COP 30 - Climate Chump Change

The West Whines, China Climbs

The largest solar installation on earth – Huanghe Hydropower Development has connected a 2.2 GW solar plant to the grid in the desert in China’s remote Qinghai province.

The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly known as COP30,will be held in Belém, Brazil, from November 10 to 21, 2025.

The BBC reported that the summit has been used as a justification to build a new highway cutting through the Amazon rain forest. The COP30's organizers and the state of Pará have denied any direct links.

Any further questions?

Oh, yes. President Trump has closed the USA office of climate diplomacy.

According to a ten-year summary of UNEP Emission Gap reports, we are on track to maintain a “business as usual” trajectory. The last four years were the four hottest on record.

André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat who will direct Cop30, told The Guardian

“There is a new kind of opposition to climate action. We are facing a discredit of climate policies. I don’t think we are facing climate denial,” he said, referring to the increasingly desperate attempts to pretend there is no consensus on climate science that have plagued climate action for the past 30 years. “It’s not a scientific denial, it’s an economic denial.”

He went on to describe a concerted attack on the idea that the economy can be reorganised to fight the crisis.

“It is not possible to have [scientific] denialism at this stage, after everything that has happened in recent years. So there is a migration from scientific denial to a denial that economic measures against climate change can be good for the economy and for people. Because we have now enough science, enough demonstration of how climate change can affect people’s lives. Now we need answers [in the form of policy measures]. We need economists to rally.”

Over the past two decades, economists have begun to take on the challenge of the climate crisis, after the 2006 landmark review by Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank, which found it would be cheaper to tackle emissions than to allow them to run unchecked. That contradicted the conclusions of some previous economists, who had claimed it was not worth trying to move away from fossil fuels, or it would be too expensive.

“Climate has not been incorporated into economic theory in a satisfactory way yet,” he said. “Because it’s a very disturbing element.”

You will be surprised, I am sure, to learn that according to researchers at University of California, Berkeley, and University College London, central bank policy on climate topics is closely correlated with and influenced by — national politics. In fact, national politics weigh more heavily than science and financial data, they found.

“We find limited evidence that climate-related economic risks are associated with central bank behavior,” Esther Shears, deputy chief economist at the State of California’s Division of Petroleum Market Oversight, said in an interview.

Shears, who co-authored the study on central bank approaches to climate risk management while a doctoral student at Berkeley, said she found that instead of considering risks such as assets losing their value in a world fundamentally altered by global warming, central bankers are more likely to focus on themes that “are significantly associated with domestic climate politics.”

Trump will not attend the talks and has withdrawn from the Paris agreement, and his actions have emboldened countries that wish to derail progress. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela and a host of other countries, including petrostates and populist-leaning governments, are all possible mischief-makers.

Each country is supposed to prepare a document setting out targets on greenhouse gas emissions to 2035 and sometimes beyond, and policies intended to meet them. But so far only a handful of countries – not including the EU, China, Japan or India – have submitted theirs, even though the deadline passed in February.

On the other hand, there is significant progress to report.

In Australia, we see a significant increase in wind, solar, and battery home and utility capacity.

China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.

China is home to almost two-thirds of world's utility-scale solar and wind power in construction.

An earlier Chinese solar installation.

President Xí Jìnpíng has pledged to the United Nations General Assembly that China is committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.

So while the rest of the nations whine that they can’t afford to address climate change, China makes chumps out of them all.

Chump change.