Last November, Brazil hosted COP30 – the United Nations 30th annual Conference of Parties, devoted to saving the Earth from apocalyptic warming.

The event marked the 10th anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement which committed its signatories (194 states plus the EU) to limiting the rise of global warming by the end of this century to within 2°C (ideally 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels. The core of the Agreement was that the main polluters, the richer and longest-industrialised capitalist West, would curb their current greenhouse gas emissions (mainly carbon dioxide) and help fund poorer, historically less-polluting and still-developing countries, many their own former colonies, to curb theirs. If this deal only partly atoned for historical injustice, present imperialist and non-imperialist nations could agree, at least for the time being, on the urgent need for shared, sustainable development as the only way to avert the suicide of our species.

Well before this article was written in early April 2026, anxiety about reaching the Paris targets was already being openly expressed. To take two examples: the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) update from COP30 last November which says, the most serious concern now is that the progress shown in the first five years after Paris, up until around 2020, has flattened off just as visible signs of dangerous climate change have emerged vividly around the planet1 and second, a more recent warning by UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell at a “sustainable business” meeting in Brussels in March 2026 about the climate impact of war and continued reliance on fossil fuels. He said,

“Some responses to the fossil fuel crisis – incredibly – argue for doubling-down on the cause of the problem and slowing the shift to renewable energy, even though it is clearly cheaper, safer, and faster to market. This is completely delusional, because history tells us, this fossil fuel crisis will happen again and again. In this new world disorder where some major powers do as they please, unconstrained by economic logic or current alliances…meek dependence on fossil fuel imports will leave Europe forever lurching from crisis to crisis, with households and industries literally paying the price. All as climate disasters wreak havoc the world over – pushing costs up and economic growth down and taking a massive human toll…While the fossil fuels that supercharge disasters rake-in trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies globally. Money that could be better spent.”

Fig.1 Climate Action Tracker from Climate Analytics showing impact of the Paris Agreement from the lead up in 2009 to targets set in 2025. NDC (on left of chart) refers to each country’s Nationally Determined Contribution [i.e., its target for mitigating global warming].

Whilst the CAT update is a blunt warning, Stiell talks as a diplomat, but that only emphasises the gravity of what he says. Both examples reflect the crucial difference between acknowledging the danger and actually stepping back from the brink. Neither, however, addresses the attendant risk of a complete collapse of the Earth's life-support system. Recent record temperatures are already impacting winds, rainfall, pollination, ocean currents and other phenomena. These are closely inter-dependent, along with living systems - plants, animals and ourselves. Current temperatures are unprecedented. If any of these phenomena departs radically from its normal variability there is a risk that others will follow suit and trigger a swift collapse of the whole system. The odds of such an event are hard to quantify but the risk is another reason to reduce global warming as much and as soon as possible (3) Even more seriously, instead of explaining how it was possible for the Paris Agreement to stall on its way to a sustainable future, the commentators just urge participants to try harder.

Real progress registered in the first few years following the Paris Agreement can be partly explained by the optimistic mood generated by the process of reaching the agreement itself, and perhaps the “low-hanging fruit” of its initial targets, selected because they were easiest to achieve. During Covid (2020-2022) greenhouse gas emissions actually fell. Although COP30 took account of China’s reaching its peak emissions target ahead of schedule, the global prognosis remained poor, due to continuing crises of capitalism, war and militarisation, US withdrawal from the Paris process and the preference mainly of Western fossil fuel companies for short-term profits over humanity’s longer-term survival.

Before the Paris Agreement, the world could anticipate around 3.6°C of warming by 2100. By COP30 in 2025 (see Fig.1), after ten years of trying to reduce that figure to the agreed ideal of 1.5°C, or even just the “optimistic” 2.0°C, the projection had been reduced by only 1°C down to 2.6°. A tiny fall of only 0.1°C. between 2024-25 ominously suggests not just missed targets for 2100 but further warming into the next century. As Climate Analytics put it: “Our global temperature projections based on this year’s policy developments and 2035 targets have almost come to a standstill: it has barely moved over the past four years. The warning signs are clear: we are heading in the wrong direction.”

It would seem that the only response to this dismal assessment of an initial promise levelling off and heading for failure is to double-down on the Paris Agreement. In their book, Overshoot: how the world surrendered to climate breakdown (2024), anticapitalist climate analysts Andreas Malm and Wim Carton reject this view, arguing that since capitalism has been able to evade or accommodate its restrictions, the Agreement is unfit for purpose and that the only chance of saving humanity is urgently to dismantle capitalism itself. Ian Angus, in his more recent book, Metabolic Rifts (2026),2 takes a similar view: the Paris Agreement is dead and humanity’s only hope is a socialist or “eco-socialist” revolution.

Malm and Carton document precisely how some powerful capitalists have subverted the Agreement to their own ends by continuing to profit from high-emission fossil fuels, and doing so covertly, by “greenwashing” or obfuscation. When they break cover at all, they offer the comforting thought that the catastrophe, which they can’t deny business-as-usual will make inevitable, can be averted just in time by some currently unimaginable technological marvel.

Pretending business as usual can solve global warming shows capitalism or its apologists have no monopoly on wishful thinking: its opponents are also susceptible but have fewer excuses. Malm, Carton and Angus may well be right in their critique of the Paris Agreement and their conclusion that only overthrowing capitalism can save us, but since they offer no perspective on how this might be done at the speed and scale required, the galvanising potential of their argument is lost.

The essential - because existential - goal is averting climate catastrophe. How to achieve this poses two questions: before it’s too late, what forces can be mustered and how can contemporary capitalism be persuaded to help or, if not, be replaced?

Environmental issues affect the lives and livelihoods of everyone, and of unborn generations. This is reflected in the “green” agendas of national and devolved governments, local authorities, political parties and in the activities of many local, regional and national organisations.

Mainstream media usually treat such issues like other subjects, in isolation from their real contexts. Environmental politics thus tends to be discussed more as environment than as politics. This means that global warming (for example) is often bracketed with the homely triviality of TV weather forecasting, and existential anxiety is deflected into irritation about activists blocking motorways. More seriously, this treatment reduces collective responsibility and political action to personal behaviour about recycling or the aesthetics of multiple wind turbines. As a result, people tend to think of environmental issues more in connection with specialised campaigning organisations like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, or the Green Party, rather than the main political parties or trade unions with other policies on their agendas (to the extent that the Green Party aspires to form or join a government it has to expand its policies into other issues).

One result of such “framing” is that green politics is not just semi-detached from “machine” politics more generally but appeals, unsurprisingly, more to sections of the middle-class interested in lifestyle than to workers interested in jobs and wages. A vast amount of work and debate on key environmental and closely linked standard-of-living issues like global warming and pollution (rather than litter or veganism) has been and continues to be done within the structures of the organised labour movement, in which there is a clear trajectory from local branch and constituency to national, parliamentary and international levels. Such work and its trajectory have certainly been obstructed by right-wing factionalism but remains a resource and a practice primed for rapid development and deployment by those with a class outlook.

As for alternatives, since the 1970s there have been five main “waves of global environmental social movements”3 mostly confined to the industrial or post-industrial West, with few links to the organised working class. The most recent, such as “Insulate Britain” and “Just Stop Oil”, have been little more disruptive than earlier, often widely supported, Greenpeace activists yet have faced punitive fines and imprisonment for their actions, and in the US comparable groups are proscribed as environmental terrorists. There is nonetheless great energy, expertise and cross-community reach in such groups, but given the short time available, their potential can probably be realised only in collaboration with organised labour.

Is it delusional to imagine that some capitalists can be more realistic than others? Not if we take the example of Western anti-fascist allies in World War Two, or of Simon Stiell’s recent reminder to “Europe” that shelving short-term interests in favour of long-term ones was something it has done before (no matter that Stiell’s “Europe” has never been everyone’s friend even in Europe itself). It’s also worth recalling that capitalism has always been pragmatic about making such deals despite wrapping itself in the mythology of free competition: without that, state monopoly capitalism and transnational corporations would never have developed.

Capitalism has never operated as a single global system, despite (or even because of) attempts by the US or by previous imperialisms to increase their dominance. The current geopolitical flux includes not just shifting alliances within or between capitalist blocs and in networks of transnational corporations, but also the rise of China.

Such changes are reflected in the struggle to defend and advance the United Nations, including its Paris Agreement and in continuing attempts to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Within and between most nations these struggles will sharpen as the crises of capital and climate worsen, and the institutions and practical experience are available (or, if necessary, can be created) for global transformation. Even if we had the time to do so, it might make as little sense to reconstruct the whole apparatus as to ignore it altogether.

For all their shortcomings, however, the climate control efforts of the United Nations have clarified the nature and scale of the problem we face. Even though here in Britain the problem is much less severe than elsewhere, especially in the global South, it is increasingly obvious that only the UN can provide the infrastructure to protect the economic supply chains and interlocking ecosystems on which we all depend – and that this demands transparency about future risks and the inadequacy of what is being done to mitigate them. That transparency is especially necessary in those countries, most of them seriously long-term polluters, with developed economies and techno-scientific capacity to monitor changing environmental conditions. Some such countries – the US and the UK among them – also have the means and sometimes the motivation to misrepresent or suppress climate-related information which their own populations and the rest of the world would benefit from knowing.

In January 2026, an article in The Times and another in The Guardian, elaborated in February in a longer piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsBAS) in the US, (5) revealed that UK intelligence contributed to a DEFRA-commissioned report on Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security. This was scheduled for publication last autumn but after it was held back by Downing Street as far too negative, a version of it was published on the DEFRA website. Next day The Times reported that an internal, unabridged version of the assessment included warnings much graver than the public-facing report: overwhelming mass migration to Europe, increasingly polarised and populist politics in the UK, NATO conflicts over collapsing food production in Russia and Ukraine, and escalating tensions between China, India, and Pakistan that could potentially lead to nuclear war.

There may be rather more to this than the suppression of climate-related projections that could cause unnecessary or even counterproductive panic. One reason for the secrecy could be embarrassment that so little is actually being done to comply with the Paris Agreement, despite public and official assurances to the contrary. Another reason might well be geopolitical. When the intelligence services have a hand in environmental risk assessments that refer to migration and potential conflicts involving NATO and those it considers its enemies, it’s unlikely that climate control for the good of humanity is the only item on the agenda. This is a possible factor in the US as well. As the longer article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports, “the Office of the [US] Director of Intelligence insists that it must keep a 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030 classified. After almost two decades, the report remains classified, albeit at the lowest level of national security secrecy.”

As if securing a sustainable future were not challenging enough, the avarice and myopia of imperialist elites and their facilitators are impediments we could do without. The BAS article doesn’t single-out President Trump’s well-known views but refers to current National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to excise any mention of climate change from the spy community’s most recent Annual Threat Assessment, which it sees as part of a “pattern of climate denialism and suppression within the Global North intelligence apparatus”.