The great COP out? | The Express Tribune

PUBLISHED
October 12, 2025

KARACHI:

The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) is scheduled to take place in Belém, Brazil, on November 10, 2025. But can we expect this one to be any different from the previous 29?

The COP is an annual event organised by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where representatives from UN member states gather to address the greatest existential threat facing humanity. Yet, after nearly three decades, many experts argue that the conferences have yielded little meaningful progress.

One such voice is Dr. Peter Carter, who practiced medicine for 40 years in England and Canada and has extensive experience in environmental health policy. For over 30 years, he has served as an Expert Reviewer with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body established in 1988 to assess climate science and guide the COP process.

The IPCC famously declared a “code red for humanity” a few years ago, a warning that, like many before it, went largely unheeded. Dr. Carter has long advocated for nonviolent protest to build political will for climate action and has worked to make complex scientific information accessible to the public and activists alike.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — that’s actually where most of my work comes in — is the authoritative body on climate science,” Dr. Carter explained. “The IPCC started around 1990 or 1991, about the same time the Climate Change Convention was agreed upon. Its role is supposed to be to inform the negotiations. But it ends up falling short of that, because every conference — and these are huge events, with 30,000 people or more, including heads of state — runs into the same problem. There’s a barrier.”

Dr. Carter says he “learned the hard way” that these processes are set up to fail. “I learned this the hard way from doing legal interventions on climate change and environmental health. At the end of the day, in all of our processes, governments make their decisions based on economics.”

The barrier, he explains, lies in the overbearing role of governments and politicians, rather than scientific experts.

“Now, the economics is perverse. Our economic system is set up to fail nature, the natural world, and future generations. It’s absolutely awful, but it’s also cast in stone,” he says.

According to Dr. Carter, meetings between heads of state during these conferences “do not have any observers.” That, he says, raises a troubling question: how can we know whether these closed-door meetings are genuine efforts to address the crisis or just another exercise in political performance?

Since the first COP was held in 1995, global carbon emissions have doubled. Despite the annual declarations of commitment, anything agreed upon at COP conferences is not legally binding. The outcomes, at best, serve as statements of intent rather than instruments of enforceable, tangible change.

“As I remember,” Dr. Carter recalls, “some of the South American representatives said, ‘We’re really shocked, because this is supposed to be a climate change negotiation, but it’s really an economic negotiation.’”

So, is COP merely a spectacle? An illusion of democratic decision-making? NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus thinks so.

Dr. Kalmus, a data scientist focused on Earth sciences, grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of political will to act on scientific recommendations. His disillusionment drove him from research labs to the streets, following a long American tradition of civil resistance that stretches back to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond.

Kalmus has been arrested multiple times for nonviolent protest; outside Chase Bank, at international airports, and during demonstrations organised under the banner of Scientists Rebellion. The movement, which he helped lead, saw more than 1,000 climate scientists arrested in the United States in 2022 for acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

His actions even drew the attention of former US Vice President and climate advocate Al Gore, who reportedly remarked at a “climate dinner” in Vancouver during the TED conference: “Scientists are gluing themselves to the doors of banks!”

It’s easy to see why Kalmus evokes comparisons to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look Up! — a scientist desperately trying to warn the world of an incoming asteroid that will end civilisation. The uncomfortable truth is that our reality isn’t far removed from the film’s apocalyptic satire.

Dr. Kalmus has often expressed his frustration with the anti-science and increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration, and with what he sees as the general detachment of America’s political elite from the realities of the climate crisis. As one of the world’s highest-emitting nations, what happens within the United States in its civic life, media, and politics has global implications.

“Here in the US, there hasn’t been any reporting on what’s been going on in Pakistan,” Kalmus says, referring to the devastating monsoon floods that killed thousands across Pakistan and India. The fact that such a catastrophic event went largely underreported, he suggests, reveals how chaotic and insular America’s political discourse has become.

When asked about the sense of urgency around the climate crisis in the United States, Kalmus sounds resigned. “It’s very, very rare for a politician here in the US to truly have the interests of the people at heart. The vast majority of them, even the so-called liberals, are primarily interested in their careers, their creature comforts, and, frankly, their insider trading.”

Given that the United States and China are the two largest carbon emitters in the world, the state of political will within these countries carries enormous weight for the planet’s future.

According to Dr. Kalmus, part of the reason for America’s paralysis on climate action lies in its legal and political framework. In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that since corporations are considered “legal persons,” any money they contribute to political parties or candidates for campaign financing is protected as free speech.

The result, Kalmus argues, is a system that effectively legalises bribery. “Billionaire class, corporate executives, corporations … it’s just legal bribery,” he says. “They give these huge donations, which allow corrupt liberals and conservatives alike to continue their political careers. They’re deeply invested in maintaining the status quo — this cushy system. I think they’re super out of touch. And either they’re not very aware of how that system works, or they just don’t care. It basically exists by crushing the bodies and dreams of working people.”

No hope from the Centre or Left

Dr. Kalmus believes that even traditional centre and centre-left leaders, such as former US President Barack Obama, share responsibility for the rising emissions that have fuelled deadly climate events, including the catastrophic monsoons in South Asia.

“He spoke at some dinner … I don’t know, I think there were a lot of oil executives there … and he said, ‘The United States is at record highs in oil and gas production. That was me, people. You have me to thank for increasing production of oil and gas,’” Kalmus recalls. “He was always far more proud of that than he ever was about doing anything for the climate. Which isn’t surprising because how much did he really do? I’d argue zero, or less than zero, because he was so instrumental in increasing oil and gas production, as he bragged about after his presidency. So yeah, he never shared our agenda on climate. President Biden, I think, is the same way. I don’t think he cares.”

In an interview a few years ago, Obama made what many critics saw as a tone-deaf remark about climate change. Speaking with comedian Hasan Minhaj, he acknowledged the crisis but struck an oddly casual note of optimism: if humanity fails to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming, he suggested, we could still aim for 2 degrees, and if not 2, then 3.

Dr. Kalmus was not impressed. “You know, when Barack Obama says there’s always 2 degrees, there’s always 3 degrees, that’s the statement of someone who doesn’t understand what those numbers actually mean,” he says. “We’re talking about devastating heat waves, massive crop failures, and waves of climate migrants forced to move because they don’t have food … just huge numbers of people arriving at borders. And the geopolitical consequences of that will be enormous. So that’s a deeply, deeply ignorant statement by Barack Obama.”

It’s not all on politicians, though. Dr. Kalmus believes the problem is rooted in a collective misunderstanding of what it means to be human.

“There’s this false sense that we’re not even animals,” he says. “That there are animals, and then there are humans, and somehow there’s this really strong line between us. Which is completely untrue. We’re literally animals. But most people walking around don’t think of themselves that way. We’re just as dependent on water, food, air, and temperatures our bodies can survive in as any other animal.”

To those immersed in the biological sciences, this may sound obvious. But in much of the world, including places like Pakistan, the idea that humans are animals can seem absurd, even offensive. That disconnect, Kalmus suggests, allows us to continue exploiting the natural world for short-term gain, blind to our interdependence with it.

Kalmus recalls a revealing encounter during Climate Week in New York, a weeklong series of global panels and events devoted to climate policy. “I met John Kerry a year ago,” he says. Kerry, the former US Secretary of State and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, was preparing to leave the event when Kalmus approached him.

“I said, ‘Hey, Mr. Kerry, I’d like to ask you a quick question. The UN climate conferences have been completely infiltrated by the fossil fuel industry. You’re in a position to exclude them, and yet their delegation is larger than that of any single nation. How can we make progress when they’re calling the shots at these meetings … when they’re literally the cause of global heating? There’s a massive conflict of interest here. One so big you could lose an entire planet in it.’”

Kalmus says Kerry’s reaction stunned him. “He got super angry. I was really taken aback. He looked at me and said, ‘What are you talking about? We got more out of the fossil fuel industry this last time than we ever had before!’ Then he turned in a huff and walked away. I didn’t quite know what to make of that.”

Kalmus suggests, that exchange captures the essence of the crisis: people who claim to care about the climate and who helped broker landmark agreements like the Paris Accord remain defenders of a system fundamentally incapable of living in harmony with the planet’s life-support systems.

Without profound legislative, and perhaps even constitutional, changes in the world’s most powerful and highest-emitting nations, meaningful progress seems impossible.

Ahead of COP30, China has made global headlines by pledging to reduce its carbon emissions by 7–10% by 2035. The United States, meanwhile, under its current administration, continues to double down on fossil fuel expansion, even as renewables outcompete oil and gas in an economy that can no longer pretend fossil fuels are the future.

If the United States is to live up to its claim of being the leader of the free world, it must ensure that future generations inherit the conditions necessary to live and prosper with dignity. Yet the current trajectory suggests otherwise: those to come will face a harsher, more unstable world than the generations of the mid to late 1900s and early 2000s ever imagined.

In a world warmed by two degrees, vast regions of South Asia, including much of India and Pakistan, may no longer be able to grow food. North America and Europe, meanwhile, will confront waves of climate refugees fleeing hunger and unlivable heat.

China’s recent pledge to cut carbon emissions by 7–10% within the next decade only sharpens the contrast. It exposes the uncomfortable truth that authoritarian systems, for all their faults, appear more capable of decisive action than the self-proclaimed “leader of democracies.” If the United States aspires to moral leadership, it must begin by leading on climate.

As global authoritarianism rises alongside global temperatures, will the so-called ‘free world’ fight to preserve both freedom and prosperity or sacrifice them at the altar of a dying planet and a fading world order?

Zain Haq is a freelance contributor

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