The world
is fractured. The climate talks reflected that.
Delegates
from nearly 200 nations — not including the U.S. — showed they could make some
progress. But they deferred the hardest decisions.
By Zack
Colman, Karl Mathiesen, Zia Weise and Sara Schonhardt
11/22/2025
03:12 PM EST
Updated:
11/22/2025 03:31 PM EST
BELÉM,
Brazil — The U.S. snubbed the talks. Petro-states and fossil-fuel-hungry
emerging economies got most of what they wanted. And Europeans struggled to
show they were prepared to lead the effort to squelch global warming.
Two weeks
of climate negotiations hardly ended in triumph Saturday, following a U.N.
summit whose final days included a fire that interrupted discussions about how
to stop burning the planet.
But they
did end, with a deal that even critical delegates said shows that a divided,
leaderless collection of nearly 200 nations can make some progress toward the
goal of averting heat waves, deepening droughts and increasingly destructive
storms.
The
delegates shoved the hardest decisions off onto future summits, however. Those
included debates about accelerating previous pledges to switch away from fossil
fuels, and about reducing trade barriers that hinder the flow of clean energy
technologies.
The
result exposed the world as it is — haltingly and slowly tackling climate
pollution, and fragmented by rising economic nationalism and protectionism,
rather than the united, optimistic community of nations that produced the Paris
climate agreement 10 years ago.
“I would
have preferred a more ambitious agreement,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband
said in the COP30 venue in Belém, Brazil, a port city selected for the symbolic
importance of its presence in the Amazon. “But at a time of great political
challenge — when you’ve got America, for example, that has left the Paris
Agreement — I think this is a significant moment.”
French
environment minister Monique Barbut said her country is “not opposing the deal
because there’s nothing particularly bad about it. It’s a fairly bland text.
This text does not raise our overall ambition, but it does not undermine
previous progress.”
Other
leaders’ reactions were far more dour. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, for
example, expressed disappointment that the final text did not include a
proposal backed by European and Latin American countries to urge a faster shift
away from coal, oil and natural gas.
“I do not
accept that the COP30 declaration does not clearly state, as science does, that
the cause of the climate crisis is the fossil fuels used by capital,” Petro
wrote on X. “If that is not stated, everything else is hypocrisy.”
It was
all a comedown from the rapturous hopes among climate supporters that greeted
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s electoral victory in his
presidential comeback three years ago, which raised expectations that the fate
of the Earth would be an obsession for the new Brazilian government — with a
special focus on the Amazon rainforest and the Indigenous people who live in
it.
Three
years ago, delegates at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt broke out in chants
of “ole, ole, ole, ole, Lula, Lula,” when the newly victorious Brazilian leader
took the podium at the talks.
This
week, he spoke to a more muted and divided gathering.
“We must
reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Lula said Wednesday after he met with
countries to break an impasse at COP30. “If fossil fuels emit too much, we must
begin thinking about how to live without them.”
Here are
some of the most important lessons learned from 13 days in the Amazon:
The US
absence mattered
U.S.
President Donald Trump is the most obvious avatar for the geopolitical shifts
confronting the talks.
He
campaigned for the White House on a promise — mostly fulfilled — of eradicating
the Biden-era green subsidies that he blamed for rising costs. He has also used
U.S. economic might to stymie other nations’ climate plans, including
pressuring other governments to buy more American fossil fuels.
In the
face of those threats, many countries that wanted to adopt a strongly
pro-climate stance had to behave “like a silent majority,” Susana Muhamad,
Colombia’s former environmental minister, said in an interview. “And so the
U.S. is not here, but actually it is here in other ways.”
The
possibility of Trump hitting nations large and small lingered in the
background: Convening just weeks after the U.S. pressured a world maritime body
to shelve a vote on establishing a climate pollution fee on global shipping,
many worried what he might try at COP30 from afar.
Trump
also used his domestic powers to offer some COP30 counterprogramming at home,
including proposing to open wide stretches of the U.S. coastline to oil and gas
drilling. That included the coast of California, whose Democratic governor,
Gavin Newsom, stormed through the summit’s early days to send the message that
Americans are still on board with the climate cause.
Several
negotiators, including Vanuatu’s Ralph Regenvanu, said it’s better the U.S. did
not attend the talks. But the prospects of a vengeful Washington seems to have
quieted some traditionally vocal governments during the summit, said French
diplomat Laurence Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement — including
Caribbean island nations jeopardized by hurricanes that climate change is
intensifying.
The U.S.
also left a leadership void that exacerbated the challenge. Nations’ newly
submitted plans for curbing greenhouse gas emissions through 2035 lack the heft
that advocates had hoped for, and many don’t even mention efforts to wind down
fossil fuels. The math is bleak: A U.N. report that tallied up those plans
concluded that the world would certainly surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming
since preindustrial times, the Paris Agreement’s stretch goal.
“If we
had been involved as a pro-climate United States, it would not look like this
at all,” former U.S. climate negotiator Sue Biniaz said of where things stood
Friday evening.
The White
House maintained Saturday that Trump is the real world leader on energy policy,
saying in a statement that “countries are lining up to partner with the U.S.”
“The
President has set a strong example for the rest of the world by reversing
course on the Green Energy Scam and unleashing our natural resources, like
beautiful, clean coal and natural gas, to strengthen our grid stability and
lower energy costs,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said.
BRICS
ascendant and Saudis emboldened
The key
beneficiaries of the U.S. absence were a group of countries allied by their
sense that the West is fading and the 21st century is theirs for the taking.
These
“BRICS” — named after their core members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa — have differing interests, but are often united at climate talks in
their rejection of efforts by wealthy countries to get them to shift away from
fossil fuels more quickly.
Those
five countries will be responsible for 46 percent of annual global greenhouse
gas emissions in 2025, according to an EU database.
The
“U.S.-sized hole” at COP30 created a vacuum for those countries to assert their
own priorities, said Li Shuo, China Climate Hub director at the think tank Asia
Society Policy Institute. He said the U.S. under past Democratic presidents
prodded countries into setting loftier goals.
But now a
“rebalancing” of power is taking place that favors emerging economies, combined
with a focus on tangible next steps to combat climate change given challenging
domestic politics across the world, Li said.
“The
zeitgeist of global climate politics is you look across the world, most of the
countries — in particular the major emitting countries — are having a hard time
domestically, economically and also on their climate agenda,” he said.
“Countries need to deliver domestically, and there’s a big gap between those
rhetorical aspirations and what they’re doing at home.”
That
sense of ascendance was reinforced when Turkey, a major emerging economy, beat
out Australia, a country with one of the highest median incomes in the world,
to host next year’s talks.
The
BRICS’s fellowship was also on show in the final meeting of the talks when
Russia’s delegate accused Colombia of behaving like ”children who want to get
your hands on all the sweets.” That remark came after Colombian delegates
complained about Brazil’s oversight of the legal proceedings that formalized
the deal.
Without
the U.S. and aided by the Brazilian presidency, the emerging countries set up a
barrier to efforts by the Europeans to lay out concrete steps and waypoints for
the move off coal, oil and gas. On Friday, the Brazilians released a proposal
for the deal that a European negotiator summed up as “a BRICS text.”
Stopped
in the corridor, Chinese Deputy Climate Minister Li Gao expressed approval,
calling it a “delicately balanced text.” An Indian delegate shared the same
sentiment in comments from the cavernous plenary floor.
The final
deal won some minor concessions from the EU. But the deal was still shaped by
the BRICS and defended by petro-states.
People
rest as everyone waits for a deal at the COP30 U.N. Climate Summit.
People
rest as everyone waits for a deal Saturday at the COP30 climate summit in
Belém, Brazil. | Fernando Llano/AP
Leaked
notes from a closed doors meeting between ministers on Friday, seen by
POLITICO, showed how fractious the talks become.
A Saudi
delegate refused to countenance any deal that constrained the Kingdom’s control
over its own industries and resources. That infuriated the Europeans. In a
statement he later publicized, EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra
complained that this was backtracking on a 2023 agreement that explicitly
committed the world to shift away from fossil fuels. “What on Earth did we then
do two years ago?” Hoekstra asked.
“The
dissatisfaction of the Arab group and the Saudis two years ago is being played
out here, and they are trying to eviscerate” the 2023 deal, said a European
diplomat.
The EU is
weakened
Together
with the U.K., which had set one of the world’s most ambitious goals, the EU
tried to fill the void of U.S. diplomatic and economic heft to push the deal
toward a more consequential outcome.
They
forced the talks into overtime by refusing to back a deal that did not address
the need to move away from fossil fuels in some small way. Those European
countries also fought to water down the deal on funding for projects that would
help poor countries defend themselves against climate change.
But the
EU entered the talks bruised from year-long internal battles among its 27
member countries over a new climate goal for 2040.
“I don’t
see a leadership position in the EU right now. I see an EU that is
conservative,” said Muhamad, the former Colombian minister, while noting that
some countries such as the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia wanted more
aggressive climate action. “But not the EU as a bloc.”
Those
divisions carried into the talks, with two diplomats saying Poland and Italy
had initially not endorsed the “road map” for moving away from fossil fuels,
meaning the EU was unable to endorse the idea. The bloc eventually put forward
its own proposal.
“Which
road map? Where is it? Where is it?” South African delegation head Maesela
Kekana told POLITICO when asked questions about the EU-backed proposal. “You
talk too much to the rich countries.”
The talks
ultimately produced a side deal for a road map process that was not included in
the official decision. It was a consolation prize for the EU and other
countries that backed the concept, but one that reinforced the reality that the
emerging economic powers that blocked it from the final text were in the driver
seat right until the finish line.
China
profits from the status quo
A major
question facing the talks was whether China, the world’s top clean energy
producer, would try to strengthen the U.N.’s institutions and the call for more
aggressive climate action. It did not.
“Credible
climate leadership would require pushing ambition and bringing others along,”
said Kate Logan, director of China Climate Hub and climate diplomacy at the
Asia Society Policy Institute. “I hope to see that from China going forward.”
But the
status quo benefits China, which sells a bulk of the world its clean energy
materials and equipment but is also the world’s top spewer of greenhouse gases.
Its new 10-year plan for slashing carbon emissions further drew criticism from
activists and diplomats who saw it as mild.
Rather
than urge all nations into bolder stances to cut planet-cooking pollution,
China used the forum to press its own interests.
China
capped a multiyear quest to elevate a call for bringing attention to the
effects of unilateral trade measures to the official U.N. climate agenda.
China has
exported an oversupply of solar and wind equipment, batteries and electric
vehicles at sharply reduced prices, generating retaliatory tariffs from
countries that want to protect their domestic manufacturers. It has contended
this is unfair and harms global climate efforts by raising prices on the
market’s most widely available products.
China’s
trade endeavor runs counter to the political discussion in European capitals
and the U.S., which has sought to keep Chinese goods out of their markets.
Trump has attempted to do this with tariffs, while the U.S. earlier tried to
counteract Chinese imports by using the massive domestic tax breaks in former
President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Republicans obliterated in
July.
But
Beijing got rhetorical support from COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do
Lago, who heaped praise on China’s cheap tech for helping emerging economies
affordably transition to cleaner energy. Many of those countries backed China’s
trade push, and COP30 applied little pressure on China to do more on anything
else.
The Earth
keeps warming
Brazilian
officials and veterans of the climate talks saw even getting through this
conference as a victory. The goal was to preserve multilateral diplomacy even
as the chances of adhering to the 1.5-degree goal appear dead.
“Optimism
is probably not the sentiment we could have these days in the world economy, in
the world situation,” Tubiana said. “So my response is always we have to do
whatever we can because every fraction of a degree counts.”
The
verbiage shift lays it bare: Diplomats here now speak of limiting “overshoot”
of the target, which U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called a “grim
assessment.” Just four years ago at COP26 in Glasgow, it was “Keep 1.5 Alive.”
The
decision in Belém will do little to help those matters in the immediate term,
as it essentially punts anything new and tangible to future years. Even then,
the results are inconclusive.
Many
nations wanted to highlight the gap between national climate plans and the cuts
needed to stay onside of the 1.5-degree goal. They got a voluntary initiative
to track and support efforts to implement climate policies, but the deal fell
short of a more ambitious proposal that would have more closely monitored
nations’ progress in getting rid of fossil fuels.
While
poorer governments pressed for countries to triple an earlier $40 billion
commitment to provide grants and cheap finance to help them cope with a warmer
world, the text merely “calls for efforts” to do so by 2035.
Yet the
climate realities are evident and mounting in every corner of the globe.
Marshall
Islands climate envoy Tina Stege at a Tuesday press conference rattled off
recent catastrophes preceding COP30: Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 cyclone
that hit Jamaica on Oct. 28, and Typhoon Kalmaegi, which tore through Vietnam
and the Philippines earlier this month.
Those
events underscored the need to kick fossil fuels as fast as possible, she said.
“It’s
just part of a litany of disasters that has now become part of our daily news,”
Stege said.
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