The United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) 30, currently convening in Belém, Brazil, from November 10 through 21, without the United States — the world’s largest cumulative emitter and a historical pivot of climate diplomacy — signals more than a diplomatic rupture. It exposes a structural disorientation: the institutions, frameworks, and economic logics underpinning global climate governance remain misaligned with the planetary realities they aim to regulate. COP 30 thus becomes not merely a summit missing a hegemon but a site in search of a new conceptual and political center. Brazil, eager to assert environmental stewardship and Global South leadership, may fill some symbolic space, but the absence of the US crystallizes both the fragility and the potential of a post-American climate order.
The United States has historically played a dual role: as a driver of climate diplomacy through funding, technological investment, and leadership in multilateral negotiations, yet simultaneously as a saboteur when domestic politics or fossil-fuel interests prevailed. Its participation has always been conditional, creating a geopolitical tension in which states aligned their climate strategies around a hegemon whose commitments could shift unpredictably with electoral cycles. With the US sidelined, COP 30 faces a unique opportunity and challenge: can a world historically reliant on a single hegemon craft a center of climate diplomacy that is not defined by dominance but by collective planetary responsibility? Current reporting from Belém underscores that negotiations on finance, adaptation, and just transition are unfolding in a vacuum where no single actor can impose order.
In this vacuum, Europe will attempt — however reluctantly — to assume leadership. The European Union can set regulatory standards, establish environmental norms, and promote technological cooperation, but it lacks the financial heft and cohesive political authority to replicate the influence historically wielded by the US. Internal fragmentation, economic slowdown, and rising right-wing political sentiment constrain the EU’s capacity to mobilize climate finance at a scale sufficient to maintain credibility for global emissions targets.
China occupies a strategically ambivalent position. It can champion multilateralism and climate diplomacy while simultaneously expanding coal capacity at home and dominating global renewable technology markets. Without the US as its negotiating counterpart, China loses the bilateral architecture that historically produced breakthroughs such as the 2014 US–China climate agreement. This dyadic absence removes a potent driver of global momentum, leaving middle powers — Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, and Indonesia — to assert influence and shape the negotiation agenda. These states press for justice, adaptation, and a reimagined climate finance architecture, reflecting moral and strategic imperatives. Theoretically, this aligns with Bill Readings’ notion of a “community of dissensus,” in which coalitions build consensus through principled disagreement rather than uniformity. Yet moral authority alone cannot substitute for the institutional and financial power the US once wielded. The diplomatic vacuum underscores a central question: can such dispersed sovereignties, operating without a singular arbiter, marshal the collective will necessary to avert ecological collapse? Reporting from The Guardian suggests that the US absence may be less destructive than its obstructive presence in earlier years, but it still leaves a fractured multilateral order.
To grasp the magnitude of this crisis, we must engage Dipesh Chakrabarty’s conceptual reframing. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, he emphasizes that climate change is not merely a policy problem but a historical rupture: humans have become a geological force, reshaping Earth systems in ways that exceed traditional causal frameworks. Chakrabarty distinguishes between the “globe”—the map of human social and political relations — and the “planet” — the Earth system in which humans are embedded and which now exerts constraints upon human agency.
This distinction illuminates a fundamental tension: COP negotiations remain overwhelmingly structured around national interests, GDP metrics, and political horizons that operate on years or decades. By contrast, planetary imperatives function on geological timescales, demanding a radical rethinking of governance, morality, and temporal expectations. Without this shift, climate diplomacy risks addressing symptoms rather than systemic causes, perpetuating incrementalism that leaves underlying drivers of ecological destruction intact.
At the core of modern capitalism lies the concept of creative destruction, articulated by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy as the perpetual dismantling and remaking of economic structures. While celebrated for driving innovation and growth, creative destruction masks a more troubling truth: entire social formations, ecologies, and ways of life are treated as expendable. The pursuit of novelty and accumulation occurs at the expense of continuity, stability, and sustainability.
Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, provides a lens for understanding this disposability. He observes that labor, land, and money are treated as “fictitious commodities” — resources bought and sold as if they were purely economic objects, divorced from their social and ecological contexts. This commodification enables exploitation and environmental degradation not as incidental outcomes but as systemic imperatives. David Harvey extends this critique with the concept of the spatial fix, describing how capitalism manages crises by externalizing environmental costs in space and time. Surplus capital is funneled into new infrastructure, frontier development, or urban expansion, relocating ecological and social harm while preserving the logic of accumulation.
Climate governance, in this context, cannot succeed without addressing these structural logics. Incremental measures, financial pledges, or technological innovations risk being superficial if they do not confront the systemic pressures that commodify nature, displace crises, and perpetuate environmental harm.
The absence of the US at COP 30 exposes the fragility of an architecture built around a hegemon embedded in carbon-intensive economies. Even with middle powers asserting moral authority, systemic transformation requires confronting the capitalist mechanisms — creative destruction, fictitious commodification, and spatial fixes — that drive ecological degradation. The summit becomes a test: can climate diplomacy transition from the management of emissions to restructuring the political economy that underwrites ecological destruction? Without addressing these foundational drivers, pledges of “green innovation” risk being administratively efficient but ecologically impotent, merely masking dispossession and degradation under the veneer of progress.
The convergence of insights from Chakrabarty, Polanyi, Schumpeter, and Harvey points to a decisive imperative: planetary survival necessitates a fundamental rethinking of economic and political frameworks. COP 30 should serve as a locus for a radical reorientation that 1) embeds planetary constraints into governance, acknowledging the scales and timescales at which Earth systems operate, 2) challenges the commodification of nature and labor, realigning economic incentives with ecological resilience, 3) confronts capital’s spatial and temporal displacement of crises, ensuring that climate solutions do not merely externalize harm, and 4) embraces polycentric governance models, including indigenous and community-led stewardship, to foster relational politics rooted in care and accountability.
It is imperative to restructure climate finance so that contributions are mandatory and tied to historical emissions, ensuring alignment of responsibility and capacity; establish a legally binding fossil-fuel phase-out treaty with clear timelines to constrain the systemic pressures of creative destruction; and reform development metrics away from GDP toward ecological health, resilience, and regeneration. Moreover, it is important to integrate indigenous knowledge and community-based governance to re-embed land, water, and biodiversity within social and ecological relationships, promote open-access technology transfer to decouple innovation from destructive capital accumulation, and strengthen South-South climate alliances to reduce dependency on hegemonic leadership and foster pluralistic governance grounded in ecological justice.
COP 30 without the United States underscores a dual challenge: an immediate political vacuum and the structural misalignment of global governance with planetary limits. The summit may achieve agreements, but these measures risk superficiality without confronting the systemic logics of creative destruction, fictitious commodities, and spatial fixes. A new center for COP 30 must emerge from principled, polycentric governance, where human activity aligns with planetary imperatives. Only by reconceiving development, innovation, and diplomatic frameworks through the lens of planetary responsibility can climate diplomacy achieve its true purpose: securing the conditions for human and ecological survival on a planet whose systems now constrain human ambition.
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