With the end of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil's Amazonian hub of Belém, activists are dispersing after two weeks of rainforest photo ops, protest disruptions, and impassioned speeches on slashing carbon emissions.
But participants sidestepped the stark reality: The actions of Western nations hold diminishing sway over the trajectory of global warming.
For decades now, western governments, especially in Europe, have prioritised carbon cuts over higher economic growth, spending trillions of dollars to convince consumers to adopt electric cars and accept more expensive, less reliable wind and solar power. All these expensive efforts are barely making a dent.
The global decarbonisation rate (measured as CO₂ emissions over GDP) has remained roughly constant since the 1960s, with no change after the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Global emissions have skyrocketed, reaching a new record high in 2024.
Despite this, climate campaigners are unrealistically demanding that the world quadruple its decarbonisation rate.
Why are emissions still increasing when the EU and the US spent more than $700 billion in 2024 on green investments such as solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, hydrogen, electric cars, and power grids? Because rich world emissions matter very little for climate change in the 21st century.
Future emissions
While the West dominated emissions in previous centuries, the vast amount of future emissions will come from China, India, Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and many other countries clambering out of poverty.
One recent scenario shows that with current policies, just 13 per cent of CO₂ emissions over the rest of this century will come from the mostly rich Western countries of the OECD.
The West’s pledge of achieving net-zero by 2050 will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars and do little.
Most likely, the policy will simply shift more energy-intensive production to the rest of the world with little overall impact on emissions—just as we have seen electric car battery manufacturing shift to China’s coal-powered economy.
If rich countries try to fix this problem with carbon border taxes, the costs will escalate further for both rich and poor countries, while robbing the poor of the opportunity for export-driven growth.
If we super-optimistically assume the West ends up actually eliminating all its own emissions without further leakage by 2050, global CO₂ emissions over the century will be reduced by just eight per cent.
The resulting reduction in global temperature rise is minuscule when run through the United Nations’ own climate model.
By 2050, the West will have reduced the global temperature rise by just 0.02°C. Even by the end of the century, temperature rise will be reduced by less than 0.1°C.
Innovation
The West's message of self-sacrifice will not go far in countries that desperately want energy-driven development.
Poorer nations don’t want to emulate Germany’s huge climate-driven debt, Spain’s green blackouts, or the UK’s record-setting electricity prices.
There is a cheaper and much more efficient approach: innovation.
Throughout history, humanity has not tackled major challenges through restrictions, but by innovating.
When air pollution enveloped Los Angeles in the 1950s, we didn’t ban cars but developed the catalytic converter that made them cleaner.
When much of the world was starving in the 1960s, we didn’t force everyone to eat less, but innovated higher-yielding crops.
Now we need similar breakthroughs for green energy—but the world is all but ignoring innovation. In 1980, after the oil price shocks, the rich world spent more than eight cents of every $100 of GDP on green R&D to find energy alternatives.
As fossil fuels became cheap, investment dropped. When climate concerns grew, in our dash to subsidise inefficient solar and wind, we ignored innovation.
By 2023, the rich world was still spending less than four cents out of every $100 of GDP. Total rich world spending adds up to just $27 billion — less than two per cent of overall green spending.
The West should increase this to around $100 billion a year.
This would enable a focus on breakthroughs in many potential technologies.
We could invest to innovate fourth-generation nuclear with small, modular, type-approved reactors, or boost green hydrogen production along with water purification, or research next-generation battery technology, CO₂-free oil harvested from algae, as well as CO₂ extraction, fusion, second-generation biofuels, and thousands of other possibilities.
None of these technologies are currently efficient, but innovation only needs to make one or a few better than fossil fuels, and all nations will switch.
Moreover, innovation will cost a tiny fraction of current and future net-zero spending, so green R&D allows us to do much more while spending much less.
Unfortunately, the leaders who jetted into Brazil’s rainforest for the climate summit remain fixated on mandates and subsidies, missing the power of smart R&D.
It's time for the West to recognise its limited leverage and pivot from wasteful spending to game-changing tech investments that actually deliver results.
The writer is President, Copenhagen Consensus/Visiting Fellow, Stanford University's Hoover Institution/author of False Alarm and Best Things First.
