The COP30 Summit in Brazil ended again with disappointment, polarisation, and a race to minimum environmental reforms.
Disagreements over reducing fossil fuels, cutting CO2 emissions faster and financing it from the Global North exposed the impossibility of reaching a consensus among rich and poor countries with hugely divergent socioeconomic needs.
COP30 is the latest annual test of global resolve to mitigate the impact of global warming and climate change but the final deal had no binding commitment to cutting fossil fuels and omitted a range of options that had been included in earlier versions.
So even without the input of Donald Trump, big business and money-grubbing financiers, the rest of the world represented at COP30 failed to agree on meaningful environmental reforms.
The Global North is not to blame. The EU was pushing hard to cut fossil fuels but left to their own devices the Global South pushed back, exposing the reality that economic growth and development is much more urgent and important to billions of people than environmental conservation.
This is a combination of economic, business, and political realities that are now glaringly obvious and increasingly accepted in rational discussions of the urgent challenges facing the world.
One basic reality is that global demand for energy, surging due to data centres and AI, cannot be met by renewable, low-carbon or zero-carbon technologies unless, perhaps, hydrocarbon electricity generation is replaced by nuclear energy.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects worldwide data centre electricity use to explode to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), equivalent to five times the annual energy consumption of Malaysia.
Electric vehicles and other green technologies reliant on existing battery technologies simply cannot replace reliable internal combustion engine (ICE) technologies in sufficient numbers. Reducing emissions from cleaner petrol and diesel engines is the only viable alternative.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecast electric vehicles (EVs) will make up 34% of the light-duty vehicle fleet in OECD countries and 28% in non-OECD countries by 2050 on the most optimistic outlook, leaving two-thirds of vehicles in the ICE camp.
“Green growth” will crush economic development, crashing living standards for hundreds of millions of people in developed economies and denying billions of people in developing economies the chance of higher incomes and the opportunities available to the Global North.
Businesses adopt sustainability programmes for two main reasons, either they see cost advantages or risk and regulation reduction in green technologies, or they see green virtue signalling as a cheap and effective way of hitting KPIs.
There is very little evidence to show that business performance improves for other environmental related reasons.
Much of the research on adoption of green virtue programmes shows that women in senior leadership roles are more likely to focus on this easy soft-skill route and avoid the harder management focus of men on efficiency and profitability.
Even in politics the green veil has slipped. For example, the Green Party in the UK, which now regularly polls second to the anti-immigration Reform UK, is running on a platform to leave Nato, tax the rich and open the doors to millions of migrants. This is not an environmental agenda; it is an anti-growth, anti-rich, anti-development political agenda.
Against this background leading figures such as Bill Gates and Tony Blair are advocating a rethink on net-zero policies, major companies are abandoning or toning-down environmental pledges and the only people continuing to resist a re-evaluation are the activists and event managers making millions from international conferences like COP30.
The reality is that we are all aware of environmental challenges, we get the message, but we are not buying it anymore.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.