The story of this year’s United Nations Conference of Parties (COP), the world’s largest climate conference, sounds like something written by The Onion:

• 13 leaders from the largest polluting nations skipped out this year; Biden, Putin, Xi, and Macron were all no-shows. 
• The host nation, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate: 95% of its exports are oil and gas. 
• COP29’s chief executive, Elnur Soltanov, was secretly filmed making fossil fuel deals during the conference. 
• The event’s “official partners” were businesses tied to Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president, including the state-owned oil and gas company, SOCAR, and an Azeri cargo airline company. 
• For the third year in a row, it took place in a country with severe restrictions on protesting, a shoddy human rights track record, and sketchy definitions of a “free press.”
• Oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered the total delegate count from the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries. If it were a nation, the fossil fuel industry would’ve been the 4th largest delegation at COP, only behind Azerbaijan, Brazil, and Turkey.
• Papua New Guinea’s delegation refused to go altogether, as their leaders now view COP for what it truly is: “a total waste of time.” They spoke on behalf of smaller Oceanic nations like Tuvalu, which—with the way the climate crisis is unfolding—could be completely underwater in less than 30 years.

COP29 seemed to be a time-waster for everybody: the political leaders who couldn’t bother to show up and even pretend to care about the environment, the hosts who are in bed with the very industries killing the planet, and for the rest of the world, whose poor and working classes need significant, fundamental, earth-shattering system change now, not later. 

This year’s conference, the faces that showed and the ones that didn’t, reveal an abandonment of even discussing fighting climate change. Talks were mainly focused on financing mitigation, not concrete solutions with strict deadlines or attempts to halt rising ocean temperatures. The end of neoliberalism and the rise of an era of inter-imperialist conflict has brought a ramping up of military spending at the expense of even meager climate promises. 

While each country’s representatives fought over who’s going to pay for global warming, it’s clear that the world’s working class has already started footing the bill. Working people are threatened by climate change at this very moment, have suffered multiple climate crises in the last year alone, and billionaires and the politicians they fund are merely inconvenienced.

The billionaire class is benefiting from a capitalist system that will forever fail to address any meaningful resolution coming out of any climate conference. Why? Because capitalism doesn’t operate on humans’ and nature’s needs being met. It operates on the need for profits to be made. While working people drown in North Carolina, lose their homes to floods in Spain, and die in historic heat waves in India, the super rich are planning out space colonies on Mars. If we’re looking for a system to save us, capitalism will always be the system that fails in that regard.

And COP29 is just another symbol of that failure. So were the US elections. If Biden wasn’t at COP29, Trump certainly won’t be at COP30. We were handed two presidential options that offered nothing positive in the fight against climate change, and Trump’s victory threatens demoralization and normalizing denial around the state of the planet. 

After this unserious conference and the US elections, it’s clear we need to build a fighting movement in the streets. Three hundred International Socialist Alternative members were at COP26 in Scotland, where over 100,000 people marched in protest and demanded real change. We need more of that. We need school walkouts and strikes to disrupt business as usual. We need to be politically independent; capitalist parties will never call for an end to fossil fuels because they’re bankrolled by oil barons and gearing up for even more wars. And whatever independent political party we build has to be made up of and run by workers and young people—the people who have an interest in saving the planet from mass death and destruction. 

The capitalist system caused this crisis and has proven itself incapable of solving it. We need a socialist alternative for people and the planet, where a rational, planned economy can fund a rapid transition to green energy. We have the resources and technology to solve and reverse climate change—they’re just being misused by the capitalist class. It’s time to build an environmental movement independent from corporate parties. It’s time to fight for a socialist world.