Imagine a conference on stopping smoking, sponsored by tobacco companies, hosted by tobacco exporters and crowded with tobacco lobbyists. Then imagine being told it is the world’s best hope for getting off the ciggies. That is the UN climate process as it rolls out every year.
Thu 22 Oct 2026 12.02 AEDT
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Imagine a conference on stopping smoking, sponsored by tobacco companies, hosted by tobacco exporters and crowded with tobacco lobbyists.
Then imagine being told it is the world’s best hope for getting off the ciggies.
That is the UN climate process as it rolls out every year. And new analysis from Global Witness shows the COP31 hosts, Australia and Türkiye, are no exception.
Türkiye’s state oil company TPAO is on course to nearly triple its gas production by 2035. Here at home, Woodside plans to double LNG production by 2032, and Santos is on track to lift crude oil production eightfold by 2035, from a small base. On Rystad Energy projections, both Australian companies are expected to produce more than 1.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent each by 2050 from assets not yet approved for development.
The science says the opposite. The UN’s Emissions Gap Report calls for production cuts, and the IEA says no new coal, oil and gas fields fit 1.5°C.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres is just as blunt. Speaking in Yerevan, Armenia, on 16 October, ahead of the UN COP17 biodiversity summit, he said governments are still “spending money on the wrong things” and singled out fossil fuel incentives. “Subsidising fossil fuels is subsidising suicide,” he told leaders. He urged countries to stop funding the production of fuels that are “boiling our planet and are the scourge of biodiversity”.
It is also a pattern. The UAE’s state oil company chased oil and gas deals while hosting COP28. Azerbaijan’s COP29 was caught facilitating oil deals. Brazil approved drilling off the Amazon after hosting COP30. As Global Witness campaigner Flossie Boyd puts it, we need to “kick the polluters out of the policymaking arenas”.
Australia should be the first to look in the mirror and admit we are being hypocrites on climate action.
On 14 October, Resources Minister Madeleine King told the National Press Club that Australia is a “resources superpower”, that industry will rely on gas for the “foreseeable future” and that Australia “must keep developing gas for export for our regional partners”.
She also defended new fracked gas from the Beetaloo by saying its emissions would be offset. The Guardian reports that research shows 95% of this decade’s emissions would not have to be offset at all.
The speech came with a gas reservation scheme. AAP reported that Labor had yielded to industry demands and curtailed the minister’s own powers under it. That is what influence looks like.
The Albanese government promised the scheme in May 2026, announcing a policy that would force gas exporters to set aside the equivalent of 20% of their exports for use in Australia. It has since “retreated”. The policy is now expected to require “up to” 20%, and the scheme has been delayed. How it will work in practice is unclear, and recent drafts have been criticised for “Santos-sized loopholes” that could let some companies and projects keep exporting as normal.
You cannot lead global climate action while subsidising the cause, taking policy talking points from those who profit from it, and planning to produce more of it.
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Belém showed us how this ends. More than 80 countries backed a fossil fuel roadmap. The final COP30 decision did not mention fossil fuels at all, and fossil fuel lobbyists had their largest share of attendance ever.
Is it designed to fail? COP decisions run on consensus, a rule that dates to the first COP, when Saudi Arabia and Kuwait blocked voting rules. Tuvalu’s climate minister, Dr Maina Talia, knows what that means. Every final text requires total agreement, so the weakest position wins.
Dr Talia, who spoke at our Climate Integrity Summit, is clear about where the focus should go. He told ABC Pacific that “negotiations should not continue to be the focus of climate COPs”. He says he is tired of telling devastating climate stories to a world that won’t listen. Who can blame him?
There is an emerging global process that is designed to do what the COP is currently incapable of doing. In April, 57 countries representing about a third of global GDP met in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF). It sits outside the consensus trap, and its purpose is to plan to phase out coal, oil and gas.
Tuvalu will co-host the next TAFF with Ireland in July 2027. Dr Talia wants countries to arrive ready to go beyond restating that the transition is necessary and “demonstrate how to make it happen”.
Australia can also back the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Now supported by 18 countries, led by Pacific states, it offers a binding path to stop expansion and manage a fair transition.
And it can end the handouts. EU finance ministers earlier this month called for a phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies at the COP31 negotiations in November. As Guterres put it: “I urge governments everywhere to end these handouts once and for all, and to use the savings for people and planet instead.”
A conference that claims to be about climate action needs a clear, science-based bottom line: a fossil fuel phase-out with actionable timelines, aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C. It must end subsidies to the industry causing the crisis and end the access that lets fossil fuel interests write the rules.
Australia is COP31’s President of Negotiations. It can keep enabling the fossil fuel industry, or it can back a fossil fuel phase-out roadmap with no new approvals and no more subsidies.
The rest of us should put our energy where it counts: in grassroots communities that will not accept the politics of pragmatic compromise, or processes built to fail. Not another talkfest run by those who plan to keep digging and burning.
Louise Morris is Head of Fossil Fuel Transition at the Australia Institute, with 20 years’ experience encompassing climate, energy, forest protection, and law reform in the not-for-profit sector, and federal politics.
