Last week, COP30 wrapped up.
COP is the acronym for Conference of Parties, which is the decision-making body for a United Nations Conference group like the Convention on Biological Diversity, or in the case of the climate, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
COP30 was, of course, the 30th in a series of these annual meetings. The first UNFCCC COP took place in Berlin, Germany, from March 28 to April 7, 1995.
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Let the record show that in 1995, the average annual atmospheric CO2 concentration was 361ppm.
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In 2024, the last year for which we have a complete data set, the average annual atmospheric CO2 concentration was 424.61, a new record. (The 2025 annual average is predicted to be 426.6ppm, plus or minus .06ppm.)
So, after 30 years of annual confabs about the climate, CO2 emissions continue to rise. And CO2 emissions, which are primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, are the main driver of climate change.
This isn’t to say that NOTHING happened at COP30. For one thing, 8 miles of road were bulldozed through the Amazon rain forest in order to facilitate traffic to the meeting site. So that seems terrible, no?
And other things happened. Plenty of meetings took place. Very important people got up and jabbered for the cameras. Side deals were struck. Flesh was pressed and hands were clasped. Oil lobbyists oozed around and glad handed and bribed and hustled, doing their slimy thing. The catering was probably fabulous.
There were some logistics hassles, it seems, causing conferees to take to Twitter and other socials post-COP30 to bellyache and whine.
But fossil fuels? Fossil fuels were not mentioned in the final document produced by the conference (the specific language regarding a “transition away from fossil fuels” that was agreed upon at COP28 was omitted from the main decision text, known as the “Mutirão” decision) and so from the standpoint of anyone who has been paying attention to the progress, or lack thereof, that’s been made since 1995, the outcome was pretty piss poor.
I was of course, spun up about this, and I took to Substack and wrote a brief and heartfelt - but rather unhelpful - post about how let down I felt. I’ll venture to say that the entire “climate change community” felt let down by this COP.
To be honest, I don’t think anyone really had very high hopes. I follow lots of people on this and other platforms who communicate brilliantly about the climate, who care passionately, who do the work and show up to protests and call their legislators and bother their friends and carry signs and do all of the activism… and I can’t think of one who really got their hopes raised that COP30 would be “the one that got things done.”
Hopes were not high, is what I’m saying, and those low low low LOW expectations were largely met.
We did not get an agreement that will bind industrialized high-carbon-emitting nations to any kind of legal framework that requires them to do anything. And emissions keep going up. This is such a terribly bad thing that I’m finding it difficult to wrap my words around it.
The climate is not something that the average human should have to get worked up about. What we know about climate change is based on fairly standard consensus science. We’re not talking about weird, alien, trippy edgelord theories or abstruse mathematics that nobody understands, and we are certainly not talking about something that is happening in some invisible realm over the horizon where no one can see while the threat is gathering.
We’re talking about science that most of us can at least understand on the third grade level - everybody’s heard of a greenhouse, right? - and we’re also talking about effects that are right in front of our eyes every single day.
Recent flooding in Thailand has been horrifying. Per Rueters:
The death toll in Thailand from flooding in the country’s south is 33, a senior government official said on Wednesday.
The causes of death included landslides and electrocution, government spokesperson Siripong Angkasakulkiat said.
And we have mega hurricanes. And massive destructive wildfires. And heat waves and heat domes and coastal erosion as sea levels rise, and on and on and on and on. What’s happening is obvious.
What seems also to be obvious is that our government should be dealing with it. And they shouldn’t need any prompting or special pleading from us.
Let me tell you a boring little story. For the last 25 years of my career I worked for the University of Washington, in their healthcare system (UW Medicine) - mostly at one of the system’s hospitals, called Harborview.
Harborview Hospital is an amazing place to work. It’s run by UW Medicine and King County (local government!) and is “mission driven,” meaning that it primarily provides services to under-served communities throughout the Puget Sound region. (It’s also the Level 1 Trauma Center for Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, and Idaho.
Harborview serves the LGBT community, provides care to the unhoused community and underinsured people, as well as patients with no insurance, and provides healthcare for incarcerated inmates in the King County prison system. Rock up at Harborview with a scary lump or a searing pain in your chest or a crushing feeling of doom, and they will take care of you - regardless of your ability to pay. I don’t believe in angels, but DANG if the mission didn’t feel angelic.
Despite being a relatively low level functionary, I felt that my work at Harborview made a real difference to our community.
Harborview Hospital
What does that have to do with climate change? Absolutely nothing. But hear me out.
One of the things that government pays attention to is earthquakes. Local and regional governments in areas prone to earthquakes (like King County) make it their business to address the issue: they try to predict upcoming seismic activity, change laws to ensure citizen safety through hardening of infrastructure and enhanced emergency protocols, and the like.
Yes, there is confident theorizing that earthquakes in some locations can be linked to climate change. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the everyday knowledge that when you live in, say, the Puget Sound, there are gonna be earthquakes.
Fairly basic earth science shows us that there are rifts and fissures and cracks in the crust of the Earth. The Puget Sound is over a subduction zone. There are fault lines that constantly jostle and push, creating a background hum of tiny little earthquakes, with larger and more dangerous earthquakes happening frequently enough that the government has taken upon itself to make seismic strengthening of buildings in the area a priority. This includes proactive work, like rigid seismic standards for new construction, and reactive work, which includes bringing existing structures up to current code.
This is just how business is done - a basic tenet of how government operates. It undergirds what most people understand about how their government will take care of them. There are no large marches on City Hall in Seattle, that I have ever seen, demanding action on the Tacoma fault line! People do not in general have to dress up nicely and go to the King County council meeting on a Thursday night and loudly demand that the county bring old infrastructure up to modern seismic standards. They just don’t.
And they don’t because they don’t have to. The government already knows that this is part of their remit. Yes, your vote does sway who is elected in any election cycle, which does affect what laws are enacted and where governments place emphasis, but in general, the undergirding assumption is that your local and regional government will take care of you. In earthquake zones, this includes commissioning studies to see what’s going on seismically in the area, determining where it’s safe and or not safe to build, drafting legislation, promulgating regulations to ensure that new development is done in a seismically stable way, and requiring that old buildings be brought up to snuff or be demolished.
At Harborview, the main hospital and a nurse’s dormitory were both built in the middle of the 1930s. They’re beautiful Art Deco-inspired structures with very simple modern lines and lovely architectural details. In the early 2000s, neither was seismically sound. Had there been another earthquake even just a little stronger than the 6.8 magnitude 2001 Nisqually quake, the buildings would’ve either shed their exterior cladding to the detriment of anyone standing in the street below or potentially even collapsed. They were that rickety.
As part of Harborview‘s master plan - a government document - seismic retrofitting was called for to both of these buildings. At the time I was a low-level drudge with a rare talent for taking real time, highly accurate notes at meetings that dealt with high level finance and project management. (No, this is really not a talent for which I wanted to be recognized.)
Despite my desire to stay at my desk building the website or writing the newsletter, I ended up sitting in on every monthly meeting of all the relevant high-level committees that dealt with Harborview’s seismic project. I transcribed, in cramped longhand, the proceedings of meetings with the CEO, CFO, board of directors, architect, civil engineers, representatives from King County council and representatives from the state and from the university upper campus. It was tedious, yes, but it was fascinating, and I learned a lot. A lot.
One of the things that I learned was this sort of just happened. I mean, it didn’t just happen, obviously, but to the extent that anyone walking around outside in the street was thinking about what was going on around them, what they weren’t thinking was, “gee! I hope that Harborview Hall and Harborview Hospital get retrofitted to withstand the next earthquake so that if I am in the hospital or walking down the street outside the hospital when it happens I will not be conked on the bean with a falling brick and die!”
The average Jo didn’t know anything about the master plan or the budget or the Board of Regents or all of the work we were doing on the project or any of that… they just expected that buildings in Seattle would be safe(r) in case of another big quake.
All of the work happened because government institutions did the research, figured out what had to be done, and made it so - without anybody having to march on City Hall or sit in at the King County Council building or storm the barricades at Harborview hospital and demand to be let into the CFO‘s office so that they could convince her to take action.
All of the work happened because government institutions DID THEIR FUCKING JOB.
That’s just part of responsible government. That’s part of what makes it worthwhile in a democracy to decide: we’re going to all vote on government officials, legislators, who approach the world in a systematic and rational way and do what needs to be done to look out for their citizens, without necessarily being specially asked. That is part of how it should work. That is part of how we mostly expect it to work
Even people on the conservative Republican side of the aisle have a lot of expectations for their government. They often don’t recognize - or admit - that they do, but they do. They expect that there will be roads to drive on. They expect that there will be running water in their kitchen sink. They expect that there will be a telecommunications system and sewers and schools. People may individually decide to vote against the millage one year in their tiny town if they think that since their kids are already grown they shouldn’t have to spend any more money, but for the most part people pay their taxes and expect the government to do what needs to be done to keep the lights on and the water running, the kids at least minimally educated, the safety net programs that they need funded, and the wheels from falling off the whole rattletrap contraption that is modern civilization.
Even more to the point, people - even Republicans - expect help when disaster strikes.
They expect the government to step in when a hurricane has barreled through their community, taken out all the power, flooded the downtown, ripped up gas stations and street signs and traffic lights and the local Congregational church and the senior center and half of the little historic downtown. They expect the government to show up then, right?
And while it is infuriating to think of the rank hypocrisy of people who vote Republican, rant angrily about creeping socialism and “dirty commies,” and then STILL take money from the government by accepting their Medicaid and their Medicare and their Social Security and their safe streets and their stoplights and their running water and their flushing toilets and their shoveled highways and their electrical grid and their (minimally) educated children… the fact remains that they do, in fact, expect the government to provide those services. Services like seismic retrofitting, for example.
Because that is what the government does. Or at least it is supposed to.
You see where I am going with this, right?
Climate science is about as unremarkable and as rock solid as is the science that informs our understanding of earthquakes. Elected officials aren’t scientists, but they can commission studies and make decisions based on what the science tells them.
They do that ALL THE TIME. Governments routinely handle things like flooding and subsidence and sewage treatment based on science: basically anything that doesn’t have the taint of CLIMATE SCIENCE, which has become a politically charged and polarizing topic that causes otherwise sober-sided, relatively competent politicians to foam at the mouth in (fossil-fuel-industry-funded) indignation.
Elected officials have access to reams upon reams of real information about the effects of the warming world and changing climate. But they aren’t acting. They’re guzzling gas industry money and turning a blind eye while the world simultaneously burns, freezes, and drowns.
So here we are in 2025, 30 years after COP1, and what the HELL has changed?
COP1 had as its mission: to review the adequacy of existing commitments by developed countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to launch a new round of negotiations for a legally binding protocol with specific future targets.
It’s 2025. There are no “legally binding protocols” (that I know of) in place. They’ve wasted THIRTY YEARS. People are dying. Communities are being destroyed. Crops are already failing. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet. And emissions continue to rise.
If you’re not enraged, I don’t know what it will take. If you don’t feel the need to take some sort of action, I don’t know what will convince you. If you don’t feel betrayed, discarded, and ignored - how do you feel?
If anyone has made it this far I would love to hear from you in the comments.
So do we make one last stand, and do everything we can to force our governments to throw enough resources at the problem to potentially ameliorate at least some of the coming suffering?
Remember: THEY KNOW HOW TO DO THIS. They do it all the time. Government could step in, enact laws, create legislation. They won’t do it unless we revolt - so should we revolt? Should we force their hand?
Or do we follow David Suzuki’s advice from his recent iPolitics interview that caused such a stir?
For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together. Finland is offering a great example because the Finnish government has sent a letter to all of their citizens warning of future emergencies, whether they’re earthquakes, floods, droughts, or storms. They’re going to come and they’re going to be more urgent and prolonged.
Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it. Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the routes of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.
Thanks for reading. I also have a Substack: climaterevolutionnow.substack.com/...
