MAYBE YOU’VE NOTICED the pattern: Since 1995, the United Nations has called world leaders together every year to participate in a Conference of Parties, or COP, on climate change. Politicians and negotiators are tasked with discussing progress and commitments—or lack thereof. So far so good, right? But year after year, governments fail to show up with enough ambition to meet even their own targets—targets that already fall short of what social movements and scientists demand. Faced with an existential threat to human and other life on earth, our leaders meet annually and agree to back away from their promises, pushing the planet further into a situation of more flash floods and drawn-out droughts, more wildfire smoke and rising shorelines, a world less fit for life in all its variety.
In 2025, COP30 marked 10 years since the signing of the Paris Agreement, where 196 countries committed to limit global warming to 1.5°C higher than preindustrial temperatures. In the summer leading up to COP30, a document began to circulate: “The science is clear: we must limit global warming to 1.5°C to avoid catastrophic effects. We must never abandon this goal,” the document says. “It is the Global South and future generations who are already suffering the consequences. We reject false solutions such as ‘green’ capitalism, technocracy, the commodification of nature, and extractivism, which perpetuate exploitation and injustice.” Instead, the authors call for transformational, structural change, the kind of courage that never makes it to COP meetings.
The document reads like an impassioned call from a revolutionary climate movement, criticizing even the green economy for emerging “not as a break with capitalism, but as an incremental modernisation of capitalism, expanding its capacity for self-regulation while perpetuating systemic contradictions.” Yet the document did not come from the Extinction Rebellion, a socialist group, a left-wing think tank, or a handful of anarchists. It came from the Catholic bishops of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, who issued it together as “the message of the Catholic Church in the Global South.”
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