COP: 30 Years of Disillusionment
Why climate summits have made us weaker—and where real change is already being built
For thirty years, we’ve been told to pin our hopes on the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) — branded as “the world’s most important climate summit.” Each year brings the same spectacle: glossy banners, hollow speeches, and declarations of “historic” deals that dissolve before the ink dries. Meanwhile, the world burns on. Forests are razed for soy and cattle. Oceans choke with oil and plastic. Land defenders are murdered. Glaciers melt, fires swallow towns, and droughts uproot farmers from their lands. Each year, the world grows hotter — and our hope becomes thinner. The problem is not just that COP fails to deliver climate justice. The problem is that COP succeeds — at what it was designed to do.
Consider the stage. COP’s defenders promise a global platform to bring forward climate solutions. But whose platform is it really? Look at the sponsors. COP30 in Brazil is underwritten by Suzano, the eucalyptus giant displacing communities with GMO monocultures; Vale and Anglo American, mining corporations with rivers of blood and poisoned water behind them; Nestlé and Bayer, agribusiness behemoths accused of child labor, deforestation, and chaining farmers to chemicals; financiers like Brookfield and TPG, carving up forests into carbon markets; and Edelman, Shell and Chevron’s favorite PR machine. Previous COPs have been brought to you by Coca-Cola, Unilever, and other icons of planetary destruction.
These actors are not there to solve the crisis, but to turn planetary collapse into their next frontier of profit. Carbon markets, net-zero pledges, offsets, voluntary guidelines: these are not paths to justice. They are false pragmatisms, as Gelderloos calls them — solutions designed to prevent real change, not deliver it. The climate crisis has become an industry in itself, generating fortunes for hedge funds, carbon traders, and the celebrity class. Al Gore built a billion-dollar fund off carbon markets. Bill Gates monopolises farmland while pushing “climate-smart” technologies cooked up by the same corporations driving hunger. Jeff Bezos pledges billions in “philanthropy” while Amazon busts unions, underpays workers, and cooks warehouse floors.
Think of what thirty years of COP has consumed: the NGO budgets poured into flights, hotels, consultants, and PR campaigns; the countless hours spent drafting reports and lobbying for commas in agreements that carry no teeth; the activist energy burned in marches outside to pressure governments and states to take action.
COPs true agenda is not to facilitate the end of extraction. It is to birth its reinvention, painted green. It is a containment mechanism that takes the raw energy of outrage and feeds it into bureaucratic rituals managed by the very governments and corporations most responsible for the crisis. It offers the theatre of inclusion while scripting out any possibility of real change.
As David Graeber warned, hopelessness is not simply an emotion — it is engineered, built into vast bureaucracies designed to smother imagination itself. COP is one of those machines. It devours resources — money, time, and our sacred capacity to dream otherwise — draining what might have nourished true grassroots transformation.
And this is the deeper danger: COP doesn’t just fail to act, it prevents us from imagining something else. It tells us that salvation belongs to the very institutions that created the crisis. It keeps us fighting for scraps from the master’s table and undermines our fight for real systemic transformation. Yes, governments and corporations bear responsibility for the crisis — but liberation will never be delivered by them. Ever.
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As we wrote in Let’s Talk About Class, Not Carbon, climate change is not the fault of the masses. It is not the farmer in Malawi, the garment worker in Bangladesh, or the family heating their home in winter who drives collapse. It is the fault of capital — of the billionaire class who profit from extraction and gamble with our survival. Just 100 fossil fuel companies are responsible for over 70% of industrial emissions since 1988. The richest 1% spew more carbon than two-thirds of humanity combined. A handful of billionaires burn more carbon in an afternoon on their yachts and private jets than most families will in their entire lifetimes. The world’s five richest men doubled their fortunes in the first years of this decade while nearly five billion people grew poorer.
This is not shared sacrifice; it is class war waged against the planet. As Audre Lorde reminds us: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
COP is the master’s house.
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For thirty years, our imagination has been siphoned into bureaucracies designed to narrow the horizon of possibility. COP is only one piece of a larger machinery designed to absorb and defang resistance. The same logic runs through every institutional process that asks us to trust reform, to compromise with capital, to believe that the system that created the crisis will one day solve it. It has functioned as a pipeline of paralysis — draining our movements, exhausting our bodies, burning our capacity to imagine, and convincing us to mistake spectacle for substance, celebrities for heroes, performance for progress.
Thirty years of sustained grassroots investment could have transformed the world.
What if, instead of feeding the endless machinery of COPs, frameworks, and “multi-stakeholder” dialogues, we had poured our collective abundance into those already defending life?
What if the billions spent on negotiations, consultants, and carbon markets had gone instead to Indigenous nations protecting their forests, to peasant movements scaling agroecology, to the patient work of rebuilding soils, restoring rivers, and redistributing power—so that communities could govern the infrastructures of care, food, and energy themselves?
What if, instead of letting those machines manufacture our hopelessness, we had invested in our own capacity to dream?
Where would we be today if these thirty years had been spent resourcing life rather than managing its destruction?
WHERE REAL SOLUTIONS LIVE
Sustainability is not a technical fix. It is a byproduct of justice. It emerges when land, water, and seeds are held in common, when people have autonomy over their food systems, when the logic of extraction is broken. The crisis we face is not technical but political — a crisis of power, inequality, and capital’s grip over life. The solutions are already here; what is missing is conviction, the collective courage to demand social fixes to a social problem. Until we confront that, no amount of innovation will save us.
COPs talking points are not solutions at all. They are distractions. The real path forward has always been clear — if we dare to name it. We must tax the rich and cancel Majority World debt so countries can invest in life rather than pay tribute to colonisers. We must defund the military-industrial complex, the planet’s single largest polluter, and demand climate reparations for centuries of colonial theft and extraction. We must return land to Indigenous stewardship, put water and seeds back into the commons, and prosecute polluters for ecocide.
Real solutions mean ending fossil fuels at the source — no loopholes, no carbon offsets or “net zero” scams. They mean redirecting the billions in agricultural subsidies away from agribusiness and toward agroecology, soil health, and peasant farming. They mean workers reclaiming the means of production, climate refugees freed from cages, survival essentials decommodified, destructive industries scaled down, and GDP abandoned as a measure of worth. Above all, they mean taking back control — refusing to place our faith in summits and institutions captured by capital, and rebuilding power from below.
Our task is not to reform COP. Our task is to outgrow it — to build something that cannot be contained. To redirect our resources away from convention halls and toward struggles on the ground. To trust not in the promises of politicians but in the power of people.
And this work is already underway. In September 2025, in Kandy, Sri Lanka, at the Third Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty, leaders of movements from around the world — representing millions of peasants, fishers, Indigenous peoples, pastoralists, workers, feminists, and more — convened together to chart a path beyond the failures of capitalism and spaces like COP, and toward alternative futures rooted in justice, care, and sovereignty.
Over three decades of relentless grassroots organising, the Nyéléni process has evolved into a living political framework that refuses to stay confined to declarations or forums. Recognising the need for a global and intersectional struggle capable of confronting empire, it now binds food sovereignty with feminism, climate justice, decolonisation, health, and labour. It reminds us that sovereignty is not granted from above, but reclaimed from below, through care, and in reclaiming control over our lives, our work, and our territories.
Parallel to COP, the People’s Summit unites diverse social and environmental movements in the fight for real justice, lifting their voices as stewards of life-affirming futures. In Belém, these movements will convene to raise the alarm against the inadequacy of governments and corporations in addressing the global crisis and propose pathways for concrete climate action—from the ground up.
We do not need more pledges. We need power.
We do not need “net zero”. We need justice.
We do not need more “solutions”. We need sovereignty.
The future is already alive in the cracks of empire: in seed banks and cooperatives, in occupied lands and liberated kitchens, in Indigenous nations defending rivers and forests, in communities resisting pipelines and mines. These are not side stories — they are the beginnings of the world to come.
Another world is not only possible. It is already alive, growing, waiting for us to harvest it. Hope was never meant to live in summits. It belongs in the commons, in our movements, in the fissures of empire where life is already breaking through.
This op-ed article by Michael Mann to Bill Gates, “You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it”. What happens when tech-oligarchs believe every problem on earth needs a techno-fix?
This op-ed by GRAIN on the agribusiness co-optation of this year’s COP in Brazil. Will Belém be the stage of massive agro-greenwashing?
This article by Valerie Volcovici and Richard Valdmanis displays 30 years of climate talks in six charts. Has there been any progress at all after three decades of pledges and summits?
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One of the best articles yet on COP. Truth to power! Power to the people!
Fantastic piece - who wrote this at A Growing Culture - so well expressed, thank you!