Essay by Eric Worrall
The Brazilian climate conference leadership is fed up with trade wars and shooting wars distracting from climate negotiations.
‘Climate is our biggest war’, warns CEO of Cop30 ahead of UN summit in Brazil
Negotiators doubt countries’ financial and environmental commitment as military and trade wars divert attention
Fiona Harvey Environment editor
Sun 29 Jun 2025 14.00 AEST
“Climate is our biggest war. Climate is here for the next 100 years. We need to focus and … not allow those [other] wars to take our attention away from the bigger fight that we need to have.”
Ana Toni, the chief executive of Cop30, the UN climate summit to be held in Brazil this November, is worried. With only four months before the crucial global summit, the world’s response to the climate crisis is in limbo.
Fewer than 30 of the 200 countries that will gather in the Amazonian city of Belém have drafted plans, required by the 2015 Paris agreement, to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown.
…
Meanwhile, the US president, Donald Trump, has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and is intent on expanding fossil fuels and dismantling carbon-cutting efforts. The EU is mired in tense arguments over its plans. China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is rumoured to be considering weak targets that would condemn the world to much greater heating.
…
Toni, a respected Brazilian economist, told the Guardian: “There’s no doubt that the wars that we’ve seen – military wars and trade wars … are very damaging – physically, economically, socially – and they divert the direction and the attention from climate.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/29/climate-is-our-biggest-war-warns-ceo-of-cop30-ahead-of-un-summit-in-brazil
Are we finally coming to the end of the COP climate process?
Nations are struggling to get their homework in on time, everyone wants to see what everyone else is doing before they submit their own grudging climate plan.
China is rebelling, new coal approvals have surged.
India is powering their economic catchup with China by building more coal infrastructure.
Africa is racing up from the bottom, building enormous fossil fuel projects to leapfrog their economies into the modern world.
European nations, as usual are being utter hypocrites – pretending they care about climate change, while rushing to exploit and import as much fossil fuel as they can, to prop up their failed renewable systems. Leave it in the ground – except when a European company or nation wants it.
Even Brazil, the host of the COP30 climate conference, is getting into the climate hypocrisy act, clearing a large tract of Amazonian rainforest to create a new highway to the conference site. I wonder if conference participants will be able to purchase souvenirs made from the rare and endangered hardwoods which were bulldozed to make that climate conference road?
And towering over all this is the US led AI revolution, which is driving a profound uptick in demand for energy across the entire world – an increase in demand which cannot be answered by renewables.
The global climate movement is the walking dead, all we need is to wait a little for it to lay down and stop moving.
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