{"id":151281,"date":"2025-11-24T14:18:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T14:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/151281\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T14:18:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T14:18:11","slug":"another-cop-wrecked-by-fossil-fuel-interests-and-our-leaders-cowardice-but-there-is-another-way-genevieve-guenther","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/151281\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Cop wrecked by fossil fuel interests and our leaders\u2019 cowardice \u2013 but there is another way | Genevieve Guenther"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 30th conference of the parties (Cop30), the annual climate summit of all nations party to the UNFCCC, just ended<\/a>. Stakeholders are out in the media trying spin the outcome as a win. Simon Stiell, climate change executive secretary for the UN is, for instance, praising<\/a> Cop30<\/a> for showing that \u201cclimate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a liveable planet\u201d. But let us be clear. The conference was a failure. Its outcome, the decision text<\/a> known as the Global Mutir\u00e3o or Global Collective Effort, is, in essence, a form of climate denial.<\/p>\n

In 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that the world<\/a> had already developed, or planned to develop, too much fossil fuel to be able to halt global heating at 2C. It acknowledged that the capital assets built up around fossil fuels must be stranded \u2013 that is to say, abandoned and not used \u2013 if warming was to be limited to 2C. But the Cop30 decision text ignores all this. Indeed, it never even mentions fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

This failure is all the more bitter because Cop30 had initially sent out so many hopeful signals that it would finally tackle the \u201ctransitioning away from fossil fuels\u201d pledge from Cop28<\/a>. Speaking ahead of the conference, the Brazilian president, Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, said that the world needs<\/a> \u201croadmaps that will enable humankind, in a fair and planned manner, to overcome its dependence on fossil fuels\u201d.<\/p>\n

Lula\u2019s call was backed by about 90 other nations<\/a>. \u201cThis is a global coalition, with global north and global south countries coming together and saying with one voice: this is an issue which cannot be swept under the carpet,\u201d said the UK\u2019s energy secretary, Ed Miliband.<\/p>\n

After a press conference where 20 ministers and climate envoys demanded<\/a> that the proposed language on the roadmap in the first draft text be \u201cstrengthened\u201d and adopted, the EU circulated its own proposal<\/a> for incorporating the roadmap in the final text.<\/p>\n

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

It seems clear that the petrostates, led by Russia and Saudi Arabia, fought against fossil fuel phaseout and won. If they feel the phaseout is an existential threat to their economies and their sovereignty, perhaps they should consider how the climate crisis is rendering the Middle East uninhabitable. The very week of Cop30, Iran\u2019s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, announced that Tehran, Iran\u2019s capital city of 16 million, would need to be abandoned<\/a> and re-established elsewhere, because, after years of climate-fuelled drought, its water has finally run out.<\/p>\n

Surely these states are being supported in their fossil-fuel authoritarianism by Donald Trump, who is the president of the world\u2019s largest producer of fossil fuels and who calls the climate crisis a \u201ccon job<\/a>\u201d. Even though the US was officially absent from the negotiations, Trump\u2019s alliance with Saudi Arabia<\/a>, and seeming affinity for Russia, underwrites their ability to advance their own energy interests.<\/p>\n

Yet would this power be as great if the world\u2019s \u201cclimate leaders\u201d had more courage? It is remarkable that at the very moment the EU was supposedly fighting to include a roadmap to fossil fuel phaseout in the Cop decision, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, was telling a press conference<\/a> at the G20 that \u201cwe are not fighting fossil fuels, we are fighting the emissions from fossil fuels.\u201d Not only does this statement directly undermine her own negotiators\u2019 positions, it is in itself nonsensical \u2013 akin to saying \u201cwe are not giving up eating ice-cream, we are giving up absorbing the calories from that ice-cream.\u201d<\/p>\n

More to the point, von der Leyen\u2019s language echoed nearly verbatim the words of Osama Faqeeha, deputy environment minister for Saudi Arabia, who told a journalist<\/a> asking about the Cop30 roadmap that \u201cthe issue is the emissions, it\u2019s not the fuel\u201d. It has long been the position of the Saudis<\/a> that the world could continue to use fossil fuels and simply remove the economy\u2019s 600m metric tonnes of annual carbon-dioxide emissions with carbon-dioxide removal. But this is nothing more than fossil-fuel propaganda.<\/p>\n

For one thing, the amount of CO2 that can be stored safely underground is limited<\/a>. That the president of the commission repeats such nonsense reveals why attempts like Cop30 repeatedly fail: so-called climate leaders in fact evince deep ambivalence about phasing out fossil fuels, ultimately unifying global climate politics around the lie that we can keep using fossil fuels and still deal with the climate crisis.<\/p>\n

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But what of China? Isn\u2019t China becoming the world\u2019s first electrostate, stepping into the role of global climate leader with the US embracing fossil authoritarianism? Well, China seems to be ambivalent too, at least for now. China did not block the text<\/a> on the roadmap to fossil-fuel phaseout, but neither did it fight to make sure it was included. Despite its dominance in solar, wind and electric vehicles, China acts less as a climate leader and more as an \u201call of the above\u201d energy powerhouse, devoted first and foremost to its own economic development.<\/p>\n

One bright spot of Cop30 is that Colombia and the Netherlands, backed by 22 nations, will independently advance a roadmap<\/a> to fossil fuel phaseout, beginning with a conference in April 2026<\/a>. This conference could be a gamechanger. UN rules require all Cop decision texts to be approved unanimously, giving the petrostates veto power over global climate politics. The creation of a fossil-fuel roadmap outside the Cop process may establish a trading bloc that could begin to sanction nations \u2013 and banks \u2013 that refuse to wind down fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

Such a bloc will have no power if its leaders are not forced to resolve their ambivalence about phasing out fossil fuels. And that\u2019s where you and I come in. All of us must do our part and subject world leaders to extreme and relentless public pressure. The challenge of stranding potentially trillions of dollars in fossil capital and rebuilding the world is enormous. Of course, global leaders and officials will take the easier, cowardly road if they can get away with it. As we cross the 1.5C threshold into uncharted climatic territory, we must make them fight wholeheartedly for fossil fuel phaseout. In the end, it is up to us to create a global politics that will finally save the world for our children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 30th conference of the parties (Cop30), the annual climate summit of all nations party to the UNFCCC,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-151281","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}