“COP Out”30

Keir Starmer says consensus is gone, but was there ever one?

I sat down the other week to watch the new sketch show from David Mitchell and Robert Webb titled “Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping”. There’s a great sketch which feels like a deliberate mirror to today’s world leaders and their reluctance to act when it truly matters.

In the sketch, your typical evil mastermind is threatening to end the world unless global powers meet his demands. However, there’s a catch. The process of ending the world is said to take around 50 years. All of a sudden, the world leaders relax and are far less incentivised to meet the antagonist’s demands.

They walk away arm in arm and are comforted in the fact the end of the world is so far away that it won’t really have any impact on their lives.

I was reminded of this sketch this week as global powers returned once again for the COP summit. The world is facing a dark future when it comes to climate change, yet the mentality of world leaders is stagnant. As they group for yet another self-aggrandising media opportunity, there are very few who really feel engaged in the debate.

Starmer stated that consensus is now gone. But you have to ask, was there really ever one?

Summit after summit have presented a great diplomatic facade, but in reality, all they have served to do is build an illusion of collective will and a system built to avoid real action.

Consensus was never real and COP proves it

Of course, the whole premise of COP rests on consensus. In itself though this feels flawed. Instead of pushing to make real strides, this has come to mean catering to the lowest common denominator. Every agreement is structured to be acceptable to the most reluctant voice in the room.

In the weeks prior to COP, we saw Ed Miliband boast that before the Paris Agreement the world was on track for 4°C of warming, now 2030 national commitments put us on course for 2.6°C. His confidence reveals the very problem we face, however unintentional it may be.

The difference between 4°C and 2.6°C isn’t really progress. It’s the difference between the destruction of our planet or a slightly slower version of it. But at COP, leaders gather to pat themselves on the back and reward the appearance of improvement. Flying in on private jets, they band together for another week or so of non-binding agreements and photo opportunities rather than steps towards real change.

So when Starmer says consensus is gone, I wouldn’t say he’s quite right. It still remains, it’s just a consensus on doing the bare minimum.

Britain’s moral leadership has collapsed

Like with many global issues, there is a fairly reasonable sense of pride in the UK’s historic ability to rally behind just causes. The UK has often presented itself as a moral pace setter which is principled and willing to punch above its weight to try and enact global change.

Starmer has tried to embody that British moral spirit on the international stage through leading diplomatic efforts in regard to the likes of Ukraine. He has seen success in convening global partners. Yet at home, domestic pressures and the mounting cost of living crisis have pushed climate ambition down the list of political priorities.

Unlike banding together against the threat of hard power activity, the climate question for many seems a lot less tangible. The real impacts of the crisis we face are a lot harder to grasp from the comfort of our island.

Putting money together to slow and long-term process is a much harder battle to fight than the instant results seen of investing in defence spending.

The government’s decision to opt out of the $125 billion Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) showed this. The clear financial hesitation has shown that Britain’s stores of moral capital are now exhausted. As the world continues its isolationist spiral and the cost of living crisis continues, has the UK given up trying?

The TFFF’s structure of national and private contributions seems precisely the kind of collective mechanism the UK once championed. Yet this time, the UK declined to back it.

This is where the interesting contrast between the UK’s two most visible representatives at COP comes into view. Prince William, following in his Father’s footsteps of environmental diplomacy through projects like the Earthshot Prize, is attempting to preserve Britain’s identity as a steward of global responsibility.

Starmer on the other hand stands as a figure visibly worn down by domestic realities. Their stances at COP this year are clear parallels; one of vision and the other of management. For Starmer, his position is no longer to lead, but instead to avoid backlash back at home.

The government knows that British voters are watching COP30 with heightened sensitivity. Miliband framed the UK’s presence as being about fighting for national interest and lower bills.

To me, national interest is in many ways the antithesis of what a climate summit is meant to represent. Climate leadership is about shared obligation and interdependence rather than transactional benefits. As much as Prince William attempts to keep the UK’s moral compass on the straight and narrow, it’s clear the government has recalibrated toward short-term electoral reassurance.

Looking back to previous summits, we saw quiet backroom negotiations among several countries centred not on cutting fossil fuels, but on securing future oil and gas access. Of course, the UK hasn’t gone this far, but seems to be slowly stooping down to become aligned with this logic. Like many other attendees, the UK is prioritising national interests over its global responsibility.

The global leadership vacuum

The uphill struggle of making even a slight dent in the climate change mission is made evident when we see not who did attend, but who didn’t.

China, the great polluting powerhouse, skipped the summit entirely, despite announcing a new pledge to cut emissions by just 7–10 percent by 2035. President Xi Jinping declared that “green and low-carbon transformation is the trend of our times,” while contributing the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug.

There are two ways to look at what’s happening here. First, we’re continuing to witness the breakdown of collective action. For the climate process to work, it needs actors who are willing to show up, negotiate, and compromise. Yet the geopolitical landscape is fractured.

The US is trapped in electoral paralysis, with its government shutdown breaking new records. China has chosen an almost deliberate absence. Meanwhile Europe remains consumed by the twin pressures of soaring energy costs and the need to balance decarbonisation with energy security in the wake of Russian aggression.

The second way to view this dynamic is through the absence of both China and India from COP30. Their decision not to attend signals a potentially growing belief that these summits have become stages for Western performance instead of platforms for genuine progress.

In their eyes, climate conferences are exercises in moral showmanship where overenthusiastic rhetoric conceals the shallow reality of stalled implementation, domestic backtracking, and policy inconsistency.

In this environment, no major power is sufficiently aligned to make real change in the climate debate. The architecture of collective climate governance remains through summits and empty pledges, but the political energy that once powered this has dissolved.

The new architects of destruction

There is another significant blind spot with COP that I feel has more relevance this time around than in previous years.

Governments are locked into debates around emissions targets and transition timelines whilst outside of this there is an entirely separate system of environmental damage occurring. This is of course the private tech giants.

These new state-sized companies are involved in the massive consumption of energy, water and rare earth metals on a staggering scale which seems to fly under the radar of squabbling nations.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon have doubled their water consumption for cooling AI data centres in the past two years. OpenAI has also projected electricity demand for large-scale model training is expected to approach the annual consumption of around 500,000 UK homes. Meanwhile, Bitcoin mining already consumes more electricity than Argentina.

As populations get excited by the promise of AI, the damage it’s contributing to the planet seems to go relatively unnoticed. These corporations can continue to wreak havoc whilst playing no part in the climate mission. Their environmental impact rivals most states yet they remain structurally unaccountable.

It seems fairly obvious that the actors who profit most from global resource consumption should contribute proportionally to the cost of mitigating it.

COP runs on the assumption that the primary drivers of climate issues are states. This seems like a dated perspective given that economic power and emissions influence has shifted. Nations seem scared to put in more checks to these mega corporations due to the massive economic weight they carry.

Climate diplomacy is too focused on negotiating with actors who no longer hold the real levers of material impact. If summits like COP want to seriously impact climate change, then they must broaden the field of responsibility beyond governments. Otherwise, the summit becomes a performance of responsibility rather than the exercise of it.

We seem to be witnessing a collective refusal to name the new centres of extractive power. These tech corporations aren’t just involved in the exploitation of the planet, but also whole populations. It’s time to ask Silicon Valley and its conspirators to pay their bill.

If we look back to the TFFF example, this is a financial demand that I’m sure the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk could majorly contribute to. However, they instead decide to sit back and keep their heads low.

The global performance of doing nothing

So, after COP30, it’s clear that leaders continue to celebrate the mere act of showing up and continue to mistake attendance for achievement. Like the sketch from Mitchell and Webb, the world’s leaders are fully aware of the ticking clock of destruction, but have chosen to look away.

Summits such as COP have become a theatre for governments to act out responsibility while the real destructive actors remain backstage. As for the UK, it is hopelessly trying to cling on to its traditional role as a moral leader, but the lines no longer suit the actor. Just like Chamberlain landing back in the UK claiming to have secured “peace in our time”, I’m sure that the UK will return from COP with statements of blissful ignorance and optimism. These will quickly dissipate.

We’ve now normalised inaction. We’re going backwards in this mission and every summit that ends in self-congratulation teaches us to accept this.

The great illusion of consensus has replaced the substance of leadership. What started as a genuine mission to save the planet has now become a performance to reassure ourselves that pretending to care is enough.