COP: 30 Years of Disillusionment
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.