A UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report released in November 2025 warns that the world is on a path to warm by approximately 2.8C this century if current policies are followed.
At a time when the world’s capitalist governments are completely preoccupied with rivalry between the imperialist superpowers, the military arms race, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, nationalism, trade wars, and a spectacularly authoritarian and anti-science development in the US, the climate issue is one of the first victims.
With Donald Trump in power, the US has done everything it can to give the climate threat the finger. Under the mantra of “drill, baby, drill,” Trump, who was supported in the presidential election by huge contributions from oil companies, has ensured that the US has left the Paris Agreement and, in his much-publicized speech to the UN General Assembly in September, declared the climate issue to be “a hoax.”
Despite the fact that 70 percent of the world’s emissions can be traced to 100 global corporations, Trump has not only opened up oil exploration in nature reserves and on the seabed. He has also abolished 31 environmental protection regulations at home and stopped the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from even reporting on emissions from the US’s largest sources of emissions. As Politico and other media outlets have reported, the Department of Energy has even been banned from using words such as “climate change,” “green,” “emissions,” “energy transition,” “sustainability,” “clean or dirty energy,” and “carbon/CO2 footprint.”
This, as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has cheerfully stated, drives “a stake through the heart of the climate change religion.”
Trump’s trade war has also secured a series of agreements on increased exports of oil and natural gas from the US, not least to Europe. Under threat of sanctions from the US and opposition from Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other oil-producing countries, a UN-led attempt to reach an international agreement on reducing emissions from global shipping within the International Maritime Organization (IMO) was halted as recently as October. This would have meant the first global tax on carbon dioxide emissions. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called this a “huge victory for the White House.”
After Trump’s frontal attack on everything related to climate policy, the banks and oil and gas companies that pretended to play along for a few years after the 2015 Paris Agreement have quickly and brutally returned to “business as usual.” Despite the International Energy Agency (IEA) stating that no new oil and gas fields can be opened if the Paris Agreement targets are to be met, there has been a significant increase in investment in fossil fuels, supported by the world’s banks. As a result, oil and gas production, led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Norway, will continue to increase in the coming years, while the US and Canada will mainly increase natural gas production and China and India will mainly increase coal production.
Russia, for its part, is trying to circumvent sanctions by increasing exports to China and India to finance its war in Ukraine.
When American banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and the whole of Wall Street, saw which way the wind was blowing after Donald Trump’s election victory, they quickly jumped ship from the so-called Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), which was launched at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. There, they committed to aligning their operations with the Paris Agreement. Canadian, Asian, and European banks such as HSBC, UBS, and Barclays quickly followed suit, until the NZBA was quietly shut down last month.
In the UK, where oil company BP has dumped its supposedly green ambitions, Keir Starmer’s Labour government is also expected to approve two new oil fields in the North Sea, Rosebank and Jackdaw, despite a Scottish court declaring them illegal. In Norway, where 100 new licenses have been granted in recent years, investment in oil and gas will reach a new record in 2025.
Even the major Swedish banks Nordea, SEB, and the AP7 pension fund have continued to invest heavily in new Norwegian oil. According to a review by Fair Finance Guide and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, Nordea has also removed previous restrictions on lending to particularly climate-damaging activities such as oil sands, shale oil, and exploration in the northern Arctic.
Incidentally, the Swedish oil family Lundin is a major shareholder in the oil company AkerBP, which has just discovered a huge new oil field in the Yggdrasil area of the Norwegian North Sea – according to AkerBP’s CEO, one of the largest commercial discoveries in a decade.
Although everyone knows that this paves the way for future climate disasters, investments already made and capitalism’s competition-driven profit requirements are forcing capital owners to act until the very end according to the same motto that Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince is said to have uttered in the summer of 2007, just before the subprime mortgage market blew up the financial system: “As long as the music is playing, you have to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” This is made possible by the lack of massive popular and political resistance.
Few of the world’s media outlets have even bothered to report on the UN Climate Summit 2025, held shortly after the General Assembly meeting where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on world governments to close the yawning gap to the Paris Agreement targets at COP30 in Brazil.
Shortly before the opening of COP30, only a third of the world’s states have yet managed to present their national contributions to updated targets that should have been submitted long ago. Of those that have done so and are included in the count, the US has withdrawn.
Among those that have not yet managed to do so are the EU, which for decades has paraded as the climate leader of the capitalist world, and India. If the new climate plans submitted so far are implemented, which is unlikely, global emissions could be reduced by 17% by 2035 compared to 2019, according to a brand-new UN report.
But to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to two degrees, a 60% reduction is needed. None of the UN chief’s five priority measures have made any progress that comes close to what is required.
Guterres’ call for a “supercharge” of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, in line with the COP28 statement in Dubai on a “transition away” from fossil fuels, has had almost no effect. Despite rapid development of solar, wind, and electric cars, primarily in China, which is simultaneously building many new coal-fired power plants, this is not enough to break the capitalist world’s dependence on fossil fuels. The picture is equally bleak when it comes to “drastically reducing methane emissions.”
Nor is the world anywhere near the goal of “halting deforestation by 2030,” the destruction of the largest carbon sinks in land-based ecosystems. In Europe, logging is on the rise.
There is little prospect of “climate justice” for developing countries, in the form of financial support for debt relief, contributions to the “loss and damage fund”, or climate adaptation, which will be a central issue for the world’s poor countries at COP30, since the US left the Paris Agreement and phased out USAID. Despite increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters, most recently manifested by Hurricane Melissa’s rampage in Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti, aid is being cut sharply in the shadow of the arms race, even from European countries such as Germany, France, and Sweden.
“The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs”, Guterres admits to the Guardian. To the Amazon-based news organization Sumaúma, he emphasizes the need for a decisive shift.
But despite the fact that, according to the European State of the Climate 2024, Europe is the fastest warming continent, with 413,000 people severely affected by storms and floods, 335 deaths and 42,000 people affected by fires, the EU is undergoing a right-wing-driven loosening of the union’s already hopelessly inadequate “Green Deal”. All to meet the demands of companies for deregulation, clearly backed by the US, and increased competitiveness.
Yet even in the financial world, which is currently dumping its own low climate targets, there is no shortage of warnings about the economic consequences of climate disasters.
“The world is rapidly approaching temperature levels where insurance companies will no longer be able to offer protection for many climate risks,” says Günther Thallinger, board member of Allianz SE, one of the world’s largest insurance companies. Without insurance, which is already being withdrawn in some places, many other financial services will become unprofitable, from mortgages to investments.
COP30 was supposed to be a particularly important stage in the annual negotiations under the UN Climate Convention, where new and enhanced national climate plans would be developed, a global framework for climate adaptation would be established, and a new fund to protect tropical forests (TFFF) would be created. But with the 1.5-degree target already shattered, the governments of poor countries in particular have shifted their focus to demands for financial support for adaptation and reconstruction after climate disasters.
But even on that point, they are likely to be disappointed. As Pakistani climate expert Ali T. Sheikh has commented, the climate is the first victim of militarism. “The axe will fall on climate finance,” he said. “It will turn the world upside down and undo 30 years of climate cooperation since the first COP.”
Where governments fail, however, the new alarm raised by scientists and the thousands of participants from climate movements and indigenous peoples, who for the first time in several years will make their way to the negotiations in the heart of the Amazon, may serve as a wake-up call after several years of closed summits in authoritarian states. This can contribute to give new life to climate protests where Fridays for Future was interrupted by the pandemic.
Clearly inspired by the Gaza flotilla, indigenous leaders from across Latin America have boarded a flotilla from the banks of the Napo River in Coca, Ecuador, bound for Belém, Brazil, with the goal of reaching the UN climate summit. According to Democracy Now, members of the so-called Yaku Mama Amazon flotilla are demanding an end to fossil fuels, protection of indigenous territories and ecosystems from oil, mining, and industrial agriculture, and a ban on fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon rainforest.
For them, it is enraging that Brazilian President Lula da Silva himself has given hypocrisy a new face by defending the permit for new oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon River with the argument that it is necessary to finance the transition to green energy.
In the shadow of warmongering and right-wing radicalization, awareness will sooner or later grow of the need for an anti-capitalist mass movement that can unite young and old climate and peace activists, trade unions, indigenous peoples, and social movements.
More and more people will realize the need to challenge the power of banks, big business, billionaires, and warmongers over the economy in order to begin a democratically planned and fundamental transformation of both production and how we live in balance with nature. The socialist insight that we cannot control and democratically plan what we do not own together, will grow.
