BRAZIL RUT
WHAT was finally agreed at this year’s UN Climate conference, the Brazil-hosted COP30? Er… well, at least the whole process didn’t collapse, unlike parts of the pavilion that caught fire a few days before the close.
This year’s focus was on implementing the targets taken since the 2015 Paris conference. Over the past decade, renewables and low-carbon technologies have plummeted in price, outstripped all expectations and are now taking lumps out of fossil demand, moving the needle of the coming decades from “apocalyptic” to merely “disastrous”. This year a bloc of 80 nations backed the idea of a “roadmap” – agreements to discuss how countries can get past fossil fuels. But determined opposition from Saudi Arabia, Russia and other petrostates, plus the absence of the (once reliable) US, helped defer it into the longest imaginable grass.