For the past 30 years, the United Nations has hosted just as many climate summits. All these summits have promised to keep the planet from overheating but failed to deliver on that promise. The thirtieth summit got underway in Belem, Brazil, on November 10. It was preceded by a Leaders Summit on November 6-7, attended by heads of state and government, which marked the tenth anniversary of the historic COP21 held in Paris in 2015. More than 150 world leaders, including then-President Barak Obama, attended it. COP21 birthed the landmark Paris Climate Pact that laid out key markers, such as the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and the threshold of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, beyond which the planet was believed to tip into irreversible changes.

In contrast, the Belem summit is a way too subdued affair. Only 57 world leaders were in attendance. Of these, the best known were Britain’s prime minister, and presidents of the European Commission, France, and Germany. Last year, all but Britain’s prime minister skipped COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan because of various diplomatic spats. Also, conspicuous by his absence in Belem was President Donald Trump, whose administration has chosen to sit out the event. But there is a Democratic delegation of 100 elected officials led by the governors of California, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. The Democratic delegation at the summit shows that the United States will be eager to return to the Paris Climate Pact under a Democratic administration.

The absence of the leaders of the four largest emitters—China, the United States, India, and Russia—casts a long and dark shadow over the summit and the planet alike. They abstained from COP29 as well. Most of the attendees in Belem are from Brazil’s neighborhood. Yet leaders of major regional nations, such as Argentina, Canada, and Mexico were missing.  Mexico was no show at last year’s summit as well.

Each year, UN member-states hotly contest the hosting of climate summits as they raise their diplomatic profile on the world stage. Even the hosts whose national agenda might be 180 degrees opposite to that of a climate summit would still spend billions on hosting the event. World nations thus buy global attention at the expense of concerns for the climate. Brazil may not be an exception to this pattern. Its president, Lula stayed away from COP29 last year but happily hosted the G-20 summit exactly at the same time. Joe Biden also skipped COP29 but attended the G-20 summit.

Of all its peers, the Belem summit has grown into a gentrified event. Because of its remote geography, it has no wherewithal to house 50,000 delegates, except those with piles of cash. Because of the soaring costs of boarding and lodging in Belem, environmental groups fear that COP30 will become “the most exclusionary in history.” Brazil insisted on Belem as the host city to draw attention to the fast declining tropical rainforests, which are the world’s carbon sinks and a means to stabilize the climate. Brazil has established a $125 billion fund for the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) as its response to global climate change. The fund has thus far garnered $5.5 billion in pledges, of which $4 billion came from Norway, Brazil, and Indonesia alone. Britain chose not to fund the TFFF, and France pledged just 500 million Euros.

At COP29, world nations could raise only $720 million for the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage that is meant to compensate poor nations for climate-induced disasters, which cost $1.3 trillion a year. Similarly, COP29, which was grandly billed as the Finance COP, launched its flagship New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) to have developed countries commit a specific amount to climate finance. Yet not only did the world’s richest nations talk themselves out of this squeeze, they refused to commit $1.3 trillion a year to fund climate action. Instead, they offered a relatively paltry sum of $300 billion a year. Even that amount they agreed to help “raise” by 2035. In reality, developed countries raised a mere $26 billion in 2023, while the need for climate adaptation alone is 14 times as much.

The Belem summit continues to be shadowed by funding gaps that drive a wedge between developed and developing countries. What divides them even deeper is NDCs, i.e., committing to specific targets of emissions reduction. To escape these divisive issues, Brazil has kept the summit’s agenda simple and “agreeable,” swapping TFFF for climate finance, and protecting tropical rainforests for climate mitigation (NDCs).

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is known for plain speaking, bluntly told his fellow leaders at the climate summit in Belem on November 6, that “the consensus on climate change is gone.” He didn’t elaborate why. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres solved this puzzle by pointing out that world leaders are “captive to fossil fuel interests, rather than protecting the public interest.” Guterres is right: the Belem summit is crawling with lobbyists for fossil fuel interests, who outnumber all COP30 delegations. Even worse, national governments beholden to extractive industries spend $1 trillion a year on subsidizing fossil fuels. Environmental campaigners want fossil fuel lobbyists banned from climate summits. If Big Tobacco is not welcome at a conference on lung cancer, why do fossil fuel interests swarm climate summits?

At climate summits, the fossil fuel industry pushes back on climate mitigation, and advocates instead for “climate adaptation” that amounts to reconciling to business-as-usual. Now philanthropist Bill Gates, in his 5,000-word memo right before COP30, writes that climate change will not lead to humanity’s demise, and thus policymakers have placed “too much focus on near-term emissions goals.” Gates, wittingly or unwittingly, hands fossil fuel interests and climate denialists a sledgehammer to crush the climate movement. President Trump hailed Gates’s declaration as his personal vindication: “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.” Gates suggests adaptation as a solution, by which he means getting used to the consequences of climate change. That’s not what developing countries plead for at climate summits: compensation for loss and damage from climate disasters, and financing climate-resilient infrastructure for which an annual spending of $1.3 trillion will be needed.

Climate mitigation is far cheaper than climate adaptation. What the world needs is upgrading of NDCs and paying for climate adaptation. For the past two years, nations with the highest emissions have disregarded the UN requirement for even submitting their updated NDCs,  which is due every five years. China is the only exception, but its updated NDCs are set too low to be impactful. On the other hand, it is a fantasy to expect developed countries, hit by inflation, tariffs, and isolationism, to finance climate action with $1.3 trillion a year.

Meanwhile, people are losing faith in the UN process of COPs. Last year, at COP29, this frustration spilled out in public when the Club of Rome fired off an open letter rejecting the COP process and calling for urgent reforms. Signatories included the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and former UN Executive Secretary for Climate Change Christiana Figueres. At the Belem summit this frustration is bound to peak, and the calls for COP reforms will grow even louder.

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