Elite capture and fossil lies: Time for climate realism and a fair-shares reset
A new civil-society report, Inequity, Inequality, Inaction, delivers a stark verdict: three decades after the Rio Earth Summit and a decade on from the Paris Agreement, governments are still protecting profits over people - shielded by elite capture and fossil-fuel disinformation. Climate cooperation is breaking down, and COP30 must deliver a fair-shares reset rooted in justice, not greed. News Climate Action Network
The report shows that Global North countries have failed to cut emissions and are still expanding oil and gas, while also failing to deliver promised finance. The global finance system is failing too: instead of providing public funds at the scale needed, it traps many countries in debt and dependence. While the Global South is closer to meeting its fair share, it still needs to take more effective climate action but is all too often held back by this debt and lack of funds. Climate cooperation is paralyzed, and global goals will remain out of reach unless COP30 delivers a reset - moving from loans to grants, from profit-driven finance to public support that enables countries to invest in clean energy, resilience, and jobs.
The collapse of ambition at COP29 in Baku left trust in ruins and cooperation stalled. The Global South’s calls for trillions in real public finance were met with token pledges and false accounting, leaving the poorest nations trapped between debt and disaster. COP30 in Belém is therefore more than another negotiation - it is a chance to rebuild trust, deliver fair shares, and keep climate ambition alive.
The report also warns that inequality within countries is driving the crisis. The global rich can shield themselves from many climate impacts while pushing the costs of transition and disaster onto workers and overstretched public systems. This elite capture - particularly by fossil fuel interests - of crucial political processes is deepening injustice, fuelling political paralysis, and blocking the stronger action needed to keep us within climate limits. This paralysis extends to militarized conflicts that divert trillions from climate action - COP30 must redirect those resources to peace and genuine multilateral cooperation.
In the face of this systemic failure, incrementalism is obsolete. COP30 must confront this political reality with a new climate realism - one that pushes ahead with rapid transformative change anchored in equity, justice, and cooperation.
Climate failure isn’t about a lack of ambition - it’s about injustice. COP30 must prove that ambition and justice are not opposites but inseparable: only fair shares can unlock the scale of action needed.
What COP30 must deliver
The report identifies three breakthroughs COP30 must achieve:
1. Fair-shares NDCs: clear commitments on finance and fossil fuel phaseout.
2. A finance reset: a radical overhaul of international financial architecture, shifting from debt and loans to substantial public, grant-based support, including debt cancellation and global taxation.
3. Just transition frameworks: putting workers, women, youth, and Indigenous peoples at the center, breaking elite capture through progressive taxes and zero-carbon economic shifts, while redirecting militarized resources towards peace, cooperation, and strengthened democratic institutions and human rights law, with protection for jobs, schools, healthcare, housing, and transport.
Tasneem Essop, Executive Director, Climate Action Network International, said: “Climate ambition and climate justice are not competing visions - they are one and the same. But both are being strangled by elite capture and fossil lies. Belém must break that grip, reset cooperation on fair shares, and put power back in the hands of people and communities. The Global North must end its wealth hoarding and deliver its overdue debt - in trillions for climate finance, in a rapid fossil-fuel phaseout, and in restoring trust through real solidarity, not empty rhetoric.”
