COP: 30 Years of Disillusionment

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.