U.S. Sat Out Major UN Climate Conference, But Lobbyists Swarmed It

The United States is AWOL from the UN climate
talks in Brazil, while fossil fuel lobbyists
are there big time. 

The United States embarrassingly sat out this year's 30th annual UN Climate Change Conference - known as COP30 -  which surprised nobody, given Donald Trump's horror at anyone who even thinks climate change is a thing.  

But that fact is to our detriment, since the United States had no say in the kinds of climate change fighting prescriptions that might emerge from the conference.

Beside the U.S., the only other nations not at COP30 are Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino, notes Carbon Brief. 

The absence of the United States is striking because the nation is also the world's largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases. 

Overall, a total of 56,000 people from 193 countries attended the conference, which is the second largest crowd at any of any past conference. 

Unsurprisingly, this year's largest delegation comes from Brazil, since that's the nation hosting the whole thing.  The next largest delegations, in order of size are China (again no surprise) and of all countries, Nigeria, Indonesia and Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The annual COP meetings have become this huge thing, attended by at least 50,000 in each of the past four years. Most rounds of this conference drew few than 20,000 annual, except the 2015 iteration in Copenhagen and the 2021 gathering in Paris. 

The Paris COP was the year the world decided to try and limit planetary warming to 1,5 degrees of the 20th century average.  

This year, the United States backed out of the international agreement to try and limit the warming to 1.5 degrees. 

Of course, we'll probably blow past the 1.5 degree goal  anyway, as emissions continue to rise. 

At last report, delegates at COP30 were still struggling to come up with an agreement to set a global path away from the use of fossil fuels. But a draft deal doesn't mention coal, oil and gas, which are almost the entire reason we have a climate change problem. 

Which might be related to this tidbit from The Guardian, which reports that more than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP30. That's more than every single country's delegation aside from the host Brazil. 

The group Kick Big Polluters Out says one in every 25 participants at this big meeting is a fossil fuel lobbyist. 

Within the next couple of days, we'll see how well all those fossil fuel lobbyists did. Stay tuned!