BREAKING: COP30 Started Today. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up

COP 30, the annual climate change celebrity shindig and gladhanding session hosted by the UN, kicked off today in Belem, Brazil.

Brazil is a huge country, and Belem is over 2000 miles north and slightly east of Rio Bonito do Iguacu, a town in the southern state of Parana, where on November 7 a tornado ripped through with winds of up to 155 miles per hour. The twister battered human structures to rubble and in their aftermath revealed scenes that beggar the imagination. The howling winds and hurtling debris left behind six dead people and 750 injured people, while ripping up houses, schools, businesses, and infrastructure.

This horrific natural disaster, likely amped up by an atmosphere that is warmer and more energetic because of global warming, happened just days before November 9, when UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell posted on his LinkedIn:

On the eve of COP30, one thing is clear: The Paris Agreement is delivering real progress, but we must accelerate in the Amazon.

Devastating climate damages are happening already, from Hurricane Melissa hitting the Caribbean, Super Typhoons smashing Vietnam and the Philippines, to a tornado ripping through Southern Brazil.

Nice how he slid that reference to the Parana devastation in there, no?

To recap, here’s COP’s official position on what, exactly, the Paris Agreement is:

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 195 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016.

Its overarching goal is to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

However, in recent years, world leaders have stressed the need to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of this century.

That’s because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that crossing the 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall.

To limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030.

Okay. So what’s happening with emissions, really?

• Week beginning November 2, 2025: 424.78ppm

• Weekly value from 1 year ago: 423.27ppm

• Weekly value from 10 years ago: 399.37ppm

According to the Climate Action Tracker, the United States has an overall emissions target rating of CRITICALLY INSUFFICIENT.

The relatively upbeat message from COP30 is in line with the greenwashing blather you are likely hearing from bad actors like Exxon Mobil and British Petroleum, who extoll their research on biofuels like algae, and ‘innovation’ from young scientists that will soon be turning the world green, while continuing to double and triple down on spending to open new oilfields and arctic shipping lanes.

In recent months I have pulled in my horns on the issue of climate change. I felt, as perhaps you do, like it’s all too much - and we are far too late - and there is clearly almost zero interest in mounting a ‘climate revolution,’ whatever the heck that might actually mean.

So when David Suzuki gave an interview this past July in which he declared the fight all but over, I felt vindicated in my apathy and retreat.

To start: you might not be sure of Suzuki’s political/progressive bona fides. He’s frequently derided as a squish or a moderate, and yet here’s what he said about billionaires in this interview:

It’s crazy that we celebrate people who are billionaires. It should be illegal for Christ’s sake. It’s got nothing to do with money, and everything to do with how big their dick is. We should have awards and whenever someone achieves $100 million, which is already obscene, we give them a bronze statue of a dick, and when you get $1 billion, we could give them an even bigger dick.

So… he’s not really mealy-mouthed.

And here’s just some of what he said about climate change:

Now, it is too late.

I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc.

There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them — the ozone layer — and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockström says we have five years to get out of the danger zone.

If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven!

And, if you look at those boundaries, like the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions.

He also said something that spoke very strongly to me, as someone who has been advocating for a very long time for a climate revolution:

Look, I’m not giving up in the sense of not doing anything, but Trump’s election was the dagger in my heart. Trump’s win was the triumph of capitalism and neoliberalism, and he’s going to wreak havoc. There’s nothing we can do about that, except maybe incremental changes.

That’s not what we need. We need revolution. Can you have a peaceful revolution? I don’t know.

But I’m saying, as an environmentalist, we have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems.

The nub of the problem in this political moment, of course, is that in the United States (and elsewhere in the western world) we’re smack dab in the midst of a slide toward fascism and authoritarianism, while end stage capitalism is producing ever more toxic billionaires and soulless multi-national corporations who are busily hoovering up all the wealth in order to feather their own nests, damn the torpedoes and damn all the rest of us little people to Hell.

To ask people to mobilize because of climate change is laughably unrealistic. In the US, the majority of us are blue, and yet we can’t even be arsed to stage a general strike to send a message to Jeff Bezos and his ilk that we are done with being impoverished wage slaves.

The No Kings Day rallies were… I suppose… fine? They sent a message? Like a sternly-worded letter from Chuck Schumer, they seemed both laudable and not nearly enough to meet the moment.

And they were well-attended, I will give them that.

But that’s all the energy most folks have. A march here and there. A vote - which is great! - but then it’s back to work. Back to the grind. Back to making money for the man, with a soul crushing job, or two, or even three, needed to make rent, ‘the grocery,’ child care, car payments, utilities, and taxes.

To expect Americans to step up to the plate and revolt because the climate is changing is not just unreasonable: it is risible, laughable, pie-in-the-sky, capricious, silly, and elitist as hell. I know that. So I have stopped harping on it.

And anyway, it’s too late. Just ask David Suzuki, an 89 year old environmentalist and climate change campaigner who has been working on this stuff for many long decades.

There is something, however, that we might be able to get people to attend to, if we can get the message across - and that is to TRY TO SAVE THEMSELVES.

The Suzuki interview concludes like this:

For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together. Finland is offering a great example because the Finnish government has sent a letter to all of their citizens warning of future emergencies, whether they’re earthquakes, floods, droughts, or storms. They’re going to come and they’re going to be more urgent and prolonged.

Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it. Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that.

Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the routes of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.

Sure, COP 30 is happening, and the ancestors bless them if they get anything substantive done.

Elections will go on here in the US (or so we fervently hope!) and more Democrats in office will likely result in more ‘green tech’ and wind farms and EVs on the road and so forth. Europe will continue to punch above its collective weight on matters of emissions.

More people will suddenly awaken to the developing and spreading calamity as more and more climate disasters pummel more and more towns. And perhaps they’ll be motivated to take action.

But the systems in place are sclerotic, and they favor big oil and big money and big finance and short term gains over swift movement to halt the trajectory of emissions. And in the meantime, trying to tell the developing world that their citizens can’t have refrigerators and nice cars and air conditioning seems not just cruel and disgusting, but also completely unachievable.

The world will continue to ‘develop’ apace. We’re not going back to an agrarian, pre-industrial idyll. (At least… not soon, and not because we planned it.)

Emissions are going to continue to rise. I mean to say - does anyone with a single functioning brain cell think that emissions are going to go DOWN any time soon?

Hurricanes and wildfires are going to worsen in frequency and strength and the potential areas they can wipe out. Flooding - heat waves and heat domes - tornadoes - crop failure - yep. It’s all going to be as bad, or perhaps worse, than the scientists have been predicting.

So we need to get together. We need to be our own salvation. We need to ‘hunker down’ as Suzuki says, and take care of ourselves. We need to plant gardens, join car pools, form neighborhood associations, learn how to do things like fix sump pumps - and how to find local people who have complementary skills - and pull together into micro villages based on cooperation and fellowship and practical maintenance  - all in the name of survival. 

Even convincing most folks that this is necessary will be a heavy lift, I know that. But it seems a little more achievable than asking people to leave work to stand astride the barricades and revolt. That’s asking people to think… well, if not globally, then uncomfortably more than locally. And it is easier, I’ll wager, to get people to take some sort of action based on what they’ll need at the subdivision, or neighborhood, or town, or city level.

Tell me what you think, please! Is this the direction that ‘climate revolution’ must take in order to happen? Or are we too late, and too embroiled in other hateful and destructive politics, to even get folks to begin the work of shoring up their own lives, and collectively and cooperatively forming those UNITS OF SURVIVAL?