COP30: The Spaceship Is on Fire

In her sharp analysis of the COP30 summit, Dr. Heidi Hart, an environmental humanities researcher and guest instructor at Linnaeus University in Sweden, captures the surreal moment when an exhibition pavilion in Belém caught fire—an unsettling metaphor for a world already burning. Despite tense negotiations and an extra day of talks, petrostates secured a final text that completely omitted fossil fuels, leaving UN Secretary-General Guterres to warn of a widening gap between science and policy. Dr. Hart situates this failure within a shifting global landscape marked by illiberal regimes, climate denial, and powerful petro-interests. With geopolitical turmoil and corporate greenwashing shaping outcomes, her commentary underscores a stark truth: on a “spaceship” with finite resources, political paralysis is accelerating us toward irreversible tipping points.

By Heidi Hart

The defining image of the COP30 climate summit flashed around the world: fire in an exhibition pavilion at the meeting site in Belém, Brazil, flames spreading up the tent’s walls and forcing evacuations. No one was injured beyond smoke inhalation, but the “world is on fire” adage took a literal turn as delegates wrestled to find consensus. The summit spilled over into an extra day, with a win for petrostates like Saudi Arabia, as the final agreement ceded more funding to at-risk countries but failed to include any language about fossil fuels. 

On Saturday, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced a forthcoming “side-text” about fossil fuels and forest protections, also a hot topic among Indigenous protesters who had pressed into the secure COP “Blue Zone” on Friday evening. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ assessment after the summit was grim, despite acknowledging some progress on “adaptation” funds: “The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide … The reality of overshoot is a stark warning: we are approaching dangerous and irreversible tipping points.” The lack of even a mention of fossil fuels in the final agreement, let alone the “deep, rapid emission cuts” Guterres acknowledges are necessary to keep the planet below overshoot carbon levels, is not just the result of Saudi and Russian delegates’ bully tactics (Al Gore has referred to the agreement as an “Opec text”) but also a symptom of profoundly shifting political realities around the world. 

The notable absence of US delegates, while the Trump administration slashed environmental protections at home, was the source of relief for some at the summit but also pointed to the normalization of climate denial amid illiberal regimes’ growing influence and far-right pressures in green-aspirational countries like Germany. Even Norway, known for its own sustainable, egalitarian culture, has no plans to sacrifice its oil wealth for the larger planetary good. Meanwhile, costly wars and deep political divisions in countries like the US and Brazil distract from efforts to forge coherent climate policy. Finally, the sheer scale of petrostates’ and billionaire technocrats’ influence cannot be overstated in watering down and even – in this case – completely avoiding action on carbon emissions cuts. Bill Gates’ recent essay diminishing the dangers of climate emergency has not helped; though “civilization” will likely not be wiped out in a sci-fi doomsday scenario, the suffering of millions and the loss of innumerable nonhuman species are hardly points to be glossed over in the name of “innovation.” Neoliberal optimism sounds increasingly tone-deaf in a time when the limits of human progress are becoming palpably clear around the world. 

The idea of “Spaceship Earth,” popularized by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1970s, portrays the planet as a closed system with limited resources. Though this idea has informed many efforts toward more sustainable living, greenwashing for the sake of profit has become the norm among large corporations. The comforts of petrocultures, the material, cultural, and economic manifestations of decades of cheap oil, are so embedded in privileged countries, there are limits, too, to how much individuals can do to shrink their carbon footprints. 

On the political level, Saudi and Russian influence is only one part of the picture; lack of concern or climate denialism (often cast as denial of the human cause) is growing in countries like Indonesia, Mexico, India, and Australia, places where the risks from global heating are high. In the formerly stable if systemically inequitable US, the lurch toward anti-science authoritarianism has been so swift as to induce a kind of vertigo. In his recent book Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, Roy Scranton writes, “We can recognize the Earth as a closed system in which we all depend on each other, but the political reality within that system resembles gang warfare more than it does a unified crew,” (91). The deep lack of consensus at COP30, when the risks of climate collapse are clearer than ever, shows how much more difficult the problem is to address in today’s chaotic political landscape.

Nearly ten years ago, in her essay “What Is the Anthro-political?”, culture theorist Claire Colebrook engaged with the already contested Anthropocene term to argue that, in light of ecological destruction, “the political” as a norm can no longer be taken for granted. This provocative stance is worth revisiting today. Especially with the rise of populist tendencies that tap into human “affect and corporeality,” the political no longer appears as a regulating modality of human-being but rather as a contingent aspect of human culture that, once that culture destroys its own “milieu” or literal environment, will go down with it. In Colebrook’s more elegant terms, “What if what we know as politics … were possible only in a brief era of the taming of human history?” (115). 

This geologic-scale perspective on last week’s pitting of the EU’s and other climate-sympathetic delegates against fossil-friendly regimes (with the absent US in the background noise) does not diminish the stakes at COP30 but shows how vast and planetary those stakes are. With our closed system threatening to burn beyond livable thresholds, the responsibility of one global gathering to stave off one local disaster after another becomes painfully clear.