassing coal for the first time.” Solar capacity is doubling every three years. Wind power has tripled since 2015. The International Energy Agency reports that global renewable energy investments exceeded US$2 trillion last year, double the amounts committed to coal, oil, and gas.
To increase energy security in the face of a growing global energy crisis and reduce their reliance on increasingly expensive, inefficient fossil fuels, countries that import oil, gas, and coal are rapidly advancing electrification and renewables.
Analysis from COP30 also shows that “sticking to three key climate promises—on renewables, energy efficiency, and methane—would avoid nearly 1°C of global heating and give the world hope of avoiding climate breakdown,” the Guardian reports.
But the world continues to burn dirty, polluting coal, gas, and oil at deadly rates and has increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry—the most profitable enterprise in history!
Canada has failed to live up to its promise to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. The federal and provincial governments are supporting expanded development of methane gas exploitation and liquefaction, and are proposing pipelines to ship more dirty bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to British Columbia ports for export, where it will be burned in other countries and not counted in our emissions reporting.
Canada’s expansion of liquefied “natural” gas production is not only economically suspect, it also makes methane-reduction pledges more difficult to meet, as LNG is almost entirely methane, and leaks and emissions occur at every step of the process, from fracked extraction and transport to liquefaction and burning.
Although 160 countries, including Canada, have signed a Global Methane Pledge, promising to cut methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030, emissions continue to rise and countries, including Canada, continue to underreport them.
By every measure, shifting from fossil fuels to electrification, renewables, and energy efficiency and conservation is far more beneficial to most people than following the same fossil-fueled road. The only ones who benefit from continuing to exploit polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels are greedy industry profiteers and short-sighted politicians who would trade human health, economic resilience, and survivability for a handful of short-term jobs and limited economic boosts.
Regardless of what roadblocks fossil-fuelled governments throw in the way, the renewable energy revolution is unstoppable.
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'A Wake-Up Call': Scientists Find 2025 Among Hottest Years on Record
"2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now."
Dec 30, 2025
Climate change driven by human burning of fossil fuels helped make 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded, a scientific report published Monday affirmed, prompting renewed calls for urgent action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.
Researchers at World Weather Attribution (WWA) found that "although 2025 was slightly cooler than 2024 globally, it was still far hotter than almost any other year on record," with only two other recent years recording a higher average worldwide temperature.
For the first time, the three-year running average will end the year above the 1.5°C warming goal, relative to preindustrial levels, established a decade ago under the landmark Paris climate agreement.
"Global temperatures remained very high and significant harm from human-induced climate change is very real," the report continues. "It is not a future threat, but a present-day reality."
"Across the 22 extreme events we analyzed in depth, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires claimed lives, destroyed communities, and wiped out crops," the researchers wrote. "Together, these events paint a stark picture of the escalating risks we face in a warming world."
The WWA researchers' findings tracked with the findings of United Nations experts and others that 2025 would be the third-hottest year on record.
According to the WWA study:
This year highlighted again, in stark terms, how unfairly the consequences of human-induced climate change are distributed, consistently hitting those who are already marginalized within their societies the hardest. But the inequity goes deeper: The scientific evidence base itself is uneven. Many of our studies in 2025 focused on heavy rainfall events in the Global South, and time and again we found that gaps in observational data and the reliance on climate models developed primarily for the Global North prevented us from drawing confident conclusions. This unequal foundation in climate science mirrors the broader injustices of the climate crisis.
The events of 2025 make it clear that while we urgently need to transition away from fossil fuels, we also must invest in adaptation measures. Many deaths and other impacts could be prevented with timely action. But events like Hurricane Melissa highlight the limits of preparedness and adaptation: When an intense storm strikes small islands such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations, even relatively high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damage. This underscores that adaptation alone is not enough; rapid emission reductions remain essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of 1.5°C, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto—who is also an Imperial College London climate scientist—told the Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”
The WWA study's publication comes a month after this year's United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP30—ended in Brazil with little meaningful progress toward a transition from fossil fuels.
Responding to the new study, Climate Action Campaign director Margie Alt said in a statement that "2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now."
"Today’s report is a wake-up call," Alt continued. "Unfortunately, [US President Donald] Trump and Republicans controlling Congress spent the past year making climate denial official US policy and undermining progress to stave off the worst of the climate crisis. Their reckless polluters-first agenda rolled back critical climate protections and attacked and undermined the very agencies responsible for helping Americans prepare for and recover from increasingly dangerous disasters."
"Across the country, people are standing up and demanding their leaders do better to protect our families from climate change and extreme weather," Alt added. "It's time those in power started listening.”
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Trump, Faced With Global Armageddon, Does Everything He Can to Bring It On
From opening 1.3 billion acres of coastline to oil and gas drilling to promising to resume nuclear testing, Trump invites us to pick our own apocalypse.
Dec 11, 2025
What self-destructive creatures we turn out to be!
Can you even believe it? Only recently, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, met in Brazil for two weeks. While 194 countries were represented there, the historically greatest fossil-fuelizer on the planet, Donald Trump’s United States, was, of course, missing in action (for the first time in 30 years). Worse yet, while the conference was underway, the Trump administration announced a new plan to open 1.3 billion acres (no, that is not a misprint!) of coastal waters to new oil and gas drilling. As for the conference itself, after floundering and almost foundering, its member nations barely agreed on a way more or less forward, what were termed “baby steps” toward a better (or at least less utterly disastrous) future. And yet, can you believe this? The final agreement didn’t even include the words “fossil fuels” or reaffirm in blunt language that they should be phased out! (President Donald Trump must have been pleased!)
Hey, and if that doesn’t cheer you up enough, consider this: A White House spokeswoman responded to the conference with the claim that President Trump had “set a strong example for the rest of the world” by pursuing new fossil fuel development while it was underway. “President Trump has been clear,” she said. “He will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”
Yes, indeed, what a world! After all, we’re talking about one of the two ways human beings have discovered to utterly devastate Planet Earth (the other, of course, being with nuclear weapons). And full credit is due. Consider us nothing less than remarkable creatures for coming up with not one but two ways to potentially do ourselves and this planet in.
A child born today is, in truth, being delivered into the slow-motion climate equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for such a kid, there’s unlikely to be any ducking and covering.
Now, imagine this: “My” president, the man, inaugurated for a second time in January 2025, was the oldest nominee ever for that office and, should he complete this term, will be the oldest president in American history, older even than ancient Joe Biden when he left office (assuming, of course, that Donald Trump ever does leave office). And give him full credit: He’s essentially put his weight—and that’s no small thing, given that he’s been termed “technically obese,” even if his administration has been denying obese immigrants entry to this country—behind both ways of doing this planet in. After all, he only recently announced that, for the first time since 1992, the US might once again begin testing nuclear weapons!
Duck and Cover
Now, imagine this: I was born in the final months of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, just over a year before World War II ended. In my youth, I lived in a world in which the two great powers on this planet, my country and the Soviet Union, were threatening to do us all in atomically. I can still remember ducking and covering under my desk in grade school, hands over my head, as sirens howled outside the classroom window, indicating a Soviet nuclear strike. (It was, of course, just a test.) I can also remember getting duck-and-cover advice from the cartoon character Bert the Turtle, as well as wandering the streets of New York City and seeing (but paying little attention to) the common yellow fallout shelter signs that indicated where you should hide, were an atomic war to suddenly break out. And in my freshman year in college in New Haven, Connecticut, I can remember fearing, because of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, that the world (or at least the East Coast version of it) might be obliterated in a potential nuclear holocaust.
Of course, none of that ever actually happened, and today, 80 years after the first (and last) two atomic bombs were actually used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are no longer nuclear tests or nuclear shelters of any sort. The last US aboveground nuclear test took place in the 1960s and the last underground one in 1992. And few people seem to think about such weapons anymore or the planet-devastating war making that could potentially go with them.
No matter that nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and—count on it!—more will do so in the future; or that nuclear-armed Israel and Russia are both involved in wars at the moment; or that, at one point, Russian President Vladimir Putin did indeed implicitly threaten to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine; or that, in May, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, each possessing about 170 nuclear weapons, faced off against each other, however briefly, in a war-like fashion, with President Trump claiming that he had stopped a nuclear war from happening. (“I’m not going to have you guys shooting nuclear weapons at each other, killing millions of people, and having the nuclear dust floating over Los Angeles.”) Nor does it seem to matter that we now know a significant nuclear war could lead to a “nuclear winter” on planet Earth in which millions of us, including undoubtedly Bert the Turtle, would be likely to starve to death and the planet itself would be devastated.
Do you truly feel confident that we humans will never consider using nuclear weaponry again?
Meanwhile, though the US hasn’t tested an atomic weapon explosively since 1992, President Trump did recently suggest that he might be ready to do so again. As he put it, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” It didn’t. Not yet at least.
No matter that no other country is, in fact, doing actual nuclear testing at the moment, though Russia is indeed testing nuclear delivery systems, or that the US military hasn’t (yet) followed up on the president’s statement by preparing to do so. The only country to have openly tested a nuclear weapon since the 1990s is, in fact, North Korea. Nonetheless, my own country now has an estimated more than 5,000 nuclear weapons out of the more than 12,000 believed to be on this planet, whether aboard nuclear submarines that travel the globe’s oceans (while a “next generation” of nuclear subs is now being built), in missile silos on land, or in storage.
Worse yet, the US military has plans to put $1.7 trillion—no, that is not a misprint!—into keeping the American nuclear arsenal in what passes for good shape over the next three decades, while producing yet more such weaponry in the years to come. And do you really feel confident that Israel or, in the future, Iran, or right now North Korea would never under any circumstances consider using such weaponry? Donald Trump certainly didn’t feel confident of that, or why would he have bombed Iran’s still-peaceful nuclear sites this year?
And sadly, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, there is no significant American or global protest movement calling on this country and other countries to reduce, not to say eliminate their nuclear arsenals. In some fashion, however strangely, the nuclear form of potential end times, of ultimate destruction, has generally been ignored (except, of course, by those producing, handling, or storing such weaponry).
And honestly, given the strange history of humanity and the growing nuclear arsenals on this planet, despite those 80 years of no use—I wish I could say uselessness!—do you truly feel confident that we humans will never consider using nuclear weaponry again?
The Slow-Motion Equivalent of Nuclear War
And consider it truly strange that we humans have come up with not one but two ways to potentially do ourselves and this planet in and the second one, unlike the nuclear version, is already quite literally in process. In some eerie sense, in fact, our world could indeed be considered, though it’s seldom thought of that way, as in a slow-motion, climate-change version of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After all, the rising heat that fossil fuel burning continues to produce globally is already estimated to be killing a person a minute on this planet. That’s millions of us annually. And worse yet, it’s guaranteed to grow significantly harsher in the decades to come.
And when it comes to climate change, unlike nuclear warfare once upon a time, there are no warning sirens or shelters, nor are its “weapons” stored in arsenals. In their own strange fashion, they are instead being both produced and exploded right before our eyes. And strangely enough, while no nuclear war has yet happened, the climate-change version of such a conflict is distinctly ongoing. That means, whether you care to think about it or not, that each of us is now facing a slow-motion version of end-of-worldism in our own lives right now, even though most of the time you’d hardly know it.
Not just Donald Trump but all too many other leaders globally are at work making things worse.
Yes, the waters of this planet are heating and rising, wildfires growing ever fiercer, floods ever more extreme, and the temperature globally is distinctly climbing in a fashion that should be considered all too unnerving. After all, the last 10 years have been the warmest in human history; 2024 was the warmest year ever experienced, and 2025 looks likely to be the second or third warmest of all time. Unlike the nuclear version of ultimate destruction, in other words, the climate one is happening right now, even if in slow motion. And yet, here’s the truly eerie thing: Most days, if you read the mainstream media or watch the mainstream TV news, climate change is seldom headline making. You would certainly have little sense from the media that, at this very moment, we’re already in the midst of a distinctly apocalyptic, if slow-motion event. Most of the time, given what we humans are doing to each other from Ukraine to the Middle East, it’s at best secondary news.
In case you hadn’t noticed (and you surely have), whatever Donald Trump does—quite literally anything, even picking his nose, no less meeting in the White House with New York’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani—instantly gets more attention than the world-devastating situation we’re living through every moment of every day (and night). Someday, if historians still exist on this planet of ours, I suspect Donald J. Trump will appear, in the grimmest sense imaginable, to be an eerie wonder of these eerie times; a president who, faced with a possible global Armageddon, did everything he could to bring it on, from opening ever more land and waters to fossil fuel production to shutting down anything that has to do with the production of renewable, non-carbon energy.
Though few would ever think of it this way, a child born today is, in truth, being delivered into the slow-motion climate equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for such a kid, there’s unlikely to be any ducking and covering. And yet not just Donald Trump but all too many other leaders globally are at work making things worse. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the president’s decision to open those 1.3 billion acres of coastal waters to further drilling for oil and natural gas, China’s willingness to build significant numbers of new coal-burning power plants, or Vladimir Putin’s desire to continue, even intensify the human activity that may put more heat-inducing carbon into the atmosphere than any other, military activities of just about any sort but, above all else, making war.
Only the other week, in fact, while the COP30 Climate Summit was underway, Donald Trump, the president of the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas, the man who has done everything he possibly could to shut down green projects of any sort, met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose state oil company, Aramco, remains a monster producer of oil and natural gas. And can there be any doubt that such a meeting at such a moment was intended to be a global slap in the face to efforts of any sort to bring climate change under control and an implicit (or perhaps I mean explicit) promise to take us all to hell in a handbasket?
As someone who, at 81, has kids and grandkids, I fear for the world that Donald Trump, Mohammed bin Salman, and so many other figures on this planet, including Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, are preparing for them. Thought of a certain way, our planet is indeed experiencing the slow-motion, climate-change equivalent of nuclear war and yet it’s hardly even news. And if that isn’t truly bizarre, what is?
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The ‘COP of Truth’ Just Normalized a New Kind of Climate Denialism
The new denialism no longer bellows about hoaxes; it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay.
Dec 02, 2025
Belém promised a “COP of truth.” What unfolded was a courteous unravelling of ambition, as denialism left global climate action wobbling at the moment it needs steel.
As the Chair of the UK’s COP30 youth delegation, I realized within hours that this United Nations climate conference would be defined by its optics—not its outcomes. The venue teemed with political hopefuls more interested in cameras than commitments, and with a record 1,600 fossil fuel and 531 carbon-capture lobbyists, 1 in every 25 attendees served commercial interests.
Then came the negotiations, where delegates quietly diluted the science. References to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), long regarded as the global lodestar of climate knowledge, were either softened into ambiguity or dropped altogether. Several companies went even further, trumpeting improvements in emissions intensity as if they were genuine reductions.
It was greenwashing par excellence, a polite fiction to excuse keeping emissions exactly where they are.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it.
So it was no surprise when the negotiations titled toward erasure, governing not just the deal but the language that framed it. The term “fossil fuel” vanished from the final Belém Political Package, replaced with sweeping and unenforceable vows to renewables and adaptation funding.
We should have foreseen how settled climate science would be twisted and spun. After all, one investigation found more than 14,000 pieces of COP-related disinformation in just the three months before Belém. Much of it was generated by AI, including a widely shared fake video that showed the host city swallowed by floods.
This version of climate denialism reveals the moral credibility of climate action is being leveraged to keep emissions frozen in place. It no longer bellows about hoaxes, except by Donald Trump who has happily dragged America back into isolationism. In the diplomatic world it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay. It is denialism wearing the mask of governance, and it is far more corrosive than the loud bluff it replaced.
The timing could hardly be worse. The IPCC’s carbon budget for a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C will vanish by 2029 if emissions continue at today’s pace. This is also the first year after the Global Stocktake that mandates governments to draft national plans that will set our course until 2030.
And what happens now determines the shape of the decisive decade. Crossing 1.5°C sharply raises the risk of irreversible cryosphere collapse—rapid ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland which will lock the world into meters of sea-level rise that imperil coastal megacities across every hemisphere. At 2°C, another billion people will face severe water scarcity—especially in the Global South where adaptation capacity is lowest and exposure is highest. This reality is why the deliberate sidelining of climate science is not just exasperating but catastrophic.
And COP30’s lone nod to honesty—the Declaration on Information Integrity—feels painfully thin. The declaration, which promises to counter climate falsehoods, was only signed by 12 countries. And with no sanctions or accountability, it is a gesture at truth in the exact moment truth needed teeth.
We need a global firewall for climate truth: binding rules for climate information, a UN body capable of verifying data with transparent AI, and legal duties on platforms to curb the algorithmic spread of lies. Climate inaction is becoming a matter of legal liability. That burden should fall equally on those who deliberately twist the science.
There must be a counterweight capable of tracing disinformation, naming the culprits of confusion, and dragging the debate back to the science that anchors it. Only then can we hope to restart global climate momentum. And in an irony worthy of our age, the technology that helped generate the mess—AI—may be the only thing sharp enough to cut through it.
According to Sachin Dev Duggal, Britain’s foremost expert on applied artificial intelligence and EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023, the internet is now a space where reliable information sits beside convincing fabrications, and no amount of earnest climate communication will fix this without tools that can separate accuracy from invention at scale.
AI is already showing what those tools might look like. It can review millions of words in seconds and test claims against established climate data with a consistency no human team can match. We are already seeing this in practice. For example, the machine-learning model ClimateBERT has analysed corporate reports and exposed misleading emissions claims. Another model, CLIMINATOR, has also been trained to hold political and corporate actors to account by checking whether their climate statements align with the evidence or contradict it. And the FactCrisis project, cofounded by the EU, has used AI during heatwaves to track false statistics and identify accounts pushing them, offering a glimpse of what becomes possible when AI and international bodies finally start reinforcing one another.
Duggal argues that the next step is a decentralized verification model. Climate data from satellites, sensors, and national inventories would sit in a shared public ledger that no ministry or corporation can quietly revise. When a government or company makes a claim about progress, anyone could check it against a record that does not bend to convenience. It would make the small acts of creative reporting that feed climate denialism far harder to get away with.
Yet today’s AI carries a flaw that limits its usefulness. Large language models are fluent but ungrounded, reproducing the language of climate science without retaining the facts that give it weight, which makes them unreliable referees in a space awash with motivated distortions. Duggal sees that any serious AI tool must reconnect claims to their evidence, trace where the data came from, and reveal the steps that turned information into a conclusion. This is the direction of his SeKondBrain project, which concentrates on how to build these evidential scaffolds so that an AI system can point to the exact documents, numbers, or assumptions that shaped its judgement. That kind of traceability matters because it gives climate negotiators and regulators something concrete to interrogate. And without systems built to preserve and expose the evidence behind their outputs, AI will remain too opaque to play any serious role in protecting science.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it. Without that basic partnership, we may have reached the point where another COP has nothing left to say.
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Flooding Kills 1,000+ Across South Asia as Climate Crisis Fuels More Extreme Rain
“We need to confront climate change effectively,” Indonesia's president said.
Dec 01, 2025
More than 1,100 people across South Asia have died after torrential rains fueled by warming temperatures caused widespread flooding and landslides in recent days.
Following days of unprecedented cyclone conditions, people across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have been left with their homes destroyed and forced to flee for their lives. A separate cyclone in Sri Lanka has left hundreds more dead.
The worst devastation has been seen in Indonesia, where Cyclone Senyar has claimed over 500 lives as of Sunday. On the island of Sumatra, rescue teams have struggled to reach stranded people as roads have been blocked by mudslides and high floodwaters. Many areas are still reportedly unreachable.
As Reuters reported Monday, more than 28,000 homes have been damaged across the country and 1.4 million people affected, according to government figures. At least 464 were reported missing as of Sunday.
Other countries in the region were also battered. In Thailand, the death toll was reported at 176 as of Monday, and more than 3 million people are reported to be affected. The worst destruction has been in the southern city of Hat Yai, which on November 21 alone experienced 335mm of rain, its single largest recorded rainfall in over 300 years.
At least two more have been killed in Malaysia, where nearly 12,000 people still remain in evacuation centers.
Sri Lanka has witnessed similar devastation in recent days from another storm, Cyclone Ditwah, that formed around the same time as Senyar. Floods and mudslides have similarly killed at least 330 people, and destroyed around 20,000 homes, while leaving around a third of the country without electricity. More than 200 people are missing, and over 108,000 are in state-run shelters, officials say.
Work has begun in Indonesia to restore damaged roads, bridges, and telecommunication services. But after he visited survivors in Sumatra, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said that the work will extend beyond merely recovering from the storm.
“We need to confront climate change effectively,” Prabowo told reporters. “Local governments must take a significant role in safeguarding the environment and preparing for the extreme weather conditions that will arise from future climate change.”
Southeast Asia was top-of-mind for many attendees at last month's COP30 climate summit in Brazil. As Winston Chow, a professor of urban climate at Singapore Management University and part of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told the Straits Times, this is because the region "is highly vulnerable to climate change."
"As a whole, it faces multiple climate risks and hazards, such as rising temperatures, sea-level rise, increasing droughts and floods, and the intensification of extreme events like typhoons," he continued.
In recent years, the region has been hit by annual devastating heatwaves, resulting in record-shattering temperatures. In Myanmar, where temperatures exceeded 110°F last April, Radio Free Asia reported that 1,473 people died from extreme heat in just one month.
Floods have likewise grown more deadly in recent years. Just this month, floods killed dozens more people in Vietnam, and a pair of typhoons killed hundreds more in the Philippines and forced over a million people to evacuate their homes.
While it's difficult to determine the extent to which any one disaster was caused by climate change, in aggregate, they are growing more intense as the planet warms.
"As the world’s oceans and atmosphere warm at an accelerating rate due to the rise in greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, tropical cyclones are expected to become more intense," explained Steve Turton, an adjunct professor of environmental geography at CQUniversity Australia in The Conversation on Sunday. "This is because cyclones get their energy from warm oceans. The warmer the ocean, the more fuel for the storm."
According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, part of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, October 2025 was the third-warmest October on record globally and had above-average tropical cyclone activity.
"The warming atmosphere is supercharging the global water cycle, and peak rainfall rates are increasing," Turton said. "When more rain falls in a short time, flash flooding becomes more likely."
At COP30, protesters from across Southeast Asia assembled to demand action from global leaders. On November 10, shortly after her home in Manila was battered by a pair of typhoons, 25-year-old activist Ellenor Bartolome savaged corporations and world leaders who have continued to block global action to reduce fossil fuel usage.
“It gets worse every year, and for every disaster, it is utterly enraging that we are counting hundreds of bodies, hundreds of missing people... while the elite and the corporations are counting money from fossil fuels," she told attendees as they entered the conference.
Ultimately, many climate activists and scientists left the conference enraged yet again, as the final agreement stripped out all language related to fossil fuels.
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