COP30 — The UN Climate Conference cannot continue to delay solutions

The COP remains one of the last functioning arenas for international dialogue, even if the United States—followed by the European Union—increasingly sidelines both the UN and international law.. This year’s COP will convene in Brazil: a setting of stark contrasts. On the one hand, Trump is preparing once again to leave the Paris Agreement, targeting the BRICS countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) as new enemies of his imperialist agenda. On the other hand, Lula intends to use the COP to force the main capitalist powers to face up to their responsibilities: funding the perifery and admitting their historic responsibility for climate change. He has invited 3,000 indigenous representatives. Parallel to the COP itself, Belém will host a “People’s Summit,” gathering more than 850 organisations, trade unions, and NGOs—mainly from Latin America—to demand climate and social justice.

Capitalism is not, nor will it be, green

The workers and the peoples are the first victims of environmental degradation and of the impacts of climate change. The exploitative, oppressive, aggressive and predatory nature of capitalism is expressed every day in the worsening living conditions of human beings, the threat of war, environmental degradation. Whether that is unaffordable energy; supermarket food prices rising and falling with global events; job insecurity; poor-quality housing unsuitable to protect working people from extreme heat or cold; or the threat of war.
 

What were exceptional events— endless heatwaves and wildfires, extreme storms and catastrophic floods, drought and spreading desertification —have become more frequent and whose impacts are heightened by the logic of territorial planning based on maximisation of profit. Desertification spreads, wildfires rage with greater frequency and ferocity. Nature is sounding alarms, mass extinctions and the loss of communities through sea-level rise are already underway. This is not due to “market failures,” a politician’s “mismanagement,” or a “corporate conspiracy.” This accelerating breakdown stems from the very nature of the current economic system: a system built on the labour of the majority, with all gains captured by a minority who dictate production and investment. To survive competition, corporations sacrifice social and ecological needs to maximise profits. Everything is expendable: workers’ wages, ecosystems, entire communities. The result appears in two contradictory tendencies. Nature is simultaneously treated as a free resource and waste deposit, while every aspect of life—including nature itself—is commodified. Environmental destruction becomes just another business opportunity. When a river is polluted, cleaning it up becomes a market niche. Far from protecting ecosystems, this logic subordinates them to profitability. The climatic changes underway as a result of carbon pollution are compounded by capitalism’s disregard for the environment generally—the accumulated results of assaults on wildlife, our waterways and seas, and the air we breathe.
 

These impacts are global but not equally borne. Multinationals and economic groups, backed by great capitalist powers, exploit less powerful countries through predation of their resources, outsourcing pollution, and dumping toxic waste. Meanwhile, propaganda casts the blame on us—as if individuals ever freely choose the transport we use, the food we can afford, the places we live or the jobs we must accept to survive. The fault lies with a system that gives us no real alternatives. Instead, the working class is made to pay for “environmental protection” through taxes on fuel and electricity, while polluting elites fly in private jets and corporations like TotalEnergies, Shell, and major banks not only abandon climate goals, but earn millions of euros with false and even counterproductive solutions like the market of carbon licenses. Communities are forced into a cruel choice: submit to polluting industries—or face unemployment and desperation.
 

Across the world the political tide moves ever further to the right and as it does, so the discourse is increasingly to deny the evidence of climate change and environmental breakdown. There are reasons for this; firstly, in order to rally working-class support against climate action by portraying climate concern as ‘woke’—an effete bourgeois concern; secondly, to divert discussion of who bears responsibility, costs, and reparations; and finally, to protect opportunities for profit.
 

Funding, War, and Betrayal

One of the key challenges in fighting climate change and its consequences is funding and international cooperation. Especially the funding of peripheral countries, which suffer the worst impacts while having contributed least to global emissions. From summit to summit, imperialist companies and governments cut, delay or water down their commitments. While the perifery demands $1.3 trillion per year in public funding, the great Western powers offer only $300 billion by 2035—largely private, uncertain funds. Yet the money “missing” for environmental protection is instantly found for war, a “first class” source for pollutants and greenhouse-effect gases. In 2024 alone, NATO countries combined military budgets soared past $1.5 trillion, the highest levels since the 1950s and ’60s. The U.S. promotes this new Cold War logic to maintain its global dominance against the countries that assert their sovereignty, right to development and own framework of international relations, pointing China’s rise as the strategic target and the European Union and the United Kingdom follow obediently. NATO members now pledge up to 5% of GDP for arms spending—an increase of over $500 billion, with another €800 billion promised by the EU. These amounts, never mobilised for social or environmental needs, are suddenly made available for war.
 

Even worse, particularly EU’s military spending overwhelmingly benefits the U.S. military‑industrial complex, which receives nearly two‑thirds of European arms purchases. Add to this European Union’s promises to keep buying expensive and polluting U.S. shale gas to satisfy Trump’s dictates —betrayals that undermine our industry, our climate and our future. This logic of confrontation, arms race and war diverts resources and destroys the international solidarity essential to tackling climate change. Scientific collaboration across the world—Chinese, American, Russian, European—made the IPCC’s climate reports possible. The COP remains one of the last remaining spaces for such cooperation. However, this fragile framework is being torn apart by U.S. disengagement and the rise of reactionary leaders such as Milei in Argentina.There is increasing entryism by the very industries—oil, big pharma, industrial agriculture, etc.—whose products continue to facilitate the world’s progress toward climate disaster. In this context, we support the People’s Summit in Belém, which gathers nearly a thousand organisations worldwide. We will also support the Indigenous peoples, invited for the first time to participate in COP negotiations by Lula himself.
 

Save Humanity and Nature, not Capital

It is tempting to blame individual leaders—to denounce their lack of scruples or their indifference to science. But the problem is not one of morality or management. The problem is the system itself. We cannot continue paying for destruction we did not cause. We cannot align with negationist narratives that protect entrenched interests. Nor can we support selfish visions that claim to preserve one nation’s environment at the expense of exploiting others. All these narratives leave untouched the foundations of our daily crises, deepening rather than resolving them.
 

When decisions are based on human needs, scientific knowledge and long‑term vision, problems are solved. When decisions are based on profit, everything else is sacrificed.  Proof lies in the colossal quantities of food wasted while millions starve—simply because entrepreneurs failed to secure the profits they demanded
 

Our Commitment
Above all, the undersigned organisations commit themselves to a new model, built on clear foundations:
   • Reorganise production to meet real human needs efficiently, promoting local production and consumption and ending strategies like planned obsolescence that artificially boost consumption.
   • Reorganise transportation, replacing individual transport by public transport, promoting the electrified railways, resorting to an integral planning, reverting the privatisations and penalising or proscribing the use of the most inefficient and pollutant means.
   • Promote measures to adapt and mitigate the unavoidable consequences of the environmental damage underway, which implies investments in scientific research, prevention of heat wave effects, prevention of pests, diseases and invading species, protection of coastal areas, protection against floods, as well as adaption of urban areas, namely by including concepts of adaptation of urban planning policies. 
   • Restore public control of energy and water, putting them to serve the populations. 
   • Repair and regenerate environmental destruction.
   • Refuse market mechanisms—namely the International Carbon Market—as a solution to fight climate change and environmental degradation.
   •Recognise the principle of common but differentiated responsibility on matters of environmental liability.
   • Refuse the logic of indebting countries under development, regarding the necessary investment to stop environmental degradation.
   • Recognise every country’s and people’s right to produce and sovereignty in essential areas, like food.
   • Redirect wasted resources (speculation, advertising, war) toward human needs.
   • Orient scientific research to serve social needs, not private profit.
   • Plan the economy to achieve these goals.
   • Coordinate internationally, based on solidarity: sharing technology and knowledge so that scientific progress is spread rapidly and fairly. 

We are all part of Nature, and it is the duty of all peoples to build this new model. Humanity is in the middle of a rapidly unfolding environmental disaster, with the systems we rely on to support our existence on this planet breaking down extremely quickly. These changes are not reversible in our lifetimes, and so our fight is not about retrieving things already lost; it is about what we, working people, can do to limit the damage and preserve our existence on the planet, within a vision of the kind of society we want. The stakes are high, and for the sake of humanity our Socialist project must succeed.
 

Conclusion
As parties rooted in the working class and population majorities, we call on all democrats, patriots, revolutionaries to organise and mobilise so that together we may build the world we need. Capitalism is not inevitable. History proves that every system eventually collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Capitalism will be no exception.