Belem, the Brazilian host city for this year’s UN climate negotiations (COP30), is home to one of the world’s largest religious pilgrimages, the Cirio de Nazare. Each October, pilgrims carry a small statue of Mary and the Christ Child from Belém’s Cathedral to the statue’s home in its Basilica several miles away. Millions of people make the procession, some crawling on their knees in devotion. In a spirit of unity, many offer water and encouragement to fellow pilgrims. I held the famous statue late one evening at COP30, when dozens of people were still lined up inside the beautifully lit Basilica. Like sacred objects held lovingly by millions of people, it had a quiet shine.
By contrast, the planet – the ultimate icon of our unity – is showing the signs not of reverence but of the destructive impacts of climate change. Last year, the world’s temperature rise surpassed the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit. What this means is now clearer than ever. Extreme climate events – droughts, floods, fires and heatwaves – are growing in number and severity. More intense droughts are putting 2 billion people who live in water-stressed cities at risk of Day Zero, the term experts use to describe when there is no water left to drink in a major city. Tropical coral reefs, the livelihood for 200 million people, are becoming extinct because warming oceans are their death sentence. Tipping points are at hand for the systems that keep the Earth habitable – the majestic Amazon rainforest, the great Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. For all life on earth, climate change has morphed from future possibility to present danger.
COP30 closed with a customary statement dressed up as ongoing progress and evidence of multilateralism’s perseverance. But, as has now been the case every year since Paris, the negotiations fell massively short of what is needed. They failed to secure a commitment to phase out fossil fuels, COP’s single most important priority, with Saudi Arabia and Arab states, encouraged by the Trump administration, defiantly blocking the only thing that will prevent an ecological and civilizational meltdown. European and other rich nations once again delayed committing actual funds, not loans with crippling interest rates, to enable vulnerable countries to transition to renewable energy and adapt to a crisis they did not create.
In the past, COP’s failures have been met with frustration along with some understanding – after all, it’s not an easy thing to solve such a huge problem. But the time for patience has come and gone. Important progress at the margins, part of every COP, should not obscure the ugly truth that a select number of nations, drunk and dependent on oil and gas profits, are unwilling to put humanity’s future ahead of their own profits. It’s time to say loudly and clearly that the COP process, which requires a unanimous consensus, is failing badly. COP hosts who care about the climate, as this year’s host country Brazil certainly does, need to recognize that crashing and burning loudly and publicly is far more helpful than “succeeding” with such a whimper.
The history of the climate movement is defined by these death and resurrection dynamics. The failure of Copenhagen’s 2009 COP failure birthed the fossil fuel divestment movement in 2011 and the subsequent massive People’s Climate Marches, which created cultural pressure leading to the Paris Agreement. In the US the Green New Deal campaign, which led to the massive 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, actually began during Donald Trump’s first calamitous term in 2018, with youth activists blockading Minority Leader Pelosi’s office to show how serious they were about climate change. The common denominator is that these transformative efforts grew out of gut-wrenching defeat, which in turn evoked deeper moral energy. That’s why COP happy talk needs to stop. Desperation at failure, utterly appropriate at this moment, is the precondition of rebirth.
Two new opportunities are emerging, born from the anger and fear at the COP’s failure, to build power around the two essential dimensions of the crisis. The first is the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which emerged in the Pacific and was modeled after the international agreement that ended the insanity of the nuclear arms race. It calls for an immediate stop to new fossil fuel development, an equitable phaseout of existing production, and a well-funded just energy transition that protects affected workers and communities.
Thousands of religious leaders – including the Dalai Lama and high-level Catholic and Protestant leaders – have endorsed it, as have over 100 Nobel Laureates, over 100 cities including London, Paris, Rome, Los Angeles, Kolkata, Lima, Sydney, and 850 elected officials from 85 countries.
In the past few years, 19 countries have also called for such a treaty, including 11 Pacific Island nations, two Caribbean countries, Pakistan (the world’s fifth most populous country) and Colombia, the world’s sixth largest coal producer. Colombia has announced its First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels this coming April. Religious communities must offer moral witness to this meeting’s importance.
On the issue of finance, there is growing momentum behind campaigns to Make Polluters Pay, with activists in the UK, US and internationally exploring legislative and legal mechanisms to force the fossil fuel industry to compensate affected communities for their climate damages they’ve caused. An emerging corollary – Stop Paying Polluters – aims to end the morally indefensible $3 million per minute in subsidies that the fossil fuel industry receives. At a time of soaring income inequality and governments slashing social safety nets, these efforts represent an ethical and politically savvy approach. Getting global north governments to fork over climate loss and damage funds to developing countries, always a tough sell, has gotten far harder in today’s context. But requiring fossil fuel companies to pay their ill-gotten gains to climate-ravaged, energy-poor countries and regions? What’s not right about that?
The world’s major oil and gas producers are not going to wake up tomorrow and trade extraction for the devotion shown by the pilgrims of the Círio de Nazaré. In this moment of danger and possibility, our strongest hope lies in mass-scale desperation that generates scaled-up campaigns capable of exerting unignorable moral pressure.
So over the holidays, if the conversation turns to climate change, tell your friends and family that the UN process is failing, and that we’re facing a life-and-death challenge,
Then get to work.