Black Alliance for Peace Questions the Relevance and Efficacy of the Conference of Parties (COP) Following its 30th Summit

Black Alliance for Peace Questions the Relevance and Efficacy of the Conference of Parties (COP) Following its 30th Summit 

COP 30 Represents the Latest Failure of Nation States and the United Nations to Effectively Address the Climate Crisis and its Root Causes

For Immediate Release 

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Nov 24, 2025 - The failure of the Conference of Parties’ (COP) 30th annual climate change summit to produce an agreement and requisite interventions to address an accelerating and worsening climate crisis places those most impacted by it - oppressed and colonized people in the Global South - in a cauldron of interlinked calamities, while also raising serious questions about the legitimacy and efficacy of COP summits. 

While it’s unacceptable that a global climate summit could not even agree on language calling for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, it’s not surprising given the fact that over 1600 lobbyists and executives representing Big Oil cartels and their interests attended COP 30. On this front, Black Alliance for Peace member and Co-lead of our Climate, Environment, and Militarism Initiative, Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, who was in Brazil for the summit, stated: 

“The legitimacy of COP 30 was put into question from the outset by the very fact that some of the biggest culprits of climate change and the lives it has and will take were allowed to take part and influence the discussions and decisions of the summit. The ubiquitous presence of these lobbyists clearly contaminated the process in the same way their fossil fuel products are contaminating our planet and public health. And while it’s encouraging that we’re leaving Brazil with a Just Transition framework for the first time in the COP’s history, I wonder how this framework can commence if there’s no commitment to phasing out fossil fuels - what are we ‘transitioning’ from exactly…it’s kind of like aiming to play a soccer match without any balls.”  

The fact that COP 30 concluded without agreement on the phase-out of fossil fuels all but guarantees that the 1.5 and 2.0 degree Celsius thresholds set in the Paris Agreement of COP 21 will be breached in the next 20 to 100 years, respectively, if not sooner.   For this reason, equity-focused climate finance is key and must be funded by the wealthiest nations to enable Global South nations to adapt to and mitigate climate change impacts. On this point, the COP 30 agreement again fails to deliver as wealthy nations could only agree on allocating $120 billion per year in a program that won’t even commence until 2035.  

“This tawdry amount of money is a drop in the bucket and shows that Global South nations and the poor are not a priority for the COP or wealthy nations who, in many cases, intentionally underdeveloped and continue to extract from Global South nations,” noted Ajamu Barack, founder of Black Alliance for Peace and current Director of the North South Project for People’s Centered Human Rights who was also on location at COP 30.

Baraka continued, “when you consider the fact that the United States alone has spent more money on wars that increase global emissions than the global community intends to spend on adaptation due to these emissions precipitously warming the planet and exacerbating extreme weather events, it’s clear the $120 billion per year for climate adaptation is unserious. The United States sent the State of Israel more than $16 billion over the last year to fund its genocidal war machine against Palestine, another $20 billion to Argentina, and an estimated $123 billion to Ukraine for a fossil-fueled military adventure in Eastern Europe. This further demonstrates the priorities of Global North nations and why future COP summits must not ignore the issue of militarism and war in the context of climate change.”  

The Black Alliance for Peace is appalled that key goals of African peoples globally, including the demand to form a stand-alone “Afro Descendant constituency” within the UNFCCC, were rejected and jettisoned from consideration in Brazil, a nation with the most African/Black peoples in the Western Hemisphere. Instead, the phrase “people of African descent” appears only once in the entire COP 30 agreement. This, despite the United Nations’ Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner just last year declaring the beginning of the Second International Decade for People of African Descent and renewing calls for “recognition, justice, and development” for Afro Descendant peoples. Clearly, COP 30 ascribes to the same white supremacist ideology that denies the humanity and self-determination of African/Black people and is also a root cause of the climate crisis.  COP 30 can’t be a part of the solutions until it ceases to be part of the problem. 

Given the self-inflicted inadequacies of COP and the United Nations, the Black Alliance for Peace understands the specious agreement that emerged from COP 30 as an exercise in abject futility. As a result, BAP calls on all colonized and oppressed people of the Global South –as well as those residing in Global North nations, who also disproportionately shoulder and absorb the worst impacts of the environmental and climate crisis to undertake determined collective struggle to develop and implement a climate and environmental liberation framework, which that nation states, international bodies like COP and the United Nations, and even certain so-called Civil Society Organizations are not fit or willing enough to engender. 

This is why we produced our “Perspective on Climate, Environment, and Militarism and why we proudly endorsed the declaration produced by the People’s Summit, a global movement of the grassroots who understood that an alternative space to convene and strategize was a requisite intervention given the demonstrated inadequacies of COP 30. BAP salutes the People’s Summit for providing a clear juxtaposition between its people-centered, grassroots-led processes and deliberations versus those of COP 30, which were demonstrably influenced by corporations and the desire to maintain the status quo of global racial capitalism. 

The People’s Summit declaration, which, in part states, “Our worldview is guided by popular internationalism, with exchanges of knowledge and wisdom that build bonds of solidarity, struggle and cooperation among our peoples,” adroitly makes the connections between the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the U.S. military build up off the coast of Venezuela, racial capitalism, militarism, fascism and the climate crisis. It also calls on global movements of the oppressed to come together in the vein of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which once proclaimed,  “The liberation movements of the world should realize the basic international facts which govern this period of history.”

To this end, the Black Alliance for Peace calls on all oppressed and colonized peoples of the Global South to embrace the collective struggle embodied in the People’s Summit declaration, our Perspective for Climate, Environment and Militarism, and our accompanying movement offering. The confluence of our politics in this regard will represent a significant step in a larger campaign to commence a global climate and environmental liberation initiative that can then form a major intervention point at future COP summits, which is the only way the COP process will ever have any chance of containing even a modicum of relevancy and efficacy. 

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) seeks to recapture and redevelop the historic anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical Black movement. Our emerging Climate, Environment, and Militarism work is connected to both BAP’s core campaign “No Compromise No Retreat: Defeat the War Against African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad” & the North/South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights.

Banner image: Rear view of several speakers facing a crowd of hundreds at a protest rally at COP 30 People’s Summit, courtesy viacampesina.org.

Los Angeles Fires: The Santa Ana Blowback of Capitalist Climate Change Neglect

Los Angeles Fires: The Santa Ana Blowback of Capitalist Climate Change Neglect 

The incendiary cataclysms in Los Angeles, California remind us that the root cause of the climate crisis exacerbating the fires spreading throughout that city and surrounding areas is fossil fuel production emblematic of runaway capitalism fueled by white “supremacy” ideology, patriarchy, and colonization. And while it’s easy to focus solely on the fires, it’s important to note that the associated smoke will be the main culprit in the loss of life due to environmental racism that has assaulted the public health of Black, Brown, Indigenous and all poor and working class people in Los Angeles and throughout the country. As revealed during the height of the Covid pandemic, Black and Indigenous peoples suffered a higher morbidity rate due to decades of exposure to poisoned air and the intentional siting of pollutive industries and operations in our communities from Los Angeles, to the Bronx, and Cancer Alley in Louisiana. These communities remain at high risk because what’s happening in Los Angeles, won’t stay in Los Angeles - the smoke generated from these fires will traverse our communities as it travels eastward, and exacerbates existing public health emergencies that are consistently overlooked and ignored by lawmakers representing both the corporate Democrat and Republican political parties and their wealthy acolytes. 

To this end, while we sympathize with those who have lost their homes in affluent communities like the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and the Hollywood Hills, we empathize with communities that will suffer long term public health impacts, including, but not limited to, respiratory and other illnesses due to years of being treated as energy and economic sacrifice zones. This pattern was most recently exemplified by the environmental travesty of New York City’s congestion pricing program, which will divert high volumes of traffic to poor, Black and Brown communities in the Bronx and Staten Island, thereby sacrificing them to accommodate affluent communities in Manhattan.  

Will President Biden, the incoming Trump administration,  and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency whose racism, classism and contempt for the poor is well documented, consider environmental justice communities across the country being choked out by smoke they had no hand in creating while billions of dollars are doled out to primarily accommodate wealthy people? It should be noted that many of these wealthy people  benefit from and advocate for the capitalist system that fuels and maintains these crises.  These are the kinds of questions BAP must perpetually ask as a principled and radical Black formation; and that we must ask as a people who understand confronting and dismantling the climate crisis requires confronting and dismantling racialized and classist capitalism - hence why we refer to climate change as the racial/class capitalocene. 

Finally, it is not lost upon BAP that, very recently, many of the people enlisted to fight California wildfires were incarcerated people, some of whose prison sentences were extended by soon to be former Vice President, Kamala Harris when she served as Attorney General of California. This was an effort to generate cheap labor from lives she and far too many others deem expendable and disposable. There is an axiomatic nexus between how these inmates/political prisoners are treated and how Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor communities are treated in the context of the climate crisis. This nexus extends to the treatment of Palestinian people who continue to be dehumanized and exterminated while also being displaced from their homelands due to an inferno of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and militarism. Such is the pathology of settler colonialism, which too many still refuse to connect with environmental degradation and the climate crisis in the United States.

We must and will continue making these requisite connections and intersections as we develop a multi racial/multi ethnic poor and working class response to this latest episode of the racial/class capitalocene’s atlas of destruction. 

No Compromise! 

No Retreat!

Banner photo: Homes on fire and palm trees blowing in wind during LA fire, courtesy bbc.com/weather.