In the early 1990s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released its first scientific reports.

The panel, convened by the United Nations (UN) in 1988, concluded that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had been increasing rapidly and would, if unchecked, induce climate change across the planet, including higher temperatures, sea level rise and numerous adverse economic and social consequences.

The panel included leading climate scientists from around the world, and the group was collectively awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

In 2015, the Paris Conference of the Parties (COP), attended by official delegations from virtually every country in the world, adopted a target of limiting the planetary increase in temperature to 1.5°C.

There have been COP meetings every year since then. The Paris meeting in 2015 was COP 21.

The most recent gathering, COP 30, was held in Belem in Brazil in 2025 and the 10 to 21 November event attracted over 56,000 delegates.

Next up is Antalya in Turkiye next month, to be followed by Addis Ababa in Ethiopia in 2027.

Futility

These annual meetings have become increasingly futile, illustrated by the ignoring the carbon emissions of enormous delegations.

A fortnight ago, the UN’s Environment Programme declared as inevitable an overshoot of the 1.5°C target, intended under the Paris agreement to be achieved by 2030.

There is a reason for the failure of the UN’s members to achieve the targets which they embraced to such fanfare 11 years ago in Paris.

The UN has 193 members, each sovereign since the end of colonialism in the 1960s and 1970s and with limited incentives to contribute to the salvation of others.

The UN is not a world government, has no powers of enforcement, and most members face no penalties from the UN for failure to deliver on targets for carbon emissions.

Small countries with tiny shares of world emissions are tempted to focus on adaptation, minimising the fallout from continuing failure. Why persist with costly mitigation if others are failing?

The reduction of emissions, or even their stabilisation, is costly at the national level, but the benefits accrue unavoidably to all – the planet has just one climate.

Benefits and costs are not aligned, each country is not likely to behave like its very own planet, shouldering all costs but also reaping all benefits.

Any ‘planets’ that failed would suffer alone in this imagined world, with the exception of some regional groupings like the European Union, which has sought to arrive at shared targets.

They have not been entirely successful since the EU is not a superstate, but a confederation of countries which retain national policy autonomy over taxes and public spending.

Per capita emissions in the EU are, nonetheless, well below the levels in the USA and have been falling gradually.

Outside Europe, the limited efforts of the EU have not been matched.

While China has the world’s highest emissions by volume, it has close to 1.4bn people, and per capita emissions are about two-thirds of the level recorded in the USA.

Total Chinese emissions thus dwarf the US total, where the population is only 340m.

Withdrawn commitment

President Trump has withdrawn from any commitment under the Paris agreement and has decried the recent increases in US gas prices, meaning auto-fuel at the pump.

Average US retail price for petrol, including state-level taxes, works out at about 98c expressed in euros per litre, roughly half the figure in Ireland and in most EU countries.

Most of the higher price in the EU is accounted for by VAT and excise duties, not by differences in economic cost, which means the world traded price.

The low US price is a reflection of public policy.

EU emissions are, relatively speaking, under better control than in the USA, and ‘drill, baby, drill’ has resulted in plentiful supplies in the USA, but there has been no support for effective federal policy mandates – which encourage fuel economy.

The US retail price for automotive fuels, for example, is the lowest of any large developed country.

Trump describes the work of the IPCC as a hoax.

Burden of adjustment

The combined share of China, the European Union and the USA in world emissions, respectively 33%, 12% and 6%, adds up to half of worldwide emissions.

There are expanding economies elsewhere – for example, India and parts of Africa and Latin America – where emissions have the potential to rise substantially, and several have argued at the COP meetings to be excused from renewed effort.

They want the burden of adjustment to fall on countries already developed.

In addition to accounting for half of world emissions, the trio of China, Europe and the USA have an additional importance.

They dominate world trade; none of the other significant emitters could survive trade barriers with these three, and they could jointly insist that trading partners toe the line.

But small countries with tiny shares of world emissions are tempted to focus on adaptation, minimising the fallout from continuing failure. Why persist with costly mitigation if others are failing?