A Decade After Paris, Climate Diplomacy Is About Saving Itself

Two weeks of frenzied negotiations over the planet’s faltering fight against climate change had come down to this: a pre-dawn battle over shifting away from fossil fuels.

The European Union, the UK and other nations had drawn a red line on the second-to-last day of COP30 in Brazil, insisting they would walk away rather than accept a deal that failed to advance a prior commitment to transition away from oil, gas and coal. That agreement had been won at COP28 in Dubai, marking the first time the term “fossil fuels” — responsible for the vast bulk of global warming — had ...