5 Nov 2025

Why capitalism isn’t waiting for COP – or climate change

World leaders are gathering for the next UN climate conference after calamitous scenes in the Caribbean, writes Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson from Belém in Brazil ahead of COP30

The writing is on the wall. But how much more writing and how many more walls do we need?

The curtain-raiser for this latest annual UN Climate Summit – or Conference of Parties (COP) – is, of course, the terrible scenes of destruction from the recent category five hurricane in the Caribbean.

That storm, scientists tell us, was made all the more powerful by the overheated waters of the Caribbean Sea, caused, they tell us, by fossil fuelled global warming.

And yet, the Americans, of course, are not here.

The number of world leaders who will gather in Brazil to get the ball rolling is likely to be down compared to recent years.

Hottest decade on record

There is a global surge in political parties denying the fact and reality of physics – pretending the reality of global warming isn’t happening.

One may as well refuse to believe in gravity.

Yes, the last 10 years have been the hottest decade on record. It’s true that the levels of carbon pollution in our atmosphere have increased to levels we’ve never seen before.

But it is also true that these conferences do deliver.

A decade ago, the historic Paris Agreement was achieved in a world where we were looking at a four degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures by the end of the century.

Because of that COP and that agreement, it now looks like 2.6 degrees.

Of course, that is an alarming temperature rise, but it is a limited success.

The COP system continues to deliver, but deliver too slowly, by common consent.

However, looming in the searing heat and humidity of Belém on the Amazon Delta, where the COP is being held, is the possibility that the Trump administration could send in saboteurs in suits at the last moment to destroy any possible agreement to try and save humanity from humanity.

That is exactly what happened in the final hours of the recent International Maritime Organisation summit and its attempt to limit pollution emissions from global shipping.

Solar energy and renewables investment

But there is a flip side.

The COP is one thing, capitalism is another.

And on that score, we are seeing nothing less than a global energy Industrial Revolution, centered around wind and solar power.

Solar has increased by more than 1,500% on the projections set out by the International Energy Authority. The take-up of global renewables far exceeds the projections which the big oil companies set out.

More than 2 trillion US dollars are being invested in renewables this year, and that is twice the level of investment in fossil fuels. Such is the take-up of renewable energy, it is saving the burning of 1.8 million barrels of oil every day.

In short, capitalism isn’t waiting for the COP. There’s money to be made and jobs and those figures speak to that.

China is at the helm – yes, they’re still the biggest coal polluter on the planet by far, but also lead the charge in renewables.

So too other powerful economies, the EU and indeed the UK, are leading in some aspects. So as ever, the picture will be mixed after the world leaders have come and gone and left their apocalyptic rhetoric about humanity standing at the edge of a climate precipice, and so forth.

Company boardrooms around the world will be quietly getting on with making money, and in that there is an irony.

Arguably Donald Trump, by dismissing physics and describing global warming as a con and a hoax, has handed other world economies one of the greatest economic opportunities the human race has ever seen.

In the US itself, many are already seeing that lesson.

There are many voices not just in California, but in Republican states – Texas in particular – who see the opportunities of clean, non-polluting energy, and are continuing to push for them whatever the “drill baby drill” noise in the White House.

So a critical test here in Belém.

Ten years on from the Paris Agreement. Yes, fossil fuel pollution is worse than ever. But it may be peaking at last.

It may still be too little too late. But, because of COPs and capitalism, there are signs of hope and genuine progress.

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