COP30 is over – now what? Is inequality the problem?

Over 1600 fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP30 in Bélèm, Brazil. And predictably, the conference could not quite bring itself to state that we had to stop using unmitigated fossil fuels. Are we incapable of reaching consensus on issues that impact core sectors of the economy? Photo by UNFCCC / Kiara Worth.

I remember when Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, came out in 2014. It was an impressive book about the climate crisis, but I found her assumption that we’d not be able to deal with climate change until we had got rid of laissez faire capitalism maybe a bit over the top. In my view at that time, we should be able to regulate those industries most responsible for emissions – regulating our own behavior in the process – and bring the world back towards equilibrium without tearing down the whole structure of western civilization.

Now I am far less sure.

As I look around me, I see the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few becoming more extreme year by year. It was serious back when Thomas Piketty first documented it in his monumental 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It is far worse now. In 2025, the top 10% of Americans own nearly 75% of all the wealth in that country. While wealth has barely budged for most Americans since 1989, wealth of the top 1% has grown steadily over that time, and wealth of the top 0.1% has grown dramatically. (The World Inequality Report will tell you more than you could have imagined based on 2022 data!)

Household wealth of most Americans has scarcely grown since 1989 (50^th and 20^th percentiles in this figure and the average household – 50% of households wealthier – had just under $200,000 in wealth, including home, in 2022. Wealth of the top 1% of households has grown pretty steadily since 1989 – least wealthy of those households had $13.5 million in assets in 2022 – while the wealth of the top 0.1% of households has grown far more – to $61 million or more in 2022. Image from Oxfam.

Such extreme inequality is not unique to the USA although the US is an outlier among wealthier countries. The Gini Index describes the extent of inequality of wealth in a country and varies from 0.0 (everyone equally wealthy) to 1.0 (one individual holds all the wealth of the country). There are a few countries with higher Gini scores than the USA. However, most European countries as well as Australia and Canada have Gini scores significantly lower. These countries invest relatively more in social services and infrastructure than does the USA; and they are somewhat more egalitarian countries.

The USA is seventh in this list of selected countries ranked by their Gini scores (the analysis did not include Canada which should fall a bit below – slightly more egalitarian than – Australia). Image from Voronoi, based on data from UBS Global Wealth Report 2025.

Of course, if we switch from a national to a global frame, many individuals in so-called Western countries are members of the global 1%. (If your total wealth is more than US$942,700 you are part of this group!) On this global scale the poorest half of individuals own very little wealth at all (just 2% of all wealth on the planet) while the richest 10% own 76% of all wealth. (For comparison, the average member of that top 10% has personal wealth equivalent to US$ 771,300 in 2022 and the least wealthy member owns about US$ 146,500.)

Now, there has always been inequality in the world. But inequality today is near record highs and is slowly deepening. Never mind the societal strains that inequality can produce; the very wealthy have an undue influence on government policy simply because these people are important enough that they have to be listened to. Then too, in many cases, the super-rich are in charge; if not formally leading the government, they control what their government lackeys get to do. Money buys influence and sheer power in this world. And, to top it all off, when it comes to the climate crisis, the top 10% are personally responsible for almost 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions (2019 data in World Inequality Report), while the top 1% alone are responsible for 17%.

Now, is it any wonder that after 30 years of struggling to rein in climate change, we still see emissions climbing? People who think nothing of taking a helicopter because it will be quicker than a taxi, or of flying across the Atlantic to Paris for dinner with a friend, are going to have to make enormous changes in their lifestyles if they were to do their fair share on emission reduction.

These are the same people with large ownerships in major corporations, including corporations that exist to dig up fossil fuels and keep our economy humming while making money for their owners. They are the same people that influence government policy directly, indirectly and covertly. They are the same people that lead the big tech corporations in the quest for AI, which seems to be as much about the building of giant server farms that soak up oodles of gallons of water to keep their many advanced microchips cool while the chips gobble energy which leads to greenhouse gas emissions. Is the picture now starkly clear? (And since I mentioned AI, who decided it would be a good idea to race towards advanced general AI, regardless of the cost in money, emissions, or added existential risk? Why, those same super-rich people.)

When global policy on major questions, like whether or not to avoid warming up the planet, is in the hands of an elite few, who are relatively insulated from the possible risks, and who stand to gain personally from not worrying too much about the state of the planet, it should not be a surprise that logically sensible policy is not adopted. This unsurprising state is exactly the state we are in.

How are we doing on climate change?

The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2025 was released while COP30 was still struggling towards its minimalist conclusion. Once again, both consumption of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases reached new record highs in 2024. In contrast to last year’s Outlook, IEA now projects a slower decline in both fossil fuel use and emissions over the rest of the century, but the details of those trajectories will vary a lot depending on how decisions are made in the next few years.

Under what used to be called business as usual (continuation of all current policies), use of oil and gas will continue to grow beyond 2050 although demand for coal is fading fast. IEA projects oil consumption of 113 million barrels per day in 2050 under these assumptions and still growing. If countries adopt all their announced climate policies (what they have publicly committed to), use of oil levels off by 2030 and gas by 2035, but declines in both are quite slow to 2050, with oil use down to 97 million barrels per day by 2050.

Needless to say, neither scenario is a sufficient response to climate change. Under business as usual, global emissions of CO₂ due to use of fossil fuels (38 gigatonnes in 2024) would remain at about this level in 2050 although they will be starting to decline. Under the more optimistic scenario in which all announced policies are implemented, global emissions will start to decline in the next several years, falling to 32.5 gigatonnes in 2035 and continuing a slow decline through 2050. The increase in global mean temperature by 2100 is projected to be +2.9^oC and still rising under business as usual. With all announced policies implemented the rise is projected to be +2.5^oC by 2100 and still rising but slower than in the alternative. Clearly, there is an urgent need to do much more than has yet been promised by governments.

And so we come to Bélèm and COP30

At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, the world managed to agree to “phase down’ the use of unmitigated coal – the text had been “phase out” until a last-minute edit! (Mitigated fuel use requires capturing the greenhouse gas emissions that are the real problem.)

It took until 2023 and COP28 in Dubai for the world to explicitly mention the need to “transition away from” the use of fossil fuels in its final agreement. Now, two years later, the world is still unable to agree to anything stronger; at the last minute the text for the COP30 agreement was edited to include a reference to “the United Arab Emirates Consensus” as code for Dubai’s “transition away!” Thirty years, and we still cannot state what is obviously true – the world will not bring climate change under control until the unmitigated use of fossil fuels is stopped. The world cannot even seem to agree to halt the intentional flaring of methane at well heads and refineries.

The various reports from Bélèm have struggled to present COP30 as anything other than a failure, while the official reports waxed lyrical over the minimal progress that was made. And then, within days, the world’s attention went back to other things: war in Ukraine and Gaza, wanton blowing up of boats in the Caribbean, the ever-enlarging size of Trump’s err… ballroom, and here in Canada, yet another pipeline proposal.

When it comes to acting on global issues, such as climate change, we have only one option – consensus among the world’s sovereign nations. When there is conflict between action needed to address the issue and economic self-interest for those who are causing the problem, and especially when those causing the problem are numerous and encompassing many nations, consensus becomes a very weak tool indeed. But that is where we are with climate change.

Now, it is true that the world is moving in the right direction on climate. A warming of +2.5^oC by 2100 is definitely an improvement over the +5.0 – 6.0^oC futures that we shuddered over 20 years ago.  Market forces alone are driving us towards renewable sources of energy and the days of using fossil fuels are numbered. And the Paris Agreement has helped market forces move us. But the future we could have achieved if the world had acted more strongly and much sooner, is now lost.

We can hope that sufficient numbers of us are going to realize eventually that the much-worshipped market is quite capable of making poor decisions, and that ‘eventually’ will be quite soon. But until that awakening all we can do is hope that numbers of the super-elite, super-wealthy, super-powerful will become seriously impacted by climate change and want to take environmentally sound but economically less profitable decisions. Then there is a chance that consensus will shift suddenly – a positive tipping point – and some future COP will result in real progress. I am not holding my breath.

Natural habitat of the very wealthy – yachts at the Dubai Marina. Somewhere under all this excess is a natural shoreline. Photo by Be Ignite on Unsplash.

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