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cop30
'There Is No Lack of Money': Climate Movement Demands Billionaire Tax to Fund Greener Future
"A fair billionaire tax could fund climate flood prevention, clean air, green cities, affordable housing, and nature protection," said one Greenpeace campaigner.
Oct 30, 2025
As Hurricane Melissa leaves a trail of destruction in the Caribbean and the world prepares for the next United Nations climate summit, campaigners this week are demanding taxes to make the superrich pay for creating a better future for all, including by transitioning away from planet-wrecking fossil fuels to renewable energy.
An Oxfam International report released Tuesday found that consumption-based carbon emissions of the richest 0.1% of the global population surged by 92 tonnes between 1990 and 2023, while CO2 pollution from the poorest half of humanity grew by just 0.1 tonnes.
The following day, the UK government released a new climate action plan for the next 12 years. The country aims to decarbonize its electricity supply by 2030 and reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The climate group 350.org responded by urging Chancellor Rachel Reeves to introduce a tax on ultrawealthy individuals and polluting companies.
"Ordinary people are already paying the price for a crisis they didn't cause—from failed harvests here in the UK to devastation from Hurricane Melissa overseas," 350.org UK campaigner Matilda Borgström said in a statement. "The government's plan will only work if it is funded fairly.
"There's more than enough wealth in this country to pay for affordable clean energy, warm homes, and secure jobs," Borgström argued. "The question for Rachel Reeves is simple: Whose side is she on, ordinary people or the superrich?"
BREAKING: 80+ young people are outside the Treasury right now to tell Rachel Reeves: make tax the super-rich PAY UP - or step down.This Budget, it's time for Reeves to pick a side: us or the billionaires. For wealth taxes to fund investment in a better future.
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— Green New Deal Rising (@gndrising.bsky.social) October 27, 2025 at 5:56 AM
Meanwhile, Greenpeace on Thursday took aim at the wealthiest person on the planet, Elon Musk. As of Thursday, his estimated net worth is $472-490.2 billion, though he could become the world's first trillionaire if shareholders of electric vehicle giant Tesla approve his proposed CEO pay package next week.
Noting Tesla's annual general meeting on November 6, Greenpeace called on governments "to lay the ground for a global tax reform" negotiations for a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, scheduled to start in Nairobi, Kenya on November 10—the same day the climate summit, COP30, is set to begin in Belém, Brazil.
"Instead of enabling one person to become a trillionaire, governments should unlock that same scale of wealth—the $1.7 trillion, which a billionaire and multimillionaire tax could generate per year globally—to protect lives and secure our common future," said Fred Njehu, Greenpeace Africa political lead for the Fair Share campaign, in a statement.
"A fair billionaire tax could fund climate flood prevention, clean air, green cities, affordable housing, and nature protection," Njehu noted. "There is no lack of money, only a failure to make the richest of the rich pay their fair share. Governments must act on behalf of the majority of people and listen to what many economic experts suggest: Tax the superrich and their polluting corporations to finance a fair green transition."
A UN synthesis report published Tuesday shows that governments' climate plans, officially called nationally determined contributions, would cut emissions by just 10% by 2035 compared to 2019 levels, dramatically short of what is needed to meet the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping global temperature rise this century at 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
"There is little mistaking the potential of the wealth tax to serve as a financial engine for environmental initiatives," Amir H. Khodadadi, an Iranian developmental economist focused on climate policy and green technology, wrote Wednesday for Earth.org. "Theoretically, a properly designed wealth tax could redistribute wealth and underwrite everything from renewable energy infrastructure to strategies for climate adaptation."
"Reality, however, is a good deal trickier," Khodadadi acknowledged. "As attractive as it is from those standpoints, using a wealth tax for climate action raises some very thorny questions about equity, effectiveness, and possible unintended consequences that will need to be thoughtfully weighed."
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We're on the Verge of Exceeding 1.5°C of Warming, But It's Not Too Late for Action
With the mounting economic and human toll of climate disasters and the benefits of affordable, renewable energy so clear and urgent, there is still space for genuine progress and alignment at COP30—and world leaders must seize it!
Oct 28, 2025
Nations will soon be gathering in Belém, Brazil for the annual United Nations climate “conference of the parties”—COP30—against a backdrop of incredibly challenging geopolitical and climate realities. Grossly insufficient action from world leaders has already resulted in worsening climate extreme events and has put the crucial, science-informed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels out of reach. As I write this, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic are bracing for the monster Hurricane Melissa—the most recent example of the deadly and costly damages from the fossil-fueled climate crisis.
Political headwinds—including the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science and clean energy policies in the United States—and the fossil fuel industry’s continued deception and obstruction are conspiring to make this a very fraught moment for climate action. Yet, with the mounting economic and human toll of climate disasters and the benefits of affordable, renewable energy so clear and urgent, there is still space for genuine progress and alignment at COP30—and world leaders must seize it!
The Significance of a Brazilian COP
The significance of this COP taking place in Brazil, a COP that should forefront the rights of Indigenous communities and the protection of the Amazon forest, cannot be overstated. Across the world, frontline communities bearing a disproportionate toll of climate impacts need solutions that prioritize their needs—not the profits of big polluters and billionaires seeking to evade their responsibility for driving the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the complicated logistics and high accommodation costs for this COP are already creating concerns about inclusivity, especially for those with fewer resources.
The COP Presidency’s Global Mutirão is a bracing call to action. COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago and CEO Ana Toni have laid out a strong vision for a focus on implementation of actions to address climate change, not just a list of future aspirations. They have been engaged in diplomacy all year, bilaterally and multilaterally, to try to lay the groundwork for consensus at COP30 even in the face of geopolitical tensions.
My colleagues and I will be on the ground in Belém, shining a light on the latest science and what it means for decision-makers, people, and the planet as we fight for climate justice alongside civil society representatives from Brazil and across the world. You can follow along with our blog series on COP30.
Breaching 1.5°C of Global Warming Is Alarming, Enraging, and Heartbreaking
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ stark remarks on the 1.5°C climate goal, made at the 75th anniversary of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) last week, hit hard: “…one thing is already clear: we will not be able to contain the global warming below 1.5°C in the next few years. The overshooting is now inevitable, which means that we are going to have a period, bigger or smaller, with higher or lower intensity, above 1.5°C in the years to come.”
Unfortunately, Secretary General Guterres has simply confirmed what several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists, Union of Concerned Scientists scientists, and many others have been sounding the alarm about since the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report was released.
Ten years after securing the Paris Agreement, the fact that the world is now on the verge of exceeding 1.5°C of warming on a long-term basis—after already surpassing it temporarily for a full year in 2024—was not inevitable. It is an absolutely enraging, shameful, and heartbreaking consequence of continued delays and obstruction of ambitious action. The fault lies entirely with gutless, self-interested political leaders—especially those from richer, high-emitting nations—and the fossil fuel industry, which has continued to brazenly and shamelessly prioritize its profits over the planet.
No country—not even the United States—can stop global climate action AND it will take a lot of countries acting together to tackle this problem at the scale and with the urgency required.
Breaching 1.5°C will undoubtedly unleash further damaging and irreversible climate harms on the world, but it is not a cliff edge. Climate impacts unfold and accelerate on a continuum, and even now, at about 1.3°C of global warming, we are—and have been—seeing profound harms to people and the planet.
Our response now—because humans still have agency over this dire problem we have caused—will make a crucial difference in the extent of the harms to come and what we can do to prepare for them. How much past 1.5°C temperatures overshoot, and how long that overshoot lasts, will depend crucially on our emissions choices. Those factors will make a tremendous difference for the magnitude of impacts like climate-driven extreme heat in the future. We must also ramp up our investments in resilience to help prepare people for graver threats as temperatures increase.
But some planetary boundaries, once crossed, can set off feedback loops in Earth systems that we will not be able to control. For example, some impacts, like the further irreversible loss of land-based ice, can set off additional multi-century accelerating sea-level rise beyond what is currently locked in, and that cannot be turned back once it gets going even if we manage to bring temperatures back down after overshooting 1.5°C.
The choices our political leaders make now—including at COP30—will determine the future we leave to our children and grandchildren. Those choices include prioritizing actions to:
- Sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions, phase out fossil fuels, and drive toward net negative heat-trapping emissions;
- Invest in climate resilience;
- Share the burdens and opportunities of climate action equitably;
- Secure justice for people on the frontlines of the climate crisis; and
- Demand accountability for fossil fuel companies and others who have contributed the most to the climate crisis.
Latest Science and Data Show Climate Action Is Far Offtrack
Despite all the loud alarm bells, most indicators continue to show a world far offtrack. Data from a recent report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) show that global carbon dioxide emissions were at an all-time high in 2024, with the biggest increase from 2023 to 2024 since modern measurements began. In addition to emissions from burning fossil fuels, a strikingly anomalous factor in 2024 was the high levels of emissions from wildfires in North and South America, including in Bolivia, Brazil, and Canada. Meanwhile, the Production Gap Report shows that nations’ fossil fuel production plans are on track to be twice as much in 2030 as would be consistent with a 1.5°C pathway. And countries’ current emission reduction commitments (aka Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) are collectively well short of Paris Agreement-aligned goals.
The 2025 NDC Synthesis report and the forthcoming 2025 UN Environment Programme Emissions Gap report further underscore these realities and highlight the very real risk that without immediate action the world could be on track for a global average temperature increase of more than 2.5°C, even approaching 3°C above preindustrial levels. A 3°C world would be catastrophic—with unrelenting extreme heatwaves, major coastal cities inundated by rising seas, food and water shortages, loss of coral reefs and die-back of tropical forests, harms to human health and other disastrous impacts. Meanwhile, the forthcoming 2025 Adaptation Gap report, themed "Running on Empty," will highlight the huge shortfall in investments in resilience to help frontline communities cope with climate impacts already locked in due to heat-trapping emissions primarily from richer nations.
Together, these reports form a dismal assessment of political leaders who are still not acting in line with what science or equity shows is necessary, despite years of high-minded promises and even as people are enduring crushing climate impacts.
Seven Things to Watch at COP30
While the context for COP30 is daunting, and the process of negotiations ahead is likely to be frustrating, global cooperation is absolutely essential to solve this challenge. There are no shortcuts around that. Every country must have a role, a responsibility, and a voice—no matter how big or small, or how powerful or not they are. That said, richer nations and major emitters of heat-trapping emissions have unique responsibilities to act boldly.
Here are seven things I’ll be watching for:
- Will nations remain steadfast in their commitment to the Paris Agreement? At the UN climate summit in September in New York it was clear that nearly every nation recognizes the utmost importance of the Paris Agreement goals for their self-interest and the global collective interest to limit dangerous climate change. The Trump administration, which has shamefully announced its intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement for the second time, is an isolated rogue actor, acting against the interests of the American people. At COP30, will the BRICS nations, the European Union countries, and others step up to fill the leadership vacuum and drive forward ambitious climate action? Many US states, subnational governments, and businesses also remain committed and will be in Brazil to show the other face of the US.
- How will countries’ emissions reduction commitments (aka NDCs) stack up collectively? So far, the NDC announcements have been a real mixed bag and collectively the announcements have fallen well short of what’s needed. The UN’s NDC Synthesis Report underscores the huge gap in ambition, with most major emitting countries still far off course in terms of their emissions trajectories, putting the world at risk of over 2.5°C of warming. Many countries have yet to even announce their updated NDCs. Closing that ambition gap will require rapid implementation, transparent progress tracking, and stronger accountability mechanisms before 2030.
- How much progress will be made on transitioning away from fossil fuels, tripling renewables, and doubling energy efficiency by 2030? Renewable energy progress—especially propelled by China and India, among others—is cause of optimism. Renewable energy is not just ramping up but actually displacing fossil fuels, and now that momentum must be accelerated. However, coal, oil, and gas are simply not being phased out fast enough, despite countries’ commitments to transition away from fossil fuels made at COP28.
- Will there be any breakthroughs on climate finance? Last year’s COP in Baku, billed as the climate finance COP, ended in deep disappointment and a breakdown of trust between richer nations and lower income nations because of the paltry finance pledges offered. This year, it will be critical to rebuild that trust, including sending a strong signal about a plan for provision of finance for both cutting emissions and for adaptation—the latter of which has long left behind and is an urgent priority for developing nations.
- Will there be an ambitious, fair agreement on safeguarding tropical forest ecosystems? Fittingly, this Brazilian COP taking place in the Amazon must prioritize a strong agreement to help protect tropical forests, a crucial aspect of climate action, centering the needs and perspectives of the people and other species who live in and depend on them. Negotiations on the Tropical Forest Forever Facility will be keenly watched as a barometer of success at COP30.
- Will COP outcomes be protected from interference from fossil fuel interests? Petrostates and increasingly large numbers of fossil fuel company lobbyists have worked behind the scenes and publicly to co-opt the UN COP space and water down global climate agreements that they see as a threat to their profits. Their lies and disinformation about climate science and renewable energy are a significant obstacle to progress and must be called out and resisted.
- Will civil society voices, especially the voices of Indigenous Peoples, get a fair hearing? While civil society representatives do not have a seat at the negotiating table, our voices as observer groups in the broader COP space are crucial to remind political leaders of who they are supposed to be serving (not fossil fuel executives and billionaires!) and that they must prioritize fairness and science in their deliberations. Through engagement with country negotiators, side events, press conferences, and public demonstrations, we will work to register our views loudly and clearly.
What Will It Take for COP30 to Be Successful?
The 10 years since the world secured the historic Paris Agreement have been a time of both incredible progress in renewable energy and worsening climate impacts, illuminating who the real climate champions are and who are the obstacles. COP30’s success depends on whether countries can rise above narrow self-interest and recommit to ambitious action. It depends on whether a shifting world order can unlock progress and leadership from new quarters. It depends on isolating the Trump administration and resisting its anti-science rhetoric and actions, as well as its efforts to upend multilateral diplomacy to solve global challenges.
I am going to Brazil in sober mind frame, deeply worried about the increasingly authoritarian Trump administration. But much as the US is an outsize actor on the global stage, this international climate meeting with 190+ countries is also a reminder of the wider world and each country’s vital place in it. The 1.5°C goal is enshrined in the Paris Agreement because of the bravery of small island nations that carried the refrain of "1.5 to stay alive" at COP21 in 2015. Vanuatu and a group of small island nations led a heroic effort to secure a landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice this year, affirming states’ legal obligations to address climate change. Meanwhile, renewable energy is taking off around the world because it is now the cheapest form of electricity in most places. No country—not even the United States—can stop global climate action AND it will take a lot of countries acting together to tackle this problem at the scale and with the urgency required.
In Belém, I know I will find inspiration and courage from the global climate justice movement, from Indigenous Peoples who have stood firm to defend their lands and communities in the face of brutal attacks, and from passionate young people who are the planet’s future. I know I will come back reenergized for the right and necessary fight here at home
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Ahead of COP30, UN Report Shows 1.5°C Will Be Breached as Countries Pledge Just 10% Emissions Cut
“The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5°C in the next few years," said UN chief António Guterres. "We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course."
Oct 28, 2025
Ahead of the United Nations' global summit on the climate emergency in Belém, Brazil, a report on countries' climate plans released Tuesday served as both "a progress update and a warning siren," one campaigner said.
According to the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) Synthesis Report, governments have submitted plans to the UN that would reduce fossil fuel emissions by just 10% by 2035 compared to 2019 levels, a fraction of what is needed to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures.
The report includes climate action plans from fewer than a third of the nations that signed the Paris Agreement, the legally binding treaty demanding countries take action to limit planetary heating to 1.5°C, a decade ago.
China and the European Union have not yet submitted their NDCs ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30), and in the United States, President Donald Trump ordered the country's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for a second time earlier this year and has been pushing for more fossil fuel extraction while dismantling renewable energy projects.
The report's projection includes a plan that was submitted by the US in the last weeks of the Biden administration, which Trump has said he has no plans to fulfill.
Without officially submitting an NDC, China has pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 7-10% of their peak by 2035, and the EU has been debating a reduction of 62-72.5%.
Judging from the commitments that have been made so far, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told The Guardian and Amazon-based news outlet Sumaúma that the 1.5°C goal will be breached, at least temporarily,
"Overshooting is now inevitable," he said, noting that an international goal should now be to reverse course on emissions in time to return to the 1.5°C mark by the end of the century.
“Let’s recognize our failure,” he told the outlets. “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5°C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5°C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs."
Guterres said it is "absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”
"The success of COP30 now hinges less on the maths of new targets and more on the politics closing the ambition gap and accelerating a fair and fast transition from fossil fuels to renewables.”
The report was released a week after Brazil's government announced it was opening up the Amazon rainforest to oil drilling even as the country is set to host COP30, where campaigners hope to focus on implementing climate action plans. Earlier this month, researchers in the United Kingdom found that the world's coral reefs have been driven to a tipping point by surging global temperatures.
“Ten years on from Paris, governments are still allowing fossil fuel companies to call the shots," said Illan Zugman, managing director for Latin America at 350.org. "We see progress in words, but not yet in the numbers. Every new oil field or gas terminal wipes out the gains made in these NDCs. Just kilometers from where COP30 will take place, new licenses are being given out. Real climate leadership means drawing the line on fossil fuels now."
Steffen Menzel, program lead for climate diplomacy and geopolitics at the think tank E3G, noted that "while some developed and developing countries are providing clear examples to follow, delays and lackluster pledges from major emitters such as the EU and China have undermined the effectiveness of the Paris Agreement.”
Despite their power and resources, said World Wildlife Fund global NDC enhancement coordinator Shirley Matheson, "major G20 economies still haven’t submitted their targets with less than a fortnight to go before COP30 begins."
“While countries are making genuine progress, the gap between words and action remains dangerously wide," said Matheson. “At COP30, the G20 must stop hesitating and start delivering. It’s time to turn the slow jog into a sprint by supercharging a clean and fair energy transition. This means increasing the share of renewable energy while phasing out fossil fuels, mobilizing climate finance, and ending deforestation and the wider destruction of nature. The world can’t afford delay disguised as diplomacy.”
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, emphasized that renewables in many countries "are booming and meet all new electricity demand this year and fossil fuels are finally showing signs of peaking."
"Yet, all progress is still far too slow," said Sieber. "The success of COP30 now hinges less on the maths of new targets and more on the politics closing the ambition gap and accelerating a fair and fast transition from fossil fuels to renewables.”
Zugman stressed that many governments around the world "have the technology, the money, and the public support for a clean energy transition."
"What’s missing is political courage," said Zugman. "Until we stop funding fossil fuels and start taxing their billions, we will keep losing precious time.”
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