The following statement was delivered today by Rachel Rose Jackson, Corporate Accountability’s Director of Climate Research and Policy, on June 19th, 2025 in Bonn, Germany at a UNFCCC press conference. For the full press conference alongside partners, see webcast here.
As the saying goes, “It takes two to tango,” and this is certainly true when it comes to international collaboration, whether on climate action or anything else. But let’s be absolutely clear. The United States has always been a very dreadful dance partner. From day one.
Nothing has changed in this regard here at Bonn, apart from their physical absence from the dance floor, which sends a very clear message to the world that, truly, the United States cares for no one and nothing but itself. Now, at least the only thing that’s different, is that it’s clear for all the world to see what those of us who have spent many years in these halls have always witnessed—that the US never was and never has been serious about international collaboration of any kind. That the US throws its neocolonial and capitalist weight around to bully, block, and stall progress on any issue that would require it to act meaningfully. And that the US never has and never will care about saving lives, protecting the planet, or avoiding an entire societal collapse that it has played a direct hand in orchestrating for decades, if not centuries.
But, at the same time, if you’re not going to bother to show up to the dance floor to tango, then simply put, maybe don’t bother to show up on the dance floor at all.
Yet, rather than than simply abandoning their dance partners, they have turned off the lights, broken the music player, put oil across the floor, tied everybody’s shoe laces together and smashed the windows on the way out of the disco — all to ensure that with or without them here, the dance cannot proceed, and this process is rigged to fail.
The US is acting in a way that is way more than bad faith. This is backhanded. It’s manipulative. It’s reckless. And it’s also senseless and illogical, because the US. cannot seem to understand that an inadequate global response to climate change will not only condemn millions around the world to death and destruction, it will also condemn millions of its own. Especially those people of color, Indigenous communities, and low-income workers and communities.
A dance that could have led to beautiful climate action decades ago has now become, to put it very simply, a dance of death. Because, the US doesn’t care, and neither does the European Union or the Umbrella Group of countries, or the supposed Environmental integrity Group. The Global North has always been partnering with the United States in the toxic tango of poisoning international collaboration.
Here in Bonn, we see only moves that will bring us closer to societal collapse and planetary destruction. And in the agenda fight over the opening days, the EU and others not only refused to come to the dance floor, they refused even to discuss the dance song or the choreography when all the Global South wanted to do and all they were asking for was the chance to discuss – *discuss*, not even deliver – meaningful climate finance and the climate debt owed to the Global South.
The Global North has absolutely no intention of delivering this debt. They have already orchestrated their get out of jail free cards. Here, they will not even allow the pretense of a discussion about finance, and at COP last year in Bakù, they helped ram through the rules on carbon markets that provide the key to their great escape and their final destructive dance. Here and at home, they are also embedding these carbon markets into their pretend NDCs, to be seen to be taking action without really doing anything to do so.
We are told time and time again that there is no money, that carbon markets are the only way for Global South communities and countries to receive any support to address climate change. All of this while they spend billions and trillions on military support to Israel, on their industrial military complexes, and now threatening the same in relation to the very disastrous developments unraveling in Iran.
These countries have all the money in the world. They have amassed infinite wealth off the backs of frontline and Global South communities who they are now indebted to. Carbon markets are their way to shift all responsibility for the climate crisis to the very same communities that are already shouldering the greatest impacts, and to ensure that these Global North countries and Big Polluters can continue to pollute with impunity.
But carbon markets don’t work. Though they have been existing in some form for as long as the UNFCCC has, they have never, not once, correlated with a global decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. They harm communities, they destroy ecosystems, and they allow the fossil fuel industry, Big Ag, and other polluters to continue to pollute unchecked. They have been shown, time and time again not to work, and are proven to fail. And they are not climate finance or climate action.
So in the Global North’s deceptive dance of climate breakdown, the moves we are seeing on the dance floor here in Bonn are the finale. And we must be attuned to their deadly agenda, and we must resist. We must call them out and we must hold them accountable. Not only to paying their long overdue climate debt. But to finally doing their fair share of climate action.
The truth is it doesn’t only “take two to tango” when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. It actually takes everyone, together in this moment, on the dance floor dancing to the same music to have a dance of climate action. Without this, it is to become a dance of climate death and destruction.”
