Stop bemoaning this year’s COP outcome: The real let-down is a crisis of national-level leadership

That assessment confuses where we’re going wrong on climate, however—and what we’re getting right.

Take the weird refusal to mention ‘fossil fuels’ in the agreement. That’s not quite the disaster it appears to be. Given that oil exporters could veto every word of the text, it’s remarkable that such references ever made it through the drafting process. The fact that they are now balking more aggressively at naming the problem we all face is a sign not of the failure of the energy transition, but of its success.

The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) central expectation for fossil fuel consumption in 2050 has been cut by 12% since the F-words were first officially mentioned at CoP-26 in Glasgow four years ago. Consumption of coal in the two biggest users, China and India, has fallen this year. These are far more substantive outcomes than the terminology of a United Nations document.

That’s not to tell a triumphal story on the progress of climate policy in 2025—just that the real problems are far away from UN conference halls.

If you want to understand what we are really doing wrong, look instead at an obscure page on a UN website where governments lodge their emissions-reduction plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. Better still, go to Climate Action Tracker, a project that tries to simplify these jargonistic documents.

These NDCs are arguably the most important element of the Paris Agreement—the 2015 deal under which every country agreed for the first time to limit their greenhouse gas pollution. They’re meant to set verifiable targets that can be measured against the best available science and get progressively more ambitious over time. There’s good evidence that governments which actually commit to such goals achieve them.

The latest list of plans, laying out where emissions will be in 2035, were intended to be a centerpiece of CoP-30. They fall far short of what is needed. Of the 10 biggest polluters accounting for three-quarters of carbon emissions, just two—the EU and Japan—have submitted documents with any hope of being enacted.

The Biden administration put in a US plan six weeks after President Donald Trump was elected, rendering the entire effort futile on delivery. India, Iran, Saudi Arabia and South Korea still haven’t made their proposals. China, Russia and Indonesia have presented roadmaps so timid, they’d be able to increase emissions substantially from current levels and still claim they hit the mark.

This lacklustre effort is very in keeping with the tenor of politics in 2025. Whether they’re promising sanctions in retaliation for TV ads, threatening to behead a foreign leader, invading their neighbours or bombing apartment blocks into rubble, the authoritarians in charge of the world’s major powers don’t like to sign on to anything these days that constrains them.

It’s citizens who will ultimately decide the path of the future—and there, the picture is brighter. At times, they’re taking the energy transition into their own hands—Pakistani households quitting a fossil-fired grid to use cheaper solar instead or Turkish drivers switching to electric vehicles faster than Americans or Australians.

At other times, they’re the ones responsible for implementing policies, delivering far better outcomes than their leaders would have you believe. For all you might have read about gas turbines and coal plants being lined up to power America’s data-centre explosion, 10 months into the Trump administration, just 11% of the generating capacity under construction is based on fossil fuels. At still other times, they find themselves in the path of the devastating effects of climate change itself.

Most of the technology we’ll need to solve this problem is already in our hands and cheaper than the alternative, if only we’d remove the morass of barriers and regulation we have erected to slow its advance. Our problem is that the world’s leaders are some of the last to see that.

Plenty of people of all generations are aware of the benefits of global action to halt climate change. But with an average age of 69, the headstrong leaders of the 10 big emitters have rarely had less of a stake in the state of things when the current crop of NDCs matures in 2035. Almost half the world’s population is younger than 30. It’s up to the rest of us to guide the world to a better course. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy.