Western politicians and climate activists are using the jungle backdrop of the poor Amazon city of Belém, Brazil for photo ops as they lecture the world on carbon emissions at the COP 30 climate summit this week.

Leaders from Europe, Australia and Canada, making ever-larger climate promises with ever-emptier rhetoric, ignore the crucial reality that Western actions are no longer central to solving climate change.

It’s time they recognize that real progress depends on innovation, not increasingly costly restrictions.

For decades, Western governments have made carbon cuts their mission.

They’ve spent trillions pushing electric cars and unreliable wind and solar energy, but their pricey programs are barely making a dent.

The global decarbonization rate has stayed roughly constant since the 1960s.

The 2015 Paris Agreement brought no improvement — in fact, global emissions hit a new record high in 2024.

Despite this, climate campaigners unrealistically demand the world quadruple its decarbonization rate.

Why are emissions still rising, even though the EU and US spent more than $700 billion in 2024 on green investments?

Because rich-world emissions now matter less than ever before.

While the West dominated carbon emissions in the past, future emissions will overwhelmingly come from China, India, Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and other countries clambering out of poverty.

One recent scenario shows that with current policies, just 13% of CO₂ emissions for the rest of this century will come from OECD countries.

So the liberal West’s net-zero pledge for 2050 will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars, but deliver little.

Most likely, these policies will simply push energy-intensive industries to the rest of the world — as electric-car-battery manufacturing has already shifted to China’s coal-powered economy.

The EU’s coming carbon border taxes, which will slap extra fees on imported high-emission goods, will only escalate costs further for both rich and poor countries. 

Even if the West managed to eliminate all its emissions by 2050, the impact on global temperatures would be tiny: a 0.04°F reduction by 2050 and less than 0.2°F by 2100, according to the UN’s climate model.

Despite this limited relevance, climate summits and activists fixate on what the rich world should do.

Protesters glue themselves to highways in Europe and the United States while largely ignoring China and disregarding India, Africa and the rest of the developing world.

Small wonder: Their message of self-sacrifice holds no appeal in countries that urgently need affordable energy for development.

Poorer nations are not looking to emulate Germany’s climate-driven debt, Spain’s green blackouts or the UK’s record electricity prices.

There is a cheaper and far more promising alternative: innovation.

Throughout history, humanity has overcome major challenges not by restricting growth, but by inventing better solutions.

When smog choked Los Angeles in the 1950s, we didn’t ban cars; we created the catalytic converter.

When much of the world faced hunger in the 1960s, we didn’t mandate rationing; we developed higher-yield crops.

We now need similar breakthroughs in green energy — yet innovation is precisely what the world is neglecting.

In 1980, after the oil shocks, rich countries spent more than 8 cents of every $100 of GDP on green R&D to find energy alternatives.

But as fossil fuels became cheaper, that investment dropped — and when climate concerns rose, governments funneled funds into subsidizing inefficient wind and solar rather than boosting innovation.

By 2023, the rich world spent less than 4 cents per $100 of GDP — just $27 billion, under 2% of all green spending — on research.

This must change. The West should increase green-energy R&D to around $100 billion a year.

That relatively modest investment could potentially enable breakthroughs across a broad range of technologies: fourth-generation nuclear, scalable green hydrogen and water purification, next-generation batteries, CO₂-free oil harvested from algae, carbon capture, fusion, advanced biofuels and many others.

None of these promising technologies is efficient — yet — but innovation only needs to make one or a few of them a better deal than fossil fuels.

Once that happens, every nation will adopt them: Innovation promises a global solution, whereas Western emissions cuts barely register.

Crucially, innovation costs only a tiny fraction of what today’s net-zero plans demand.

Instead of pouring resources into subsidies and mandates that raise prices and shift emissions abroad, we could spend comparatively little to make clean energy inherently competitive.

Yet the climate-obsessed politicians from Europe, Canada and Australia negotiating in Belém remain blind to the necessity of green R&D. 

President Donald Trump didn’t show up at COP30, or even send a representative.

Instead, his administration should  step forward to lead the charge on pragmatic energy policies.

His practical influence could rally others toward an affordable path that’s far smarter than pouring billions into symbolic gestures that barely move the needle.

It’s time for the West to recognize its limitations — and pivot from wasteful spending to game-changing tech investments that actually deliver results.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”