COP30 concluded with familiar promises of technological solutions like renewable energy and carbon capture.
These recycled ideas fail to address systemic issues.
The persistent focus on technology obscures critical questions about emission reductions and social responsibility.
COP30 has concluded, and the pattern is grimly familiar. The same technologies dominate climate discourse — renewable energy innovations, carbon capture, AI-powered solutions, sustainable cooling systems — promising salvation from climate crisis.
These are not new solutions emerging at COP30; they are recycled promises that have appeared at every COP for years, particularly the last four conferences. The technology list barely changes; only the conference location does.
Yet this persistent techno-optimism obscures critical questions: Which countries must actually reduce emissions? Which social segments bear responsibility? And fundamentally, can technology substitute for the systemic change that negotiations perpetually avoid?
Renewable energy expansion is essential but insufficient — a reality COPs acknowledge rhetorically while ignoring in practice. Negotiations still assume solar and wind can replace fossil fuels at current consumption levels.
Yet global energy demand keeps rising even as renewable capacity expands; renewables largely add to, rather than displace, fossil fuels. Demand reduction receives little attention because it threatens dominant growth models and corporate profits. Technologies sustaining high consumption remain politically acceptable; systemic changes requiring less consumption remain politically impossible.
Cooling technologies expose these limits starkly. Air conditioning creates feedback loops — cooling indoors while heating outdoors — intensifying urban heat islands. More fundamentally, conventional AC systems fail beyond 50–55°C, thresholds increasingly reached during heatwaves in South Asia and the Middle East. These thermodynamic limits are well known, yet COPs persist in presenting mechanical cooling as adaptation.
This framing turns heat from a collective crisis into an individual consumer problem, where survival depends on purchasing power. Outdoor workers, informal settlers and agricultural labourers — those most exposed — often lack access to cooling.
Passive cooling alternatives work with nature rather than against it: urban forests, shaded public spaces, water bodies, green roofs, thick-walled buildings and natural ventilation. These approaches require minimal energy, benefit all income groups, and remain effective when mechanical cooling fails. Despite centuries of evidence and repeated advocacy at COPs, they remain marginal because they demand systemic urban reform and long-term public investment — not profitable product sales.
Carbon capture and storage follows a similar pattern. Promoted for over a decade, CCS remains expensive, energy-intensive and limited in scale, while creating moral hazard by legitimising continued fossil fuel extraction. Each COP repeats the promise; each delivers delay.
Artificial intelligence is the newest technological fixation. While useful for modelling, AI is energy-intensive and risks deepening inequalities, as poorer regions lack the infrastructure to benefit — contradictions visible at successive COPs and consistently ignored.
Net zero has been endlessly refined and repackaged at recent COPs, yet it remains a dangerous fraud that enables continued emissions under the guise of climate action.
From COP26 through COP30, the script is unchanged: “net” permits ongoing emissions to be offset by claimed removals, substituting accounting tricks for real reductions. Fossil fuel companies enthusiastically endorse net-zero targets precisely because they allow continued extraction and combustion today, while deferring responsibility to speculative future carbon removal.
Carbon offset markets, promoted at every COP as climate finance, suffer the same chronic failures: credits for forests never at risk, renewable projects that would have happened anyway, unverifiable additionality, and impermanent removals reversed by fire or degradation.
A tonne of fossil carbon emitted is permanent; a tonne “removed” is uncertain, temporary, and often fictional. This asymmetry is well documented — and repeatedly ignored.
The atmosphere responds to absolute concentrations, not net accounts. Emitting 100 units while claiming to remove 100 is not the same as emitting zero.
The urgent task is absolute emission cuts — ending fossil fuel extraction — not net-zero accounting that entrenches business-as-usual. Yet since Paris, net zero has been strengthened while real reductions are deferred to distant 2050–2060 targets, shifting risk and responsibility onto future generations.
COP negotiations formally recognise foundational principles — polluter pays, equity, common but differentiated responsibilities, and transparency. Yet several equally critical concepts remain absent across COP26 to COP30.
Limits to growth are largely ignored. Negotiations assume perpetual economic growth, promising decoupling through efficiency while sidelining planetary boundaries and resource limits. Degrowth perspectives — especially relevant for high-income countries that must reduce material and energy throughput — receive no serious consideration. Growth itself remains unquestioned.
The precautionary principle is similarly marginalised. In the face of uncertainty, precaution should guide climate action, particularly around geoengineering, large-scale carbon capture and storage, and ecosystem-level genetic interventions. Instead, negotiations consistently favour techno-optimism over caution.
Despite decades of evidence that small is beautiful, COPs privilege gigawatt-scale, centralised infrastructure and industrial solutions. Community-scale, context-specific, human-centred technologies remain peripheral.
Climate policy also fails to reflect that nature works in cycles. While industrial systems remain linear — extract, produce, dispose — regenerative and circular approaches aligned with ecological cycles receive far less attention than technological fixes.
Finally, inter-generational equity is weakly addressed. Long-term carbon storage creates risks and liabilities extending centuries into the future, yet the ethical burden placed on future generations is scarcely debated.
Technology discussions cannot be separated from politics, business interests, power structures and wealth distribution — realities acknowledged nowhere in COP negotiations despite being visible at every conference. Climate technologies are embedded in political economies, shaping who benefits, who bears costs and whose interests are served.
Corporate enthusiasm for technological solutions consistently serves greenwashing — creating appearance of action while avoiding fundamental business model changes. This pattern has been documented at COP26, COP27, COP28, COP29 and now COP30, yet negotiations treat corporate technology commitments as genuine climate action.
Vague Net Zero commitments rely on speculative future technologies rather than immediate emission reductions — a script corporations have perfected over multiple COPs. Technology nationalism and intellectual property restrictions concentrate innovation and benefits in wealthy countries and corporations, maintaining power imbalances through technology control — another unchanged reality across years of negotiations.
Technology transfer mechanisms discussed at every COP have failed to materialise at every COP. Developing countries lack financial resources, technical capacity and infrastructure to adopt sophisticated technologies, meaning those most vulnerable to climate impacts consistently lack access to adaptation and mitigation tools. The same promises of technology transfer appear in declarations from COP26 through COP30; the same failures to deliver follow each declaration.
India approaches COP30 with renewable energy expansion, digital agriculture, ethanol blending and lifestyle change campaigns. Yet the country faces escalating impacts — catastrophic floods, dangerous heat, water crises, declining food production, worsening pollution. India’s technology choices must address immediate adaptation needs while pursuing long-term mitigation without replicating wealthy countries’ unsustainable consumption patterns.
Moving beyond techno-optimism demands adherence to several key principles. First, prioritise the proven over the speculative:Favour deploying established technologies, such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, sustainable agriculture, public transport, and forest protection, over untested futures like large-scale CCS or geoengineering, which may never materialise.
Equally important is choosing the accessible over the exclusive: Opt for technologies that are widely available to diverse communities, rather than proprietary solutions controlled by corporations and accessible only to the wealthy.
Similarly, embrace the appropriate over the merely advanced: Support innovations suited to local contexts, instead of assuming that technologies developed in wealthy nations can be universally applied.
Technologies should complement nature rather than dominate it: This means championing approaches that work with natural systems, such as agroecology, ecosystem restoration, and passive cooling, over industrial methods that seek to override or replace them.
Finally, when trade-offs emerge, place the socially just over the technically optimal: prioritise equity, rights, and human dignity above narrow measures of efficiency.
We need critical assessment of which technologies, deployed how, by whom, for whose benefit, actually serve climate justice and ecological sustainability, instead of techno-optimism recycled from conference to conference. The missing principles — limits to growth, precaution, working with nature's cycles, inter-generational equity — must guide technology choices. Net zero must be rejected in favor of absolute zero.
Energy demand reduction must receive equal attention to supply transformation. Passive cooling and nature-based solutions must be prioritised over energy-intensive mechanical fixes. Technology must serve people and planet, not corporate profits and greenwashing.
The urgency is not finding clever technologies to sustain unsustainable systems — the failed strategy of every COP for years — but building just and ecological systems enabling human flourishing within planetary boundaries. That is the challenge COP30 failed to confront, the challenge every COP since Paris has failed to confront. Until negotiations face this reality honestly, courageously, and without the comforting delusions of techno-optimism endlessly recycled from one conference to the next, the climate crisis will deepen while technologies are discussed, emissions continue, and the planet burns.
Narasimha Reddy Donthi is an independent public policy expert. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.