After COP30, what now?

Image by Sujalparab via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

 From East Anglia Bylines

Author Kurt Vonnegut described this as one of his shapes of story. Of Cinderella, the most popular story ever and translated into 700 languages, he said: “People love that story.”

It’s Rags to Riches. We all recognise this shape of story in our own hopes.

Now we’re all in a climate and nature hole.

The physics of heat are relentless. Rising seas, more moisture in the air, droughts then heavier rain, stronger wind and storm, melting glaciers. The cause is simple. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases capturing heat in the atmosphere. The source is clear too. It’s fossil fuels. Coal, oil, gas.

This much is known. The hole is hot and the future dark.

So it seems.

The 30^th COP (United Nations Conference of the Parties) has just concluded in the Amazonian city of Belém. COPs are good. They bring people together. They bring along activists and thinkers and academics and citizens’ groups. People meet, talk, share. Little advances happen.

But there are two problems

Groups of countries can easily be blockers. Key text disappears from the declaration as everyone tries to get to at least some kind of agreement. In the COP30 agreement, there’s no mention of fossil fuels. Blockers won.

Second, even when a declaration emerges at a time of common purpose and gentle politics, such as in Paris 2015, it still needs to be implemented.

We all hoped the Paris agreement would hold global temperatures to below +1.5°C (above pre-industrial baseline). But in ten years, carbon dioxide levels have leapt, and temperatures followed. The breaching of +1.5°C is inevitable.

And yet, COPs are wondrous

There’s common purpose. They point at the deniers and the selfish. They provide an energy to social and political change. They’re talked about.

For we have much to share. Remarkably, things are happening with renewables. They are reaching a scale where costs are falling and businesses, households and whole communities start to look daft in not adopting.

A quiz question. What links these seven countries: Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Uruguay?

It is this: their electricity supply systems are 100% renewable. A mix of wind, solar, hydro and geothermal has saved them huge sums of money by not having to purchase fossil fuels. These countries did this not by accident, but by intent. Governments chose.

Another question. When you spend capital on renewable energy infrastructure, what are the running costs of producing energy?

This is easy. It’s virtually zero. You get electricity for nothing, for 25, 30, 35 years. And there are no clean up costs. No air pollution to damage health. No greenhouse gases.

Countries are saving money; so are households

Typically, adoption follows an S-curve. For a long period, slow growth, then the exponential steep part, then a flattening. But after 80% of adoption, you don’t need to worry about the last bit. We know that systems then tip.

Life on the S-curve is something staggering, as Bill McKibben writes in his new book, “Here Comes the Sun.”

In 2004, it took the world one year to install 1GW (gigawatt) of solar generation. In 2016, it took one week; in 2023 one day; in 2024 just 18 hours.

This is happening fast.

Here’s the example of electric vehicles (EVs), as Tim Lenton shows in “Positive Tipping Points.”

In 2010, there were 3,000 EVs in the whole world. By 2022, there were 10 million; in 2024, 40 million. Doubling times for adoption are one and a half years. In four more doubling periods, a total of six years, there will be 640 million EVs worldwide. One more doubling period, and all fossil fuel vehicles will be gone. They’ll be stranded assets, along with ships burning oil to move oil, and petrol stations and domestic tankers.

In China, EV car companies are now offering 600,000-mile warranties, so confident are they in the technology. It’s going to take a lot of years for most people to drive that far.

A small change in policy can help

All countries across Europe are suffering higher gas prices since the invasion of Ukraine. Germany has just deregulated the installation of solar PV on balconies and roofs of flats. 1.5 million people have acted. Solar panels are suddenly everywhere. Their energy costs have fallen. The country is safer too. Now the same in Italy, Poland and Spain.

Solar panels are, after all, now cheaper than garden fences.

In Pakistan, national electricity demand fell by 10% last year. Households, farmers, businesses are buying cheap solar panels from China, installing them on every roof and spare patch of land. In six months last year, people installed 30% of national grid power. Diesel sales fell across the country by 30%.

The UK is good-bad

The first country to have a legally binding Climate Change Act. The first country deliberately to remove coal from all electricity generation: the last plant closed in late 2024. Yet oddly hesitating over renewables.

Let’s put this in perspective. Sizewell is the UK’s next nuclear power station. It’s going to take a long time to build; it’ll be late (they all are); we’ll pay more (we always do). And at the end, it’ll produce a meagre 3GW per year.

Don’t laugh. This is true. In Wyoming this year, legislators filed a Bill entitled “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again.”

Yet in the Dakotas, 85% of electricity is now from renewable sources. Tiny Vermont is saving $2 billion per year by not paying to import fossil fuels into the state. Some get it, some don’t.

So what’s our story now?

We’re still in a hole.

Anyone born before 1990 has lived through the good times, and then the fast slide into the hole. 1990 was the last safe year, when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at 350 ppm (parts per million). Today it’s 427, and rising. Very unsafe.

Anyone born after 2010 has only seen the bottom of the hole. They’re going to be the first generation to experience the single direction of upward movement. It’s going to feel very good indeed.

COPs are important. They stop forgetfulness.

COPS are flawed. Agreements are hard, and blockers love to do their thing.

Here we are then. In a decade when systems will flip, costs and pollution fall. When countries will find that green growth brings new jobs, better health and lower energy costs.

As Nick Stern recently wrote, “When some step back, others step forward.” The arc of history is being revealed.

We do still have choices.

Like Greta Thunberg, I think the COP process is now useless, so I disagree with the conclusions of this article.  All the same, there is lots of good news in it, so I posted it.

America sets fire to the world

 By Joel Pett

What have we achieved since the Paris agreement?

From The Climate Council

In 2015, the Paris Agreement made history. 195 countries came together at the world’s biggest summit on climate action (also known as COP21) and agreed to the world’s first binding international agreement to limit climate change and adapt to its impacts.

Importantly, countries agreed to work together 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.’

Every national government must now establish a clear plan to reach net zero emissions with regularly updated targets to cut climate pollution.

As governments converge once more at the United Nations Climate Conference, this time, COP30 in Belém, Brazil, some are asking what have we achieved to combat climate change?

The past three years have been the hottest on record, climate disasters have slammed every continent this year and climate pollution from coal, oil and gas continues to rise.

10 years after Paris, it’s worth taking stock of where we are at, how much the world has achieved, and the task ahead.

In 2023, the international community agreed to switch away from fossil fuels, finally formally acknowledging the contribution of coal, oil and gas to global warming.

This agreement was labelled the ‘beginning of the end’ for fossil fuels globally. While we still have a long way to go, the global energy mix is shifting away from coal, oil and gas:

• Global emissions are slowing: the latest data shows that we are burning more fossil fuels than ever and emissions continue to climb, but the rate of growth has dropped from 2% per year to 0.6% per year.
• The world’s biggest polluter’s emissions have peaked: China’s emissions are already peaking, five years ahead of previous projections.
• Countries are phasing out coal: this year, Ireland became the eighth country to phase out coal generation since the Paris Agreement was signed. Many more have committed to becoming coal-free over the coming years, including nearly the entire European Union.
• More countries are committing to get off coal, oil and gas: Pacific Island Nations are leading a diplomatic campaign for a global phase out of coal, oil and gas, calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, 62 countries led by the UK and Canada have pledged to phase out unabated coal generation completely through the Powering Past Coal Alliance.

The global energy transformation is gathering speed: low-emissions energy sources (including wind, solar, hydropower and nuclear) now generate more than 40% of the world’s electricity, compared to 33% in 2015.

Clean energy is smashing records:

• 2025 saw a significant milestone: in the first six months of 2025 the world generated more power from solar and wind than from coal.
• Record-breaking renewable rollout: Global renewable electricity generation is expected to nearly double by 2030 – enough new renewable generation to meet the combined power demand of China and the US.
• Solar is booming: ​​It took eight years for the world’s solar capacity to go from 100 TWh to 1,000 TWh, then just three years to double to 2,000 TWh. Solar prices have dropped 66% in the past decade, becoming the cheapest form of power in history.
• Investment in clean energy has increased 10x: Investment in clean energy has grown from around US$230 billion in 2013, to $2.2 trillion in 2025 (equivalent to AU $3.4 trillion – twice as much as global investment in coal, oil and gas).
• China: The world’s biggest polluter, China, is transforming into a clean energy juggernaut.
• Cleaning up transport: One in five cars sold worldwide is now electric, compared to just 1% in 2015.

Read more in our report Power Shift: The US, China and the Race to Net Zero

 

When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 no countries had formal net zero targets. Now,  83% of the global economy has a net zero target. Analysis shows that climate targets are becoming more robust over time, covering more sectors and gases. The majority of countries also have targets to increase renewable generation.

 

The Paris Agreement aims to reach peak global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, reaching net zero by the second half of this century. If all countries follow through on their commitments, global emissions are expected to peak by 2030. However, to limit global heating to 1.5°C without overshoot, global climate pollution needed to peak this year, at the latest, and fall by 43% on 2019 levels by 2030.
But global temperature is rising, and so are the impacts

We are already living in a hotter and more dangerous world, fuelled by climate pollution from coal, oil and gas. Today we are at 1.3°C of global warming, and the past three years have been the hottest on record.

In 2015, the world was on a catastrophic path to an average global temperature increase of 4°C by the end of this century. Now, according to the latest official data, we are tracking towards 2.3 – 2.5°C, if countries reach their targets.

This is a more dangerous future, and still falls far short of what is needed. Global warming of 1.5°C is considered the upper limit of what vulnerable communities, coral reefs, and many ecosystems can withstand. Science is clear that crossing the 1.5°C threshold increases the risk of triggering irreversible and cascading climate impacts. Transformative action, delivered urgently, is needed to limit how much and for how long we overshoot this threshold, and to bring temperatures back down to safer levels.

The only way to do so is by cutting pollution from coal, oil and gas further and faster than we are today, in all the places we can do so.

With almost half the world’s population already vulnerable to the effects of climate change, global work to adapt, build resilience and deal with loss and damage caused by climate-driven disasters is critical. The Paris Agreement set a Global Goal on Adaptation to increase countries’ efforts to prepare for and manage the impacts of climate disasters. In 2023 countries agreed to an adaptation framework, and a key focus of COP30 in Belém is to establish indicators to measure this progress.

The international community has also established a new Loss and Damage fund, and as of June this year, 27 countries had pledged more than AU$1.2 billion. This represents a small fraction of the estimated economic costs of climate change-induced loss and damage in developing countries of up to $AU800 billion in 2030, rising to up to 2.6 trillion by 2050.

So, we have achieved quite a lot, but nowhere near enough.  We need to do more, much more.

World on track for catastrophe

From The Guardian

The world is still on track for a catastrophic 2.6C increase in temperature as countries have not made sufficiently strong climate pledges, while emissions from fossil fuels have hit a record high, two major reports have found.

Despite their promises, governments’ new emission-cutting plans submitted for the Cop30 climate talks taking place in Brazil have done little to avert dangerous global heating for the fourth consecutive year, according to the Climate Action Tracker update.

The world is now anticipated to heat up by 2.6C above preindustrial times by the end of the century – the same temperature rise forecast last year.

This level of heating easily breaches the thresholds set out in the Paris climate pact, which every country agreed to, and would set the world spiralling into a catastrophic new era of extreme weather and severe hardships.

A separate report found the fossil fuel emissions driving the climate crisis will rise by about 1% this year to hit a record high, but that the rate of rise has more than halved in recent years.

The past decade has seen emissions from coal, oil and gas rise by 0.8% a year compared with 2.0% a year during the decade before. The accelerating rollout of renewable energy is now close to supplying the annual rise in the world’s demand for energy, but has yet to surpass it.

“A world at 2.6C means global disaster,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. A world this hot would probably trigger major “tipping points” that would cause the collapse of key Atlantic Ocean circulation, the loss of coral reefs, the long-term deterioration of ice sheets and the conversion of the Amazon rainforest to a savannah.

“That all means the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity,” said Hare. “This is not a good place to be. You want to stay away from that.”

The world has already heated up by about 1.3C [Actually, 1.5C] since the Industrial Revolution due to deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, a situation that has already unleashed fiercer storms, wildfires, droughts and other calamities.

Under the Paris deal, signed in 2016, countries are meant to periodically update their plans to slash emissions, with new submissions of so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) expected for this round of UN climate talks currently under way in Belém, Brazil.

But only about 100 countries have done so, with the cuts envisioned very much insufficient to address the climate crisis.

Under a scenario that considers countries’ net zero targets as well as NDCs, the outlook has slightly worsened, with global heating moving from 2.1C to 2.2C by the end of the century, according to the Climate Action Tracker, largely because of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris climate deal.

Donald Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax”, torn up climate policies at home and agitated for more oil and gas drilling in America and overseas. For the first time, the US has not sent a delegation to a Cop summit, to the relief of some delegates.

While the rate of global heating is still dangerously high, the expected levels have come down since the Paris deal, when about 3.6C of heating by 2100 was expected. This is due to an explosion in the rate of clean energy deployment and a decline in the use of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

However, an assessment released simultaneously by the Global Carbon Project (GCP) found emissions from fossil fuels are still projected to rise by about 1% in 2025.

The new analyses also show a worrying weakening of the planet’s natural carbon sinks.

The scientists said the combined effects of global heating and the felling of trees have turned tropical forests in southeast Asia and large parts of South America from overall CO2 sinks into sources of the climate-heating gas.

We face catastrophe.  Yet we do not act.