3 years to 1.5°C breach, yet COP30 deal omits ‘fossil fuel’: Prof Joyeeta Gupta at HTLS 2025
Speaking at 23rd HT Leadership Summit, Professor Joyeeta Gupta rued that there is not enough attention to rapidly shrinking emission headroom
Three years. That’s how long before the world crosses the 1.5°C threshold, with only 130 gigatons of carbon dioxide space remaining. Yet at COP30 in Brazil last month, wealthy nations—responsible for four-fifths of historical emissions—resisted discussing their financial obligations while 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists ensured the final agreement never mentioned the words “fossil fuel.”
This failure reflects the persistent problem of climate action, and a deeper crisis of climate justice, according to University of Amsterdam professor Joyeeta Gupta, who has tracked climate negotiations for three decades.
Speaking in an online session at the 23rd Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Gupta rued that there is not enough attention to the rapidly shrinking emission headroom. “That’s one of the big problems—we are not taking this storyline that there is very little CO2 emission space left seriously”.
Instead, nations are retreating into a “hegemonic response”: hoarding resources, refusing responsibility, and delaying action through “problematic narratives” like net zero and managed overshoot, she added in the session with Binayak Dasgupta.
The University of Amsterdam professor, who co-chaired the Earth Commission and was a lead author of the 2007 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report that won the Nobel Peace Prize, offered a stark assessment of the UN Climate Conference in Belém in November. While the gathering acknowledged for the first time that overshooting 1.5°C is likely, the solutions being relied upon are fundamentally flawed, she argued.
“Overshoot pushes the time limit to when you get to zero into the future, and net zero means you can continue to emit as long as you plant trees somewhere in the world to compensate or offset those emissions,” Gupta said. “Both these narratives are actually problematic.”
According to Gupta, the current paralysis on climate action stems from how nations are reacting to the vanishing carbon budget. She identified two prevailing responses, both failing.
The first is the “hegemonic response,” exemplified by resource hoarding during the Covid-19 pandemic — when wealthy nations pre-purchased enough vaccine doses to immunise their populations three times over — and Europe’s reopening of coal plants after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered an energy crisis.
“If you are a hegemonist, then you basically want to hoard,” Gupta explained. “You want to say, ‘I’m going to do whatever I can within my own country to maximise the use of my resources and I’m not going to share responsibility with others.’”
The second problem lies in the neoliberal capitalist approach, which attempts to solve the crisis through market mechanisms and carbon pricing. Gupta argued this is fundamentally unsuited for a collective crisis.
“The climate change problem is not a problem of individuals. It’s a collective problem,” she said. “Current neoliberal capitalist systems are just not going to solve the problem, and neither is retreat into ‘my country first’ narratives.”
Gupta expressed little hope that elected governments would drive change. “Governments in democratic countries come for four to five years and most of them just want to maintain the system, maintain the status quo. They don’t want to rock the boat,” she said. “The chance that there is political willingness to undertake action is quite low.”
Instead, she pinned her hopes on social movements and the judiciary, which she believes can “balance the power of politics” by bringing science back into the discussion.
With the carbon budget nearly exhausted, the traditional path to development — using fossil fuels to grow an economy — is now a dead end. Gupta acknowledged the moral logic of the Global South’s position but warned of its consequences.
“If the Global South makes the argument that we will use our fair share when the Global North did not leave its fair share—now that’s a very logical argument and I hear this very often. But if they use that, everybody loses,” she said.
Instead, she proposed that developing nations must “leapfrog” the fossil fuel era entirely.
“They need to leapfrog intellectually, so go beyond this neoliberal capitalist idea to much more deepened multilateralism, a completely different economy,” Gupta said. “Technologically they have to leapfrog. They have to leave the fossil fuel underground and see if we can use the sun to get to a much better renewable energy system. And they have to move forward in terms of institutions. They have to leapfrog institutionally.”
She singled out India as uniquely positioned to lead this transition. “India has the intellectual capacity. India has the IITs and the IIMs. It has a massive number of people all over the world with expertise. So, if India could sit together, leapfrogging is a possibility,” she said.
But Gupta warned the transformation cannot be technocratic—it must become a mass movement.
She also cautioned that the stakes for India are existential. At 1.5°C and beyond, the country faces devastating heat, glacier melting, saltwater intrusion, and extreme weather events. “It’s not a joke. It’s going to be very, very expensive for countries of the Global South,” she said.
A major obstacle remains finance. Gupta noted that Official Development Assistance (ODA) from rich nations dropped by 9% last year and could decline by 13-15% this year, with wealthy countries increasingly pushing for private sector loans rather than direct grants. She warned that high-interest private loans could trap the Global South in deeper debt.
The crisis is compounded by existing debt burdens: developing countries currently spend five times more on debt servicing than on climate action, according to research Gupta cited.
To counter this, she advocated for “debt-for-climate swaps”—financial agreements where a portion of a developing nation’s foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for domestic investments in climate adaptation and environmental conservation.
Gupta also proposed aggressive new revenue streams, including “tax justice” measures to recover an estimated $500 billion lost annually to tax evasion and avoidance, and seeking compensation directly from oil, gas, and coal companies. She noted there are currently around 160 court cases against fossil fuel companies worldwide, though none have yet resulted in compensation.
