The nations of the world are exhibiting “moral failure and deadly negligence,” said UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in his fierce opening remarks for Cop30 in Belem, Brazil.

Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, called out the US president by name: “Mr. Trump is literally against human kind,” he correctly said. “We can see the collapse that will happen if US does not decarbonize its economy. It is 100% wrong.”

Meanwhile, back in the USSR, I mean the USA, Democrats are dancing in the streets this week over a nationwide “pushback” that saw Republican candidates defeated in off-year elections across America.

I hate to be a party pooper, but in one year Trump has been more destructive nationally and internationally than any president in American history, and he has three more years in office.

No one dares mention the only viable national political response – an awakened American people electing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and Senate. Then impeaching the bastard for the third time, and this time convict and remove him from office.

That’s unlikely, and it’s secondary anyway. Even in the best-case scenario, navel-staring America is now the caboose and no longer the dubious moral engine of the defunct international order.

The question is, what needs to happen in human consciousness as a whole to adequately respond to the climate and extinction crisis?

Guterres rightly called for a “paradigm shift.” Yet he still spoke in terms of the obsolete nation-state paradigm based on the sovereignty (that is, “supreme principle”) of 200 nation-states.

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Belém should be “the Cop of truth.” So let’s cop to the truth. The international system lies in rubble at our feet, and the UN is going the way of the League of Nations.

Even so, are there any government leaders willing to acknowledge the truth that they must break out of the smothering box of the nation-state serving global hyper-capitalism?

Under that system, man is on track shoot past 2 degrees warming, trigger more tipping points in natural systems such as ocean currents, rainforest and ice caps, and “expose billions to unlivable conditions and amplify threats to peace and security.”

At the political level, Petro spoke truth to the powers that besiege: “This is a real apocalypse,” he said. In addition to Trump, he laid much of the blame at the feet of petroleum industry lobbyists in the Cop system. “They are going against life. This is immoral. This is not human.”

“As a result,” he said, “the world had lurched from climate change to climate crisis and now faced climate collapse.”

True, but the difficult truth for national leaders and activists alike is that radical change will not come from the political level, but will manifest at the political level.

To focus one’s energies primarily on national governments is to hack at dying branches of dying trees, rather than dig into the soil and eradicate what’s poisoning the roots of human social, economic and political organisation.

The toxic soil is within, not outside us. It is the emotionally held identification with particular groups over the emotionally realised fact of humanity as a whole.

If even 1% of people around the world actually did the spadework of self-knowing and ended the roots of tribalism within, there would be a psychological revolution that would change the course of humankind.

Man’s fragmentation of the earth has reached the maximum degree the planet’s interwoven ecosystems can withstand without collapse. But a widespread resignation is setting in, ranging from apocalyptic despair and ‘numbness’ in countless individuals, to calls for socio-political adaptation by academics.

Adaptation to man’s fragmentation is not an option.

The problem with policies that seek to adapt to global warming and the dramatic loss of biodiversity is that acceptance of the status quo is built into them. It isn’t that mitigation efforts through policies, infrastructure and insurance shouldn’t be undertaken. It’s that any hint of sustaining the status quo must end.

With characteristic understatement by legacy media, we’re told that Cop30 opens as “several powerful countries are stepping away from climate action as far-right nationalism takes hold, particularly the US.”

Yet we’re being told we cannot give up hope, even as “as much of the world is distracted by war, and the US is leading an attack on efforts to build international collaboration to deal with shared global problems.”

I don’t believe in hope. I believe in facing and understanding what is.

The 1.5-degree global warming goal of Paris has already been surpassed. On our present course, we’ll shoot past even 2 degrees before the end of the century, with catastrophic effects we cannot imagine.

To change course there must be a psychological revolution that ends tribalism/nationalism as a dominant feature of human social and political organization.

However both the ascendant extreme right, with its atavistic nationalism, and the Enlightenment-based left, with its belief in reason and adherence to “sovereignty” in thousands of fragmented forms, assume identification with particular groups is a given.

Identification isn’t that difficult to end within us however. And the basic course of humankind will change when even a small minority of people does so.

The archaic sovereignty of nation-states, the cornerstone of the dead international order and 5000 years of stupid empires, belongs to humanity now.

In current political terms, the UN must be superseded to survive. A body of whole human beings of great moral suasion, eschewing power in perpetuity, must emerge and speak effectively for the earth and humanity.

Martin LeFevre

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