Requiem for COP 30: Utter Failure (but success for consumers, taxpayers, freedom)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 25, 2025

“Let me be clear … COP30 will close with a political text without mentioning fossil fuels phase-out. It does not mention fossil fuel phase-down. It does not provide a pathway to end deforestation. It does not mention the very causes of the crisis. Nothing. Zero. Silence.” (- Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, below)

Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, self-described “He/Him; TIME100 Climate 2025; Special Representative for Climate Change of Panamá; Inaugural Obama Scholar; Pritzker Environmental Genius Award Finalist 2023,” summarized COP30 as follows.

Dear friends, colleagues, and every person who cares about life on this planet,

I will be brutally honest: the COP and the UN system are not working for you. They have never really worked for you. And today, they are failing you at a historic scale.

Ten years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the negotiators that your governments sent to COP30 are not defending your future. They are defending the very industries that created this crisis: the fossil fuel industry and the forces driving global deforestation.

After three weeks of advocating for language that reflects the reality you live (floods, droughts, heatwaves, hunger, displacement) the text countries are now poised to adopt does the opposite.

Let me be clear so there is no confusion: COP30 will close with a political text without mentioning fossil fuels phase-out. It does not mention fossil fuel phase-down. It does not provide a pathway to end deforestation. It does not mention the very causes of the crisis. Nothing. Zero. Silence.

A Forest COP with no commitment on forests is a very bad joke. A climate decision that cannot even say “fossil fuels” is not neutrality, it is complicity. And what is happening here transcends incompetence.

Science has been deleted from COP30 because it offends the polluters. Meanwhile, children in elementary school are learning more accurate climate science than the text chosen to guide global climate policy. This is a tragedy.

This message is not to governments. It is to you: communities, youth, farmers, pastors, teachers, CEOs, artists, Indigenous leaders, scientists, parents, organizers, workers.

Rise. Speak. Organize. Vote. Demand. Mobilize. If your representatives refuse to represent you, then replace them. If your leaders refuse to defend your right to a livable future, then become the leaders your country needs.

We must keep fossil fuels in the ground, the COP30 outcome will not do that. We must end deforestation everywhere, the current text does not take us there. We must triple adaptation finance: the current text encourages, but does not commit to verifiable action.

Despite all of this, I still believe in hope. Not passive hope: active, defiant hope.
Hope as a decision. Hope as courage. Hope as action. Everyone outside the Blue Zones of the multilateral maze: we need you now more than ever.

If there is to be a turning point, it will not come from a COP. It will come from people. It will come from you refusing to accept mediocrity dressed as diplomacy.

Rise up. Speak up. Stand together. We still have time, but not if we stay silent. When leaders fail, people lead. And it is time to lead.

This verdict needs to be turned around. What is presented as bad news is really good news. His is a false hope that the world is not, in fact, demanding better energies in place of inferior ones; that dense stock energies replace dilute, intermittent, fragile, land-and-transmission-intensive ones.

This of social justice in place of the green greed of the Climate Industrial Complex. And global greening from CO2 fertilization as a byproduct of fossil-fuel usage to boot!

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Pre-COP30 Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez: