If anyone expected that the air of the Amazon would awaken the ecological sensitivity of world leaders, COP30 was an ice-cold bath of reality, ending with a diluted agreement that exposes the discredit into which these climate summits have fallen. What should be a global forum for urgent action has turned into a stage for diplomatic hypocrisy, where no one ignores that a significant part of countries are not there to save the climate, but to protect economic interests and competitive advantages.
However, science has stopped using euphemisms: the 1.5 ºC target set in the Paris Agreement ten years ago is no longer viable. Many researchers admit that up to 2.5 ºC of warming compared to pre-industrial values will be at risk if nothing changes.
We know what that means. We have seen it every year, with an exponential increase in droughts, floods, fires and heat waves, which now affect millions of people. But not only. As scientists warn, exceeding 1.5º C will bring us closer to breaking points in major regulatory systems on Earth, such as the Amazon where this COP 30 took place. And we’re not talking about a distant future.
The truth is that climate has become one of the main victims of diplomacy bully North American in international relations, thrown into the “woke” hat agitated like a demon by Trumpism. And this has given new support to those who have always sought to halt progress at climate summits. As reflected in the final text of this COP30, a protocol agreement at the 25th hour to save photography, with a lot of diplomatic cosmetics, but which will not lead anyone to leave Belém do Pará truly excited about a glimpse of progress.
While these summits fail, other actors are discreetly advancing on parallel paths, as revealed this week by a report on the Politico website about a geoengineering project by an Israeli-American startup, Stardust Solutions, with several million raised from Silicon Valley financiers and lobbying active in the US Congress.
And what does Stardust Solutions propose to do? Something simultaneously as simple and as complex as scattering particles in the stratosphere to reflect a fraction of sunlight and artificially lower global temperatures. In other words, an “emergency cooling” that long diplomatic efforts at negotiating summits seem incapable of guaranteeing.
Tempting shortcuts for powers little committed to climate action. Instead of reducing emissions, they invest in technologies that allow them to control the planet’s thermostat and gain a strategic advantage in an increasingly unstable world.
The risk is evident: transforming the climate crisis into a new field of strategic dispute, where only a few have access to solutions, assuming themselves as climate guardians. Climate action may well have already ceased to be an act of cooperation and become a new cold war mechanism.