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In less than a week, the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) on Climate Change will convene in Belém, Brazil. Yet the structural and political headwinds surrounding it all but guarantee another disappointment. “Failure,” in this context, means not merely the absence of progress but the continuation of what has become an annual global ritual: another gathering that will produce no binding targets for reducing fossil fuel emissions, no credible enforcement mechanisms, and no meaningful accountability for nations or corporations that continue to drive climate change,.

This Conference unfolds against a sharply deteriorating backdrop:

• A broad U.S. retreat from climate leadership, marked by the dismantling of prior commitments
• Bill Gates’s highly publicized pivot from mitigation to adaptation, which is nothing less than a symbolic surrender that shifts the narrative from prevention to the status quo responsible for climate change
• The entrenched influence of fossil fuel interests, which continue to shape negotiations, water down commitments, and steer outcomes toward inertia

In the end, barring significant and unexpected developments, Belém will host a conference that might as well be a mirage in the world’s largest rainforest. Delegates will arrive on jets fueled by the very hydrocarbons driving climate change. In concrete outcomes, that conference will essentially ratify the continued burning of fossil fuels. Perhaps that is its point. Climate diplomacy has become little more than idle theater, performed in growing warming it refuses to confront.