Copyright irishmirror
It's probably for the best that Donald Trump has opted out of the global climate summit taking place in Brazil next week. He wouldn’t approve of the dress code for one thing. As thousands of world leaders and delegates prepare to descend on the city of Belém in the Amazon, organisers issued this advisory: “The Government of Brazil wishes to inform all participants that, due to the high temperatures and humidity in Belém, formal business attire will not be required. “To ensure everyone’s comfort, the recommended dress code for the COP 30 is smart casual.” You can hear the cries from the orange man baby’s hand-picked press corps: “Do these tree huggers even own a suit!” It’s also perhaps no harm that delegates will feel the heat at Cop 30 . It’s 10 years since the nations of the world met in Paris and fixed 1.5 degrees of warming as the limit to avoid the worst impacts of a climate catastrophe . For the fossil fuel industry that has been a decade of business as usual that has seen the temperature rise shatter 1.3 degrees and counting. It has been a decade of record-breaking heat, year after year. Researchers who looked at 213 heatwaves that occurred this century across 63 countries found they had been all made more likely and more extreme by the fossil fuel industry. Fourteen companies alone polluted enough to individually cause over 50 of them. These include Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell. The usual suspects behind the greatest organised crime spree in history. The European Union estimated the cost of climate driven disaster over the past 40 years to be €500 billion and 138,000 deaths. Last year the US experienced 27 confirmed climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each. These included one drought, a flood, 19 severe storms, five tropical cyclones and a wildfire. By 2050 the world economic forum predicts the cost of disasters to the global economy will be over a trillion a year. Surveys show an overwhelming majority of 89 percent of the world’s public want their governments to do more to tackle the climate crisis. But unfortunately that requires depending on the richest one percent to do the right thing. Don’t hold your breath. If this Cop is to represent the moment the world changed course it won’t be because of leadership in the cabinet and board rooms. It will be down to another concept which the organisers have adopted from indigenous South American culture as their conference theme - Mutirão’ - in which the many come together to help each other - and themselves - in times of need. In Ireland we have a similar idea, we know it as ‘Meitheal’, an ancient system of cooperative community solidarity. The Cop30 call is for a ‘Global Mutirão’ that could trigger a transformative mobilization across borders. By one estimation it would need around a billion people to succeed. A billion people who simply by their choices as citizens and consumers could force the transition away from fossil fuels, that is already underway, to an unstoppable tipping point. That is what the oil barons and their corporate capos and political honchos fear more than a gathering of governments that they can cajole and buy off. If the Amazon seems a bit distant from our everyday reality, Brazil has another universal symbol of what’s at stake. In the home of the Samba Kings of the beautiful game, they may have noticed a ‘Football for the Future’ report ahead of Trump’s 2026 World Cup . it found that 14 of the 16 host cities are already exceeding “safe-play thresholds” for extreme heat, unplayable rainfall, and flooding. In England, the home of football, 120,00 grassroots matches are now cancelled every year due to heavier rains and worsening storms. More people are starting to get that this fight is not about giving up on things and traditions we love as they’ve been told. It’s about saving them. And that’s going to require showing some serious ‘meitheal’. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here
