For another year, the COP (Conference of the Parties) climate summit has proven to be an exercise in the most cynical of language games. The evasive jargon of COP remains an accurate reflection of the power relations in the world’s energy market, and a testament to its universal disregard for social need, collective future, and the accelerating processes of climate collapse.
One oft-used word in Belém during COP30 was ‘multilateralism’. The organisers aimed to show that this year’s summit was different, that its very geography in the Amazon signalled a world beyond US-dominated unipolar hegemony. The US, of course, did not participate—a move aligned with Trump’s strategy both on its vulgar surface and in its imperialist core. While the world congregated in northern Brazil, the world’s top polluter was congregating its military off the coast of Venezuela. From military aggression to economic blackmail, US imperialism is expanding its global capacity in fossil fuels, energy, and critical minerals. While a consistent tendency, this drive now has the added element of intensifying inter-imperialist competition with China, an economic powerhouse that, while integrated into the world market, is not playing the same extractive game. China brought to COP30 its material results in rolling out renewable energy and a long-term strategy for its vision of an ‘ecological civilisation’ (https://socialistvoice.ie/2025/05/chinas-environment-code/).
By the standards of what COP claims to be, China is well-established as a leader. By the standards of what COP actually is—a forum for managing capitalist crisis—fossil capital remains the main shaping force. For days in Belém, international delegations debated a roadmap for the phase-out of fossil fuels, a crucial component of any meaningful vision for a future beyond total climate collapse. The end result was a predictable failure: the final declaration did not reference the roadmap, or fossil fuels at all. (This means the only mention of fossil fuels in a COP declaration remains the single reference in COP28, negotiated by Eamon Ryan: https://socialistvoice.ie/2024/01/cop28/). It is a consistent word game: fossil capital pushes the line that “fossil fuels are not the problem, emissions are,” a sleight of hand designed to keep production going and maintain its chokehold on the global economy.
COP30 concluded with a call for a “global mutirão”—a Portuguese word of Indigenous origin meaning “collective effort.” This was another nod to the attempt to present this COP as different. When President Lula first called for bringing the summit to the Amazon at COP27 in Egypt, it generated a wave of enthusiasm about tackling the climate emergency at one of its epicentres. After all was said and done in Belém, it is impossible to call it a success. The parallel ‘People’s COP’, with its focus on grassroots and indigenous organising, offered a hopeful image and a set of progressive ideas in sharp contrast to the official programme. Yet, the outcomes of the real COP remained entirely unaffected by this progressive vision.
COP is hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). When practical measures for tackling climate change are kept out of the final declaration, it is a deliberate effort to undermine the UN’s own role, however limited. Solutions are thus abandoned to individual capitalist states, competing corporations, and imperialist blocs. In Ireland, days after COP concluded, we saw the announcement of the next step in building the Shannon LNG ‘emergency reserve’ in Cahiracon, Co. Clare—a project that binds Irish energy infrastructure directly into the fossil fuel economy of the US and EU. We are being rushed into this with the bizarre, ideological threat of future wartime attacks on pipelines, a manufactured crisis to serve private profit.
The lesson is clear: the COP process is not designed to save the planet. It is designed to manage the contradictions of a system that prioritises the accumulation of capital above all else. It is a theatre where the interests of fossil capital and competing imperialist blocs are reconciled with the need to pay lip service to a crisis they are structurally incapable of solving. The future of humanity cannot be left in their hands.
