Come November, some foreign diplomats and climate scientists will be staying on cruise ships docked in the city’s port terminal during the summit. Others will sleep in Belém’s many love motels, which charge both hourly and overnight rates, and whose rooms often come equipped with risqué artwork, colorful flashing lights, a dance pole, and erotic furniture. As one motel owner told the New York Times, “this might be a bit awkward,” but with some luxury hotel rooms costing as much as $267,000 for an 11-day stay during the conference, love motels might have to make do for some attendees.
Though there has been pressure for a last-minute switch to a different host city, organizers have maintained that Belém remains the only viable location for the COP, which stands for Conference of Parties. “The COP will be in Belém, the leaders’ summit will be in Belém,” COP30 President Andre Correa do Lago said earlier this month. “There is no Plan B.” But does any of this matter? What purpose does a global climate conference serve if the world’s biggest polluters—China and the U.S.—are not participating?
In April, Secretary of State Marco Rubio eliminated the State Department’s Office of Global Change, the federal body responsible for climate-related international diplomacy, and terminated its employees. This doesn’t mean there won’t be American voices heard in Belém, only that those voices won’t represent the federal government. Philip Rossetti, a resident senior fellow on energy at R Street Institute, told TMD, “You might have attendees that aren’t necessarily representing the administration or the government, but they still might … be able to open up dialogue.” In fact, most COP attendees are not part of delegations sent by foreign leaders, but are individuals who work or conduct research in the field of climate policy. “You have a lot of people who aren’t actually affiliated [with the] government,” Rossetti said, “but are going there just to participate in public events and meet other people who are interested in these issues and have their own sort of side chats and side events.”
Still, Brazil’s goal is that, by the time the summit concludes, COP30 won’t go down in the history books as just another annual climate conference. “Let us imagine that, in 2028, the world will look back at 2025 not only as a year of negotiation, but as a moment of global alignment,” Correa do Lago wrote on May 8 in a public letter, “when governments, communities, business and institutions came together to shift the trajectory of humanity’s relationship with the planet.” Kimberly Clausing, a professor in tax law and policy at the University of California, Los Angeles and a National Bureau of Economic Research research associate, told TMD that while COP summits in recent years made “incremental efforts here and there, I think there is some desire to see something more bold coming out of this COP.”
Past COP meetings produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Paris Agreement in 2015, and, just last year, world leaders agreed to adopt a $300 billion annual target in collective contributions for poorer nations to deal with climate change-related damage. But with the Trump White House pulling the federal government’s COP30 delegation, Catherine Wolfram—a professor of energy and applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and former Treasury Department deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics—told TMD that Brazil is “looking for ways to downplay the fact that the U.S. isn’t there,” fearing, in part, that other countries might follow the U.S. out the conference room door. “They definitely don’t want that to happen,” Wolfram added, “and so, I think they’re looking for things they can do to move forward without the U.S.”
The U.S. emitted about 4.91 billion metric tons of carbon emissions in 2023—second to only China’s 11.9 billion—which, as Clausing noted, makes the U.S.’s share of global emissions about 13 percent. “So, getting progress across the board requires a lot more than the United States, and there’s a lot that the rest of the world can do on their own.” But, as true for all negotiations, each party wants a fair deal and assurance that they’re not drawing the short end of the stick. “I think one of the big tensions is, what is fair here?” Clausing said. One source of division is determining which carbon emission metrics to use: the total, cumulative emissions from a single country over time, or that country’s current rate of emissions at present? “It’s not always clear that every country is taking similar sacrifices,” Clausing added. “Some are doing a lot more than others.”
“There’s certainly a leadership vacuum with the United States stepping away,” Clausing said. “This provides an enormous opportunity for China to characterize itself as a country that is very much interested in leading in this space.” In prior COP conferences, the U.S.’s primary gripe with China was its role as a free rider; the country would benefit from global climate deals but bear little to no cost.
“One of the challenges is that, even though the United States is the second largest emitter, there are very few commitments from the world’s largest emitter, which is China,” Rossetti said. “So, from a kind of strategic perspective,” he added, “the U.S. just doesn’t want to do anything if it’s going to put it in a worse position, both economically and strategically, vis-à-vis China.” While China did not send a delegation to COP29 in November 2024, Chinese state-sanctioned media reported in April that President Xi Jinping planned to submit 2035 climate and emission targets before COP30, as required by all Paris Agreement signatory nations.
However, Xi’s renewed environmental stewardship may not be motivated by well-meaning concerns about climate change. One official told Politico, shortly after the administration eliminated the Office of Global Change, that doing so was “just strategically f—ng dumb when it comes to China.” As Wolfram explained, “China has invested a lot in kind of the decarbonization technologies that will be necessary to decarbonize the world.” China holds about 76 percent of total clean tech factory investment globally, and dominates international markets for batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, according to an April report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), the news agency’s research subsidiary. Demand for climate action often leads to demand for clean energy, and China has worked to become the global supplier for clean energy products, with 43 percent of its clean energy exports going to “emerging markets,” per the BNEF report.
“So, even if [China] didn’t care about climate change at all,” Wolfram added, “it might be in their interest to help the rest of the world get there.”
