Opinion- COP30... When the house is literally burned

The fire broke out on Thursday afternoon. I watched the videos from Muscat: smoke billowing from the venue’s upper floors, delegates evacuating into Belém’s humid air, clutching laptops and half-finished coffee. My first thought was whether my negotiator friends had made it out safely. My second: someone had already captioned the footage “Perfect metaphor.”
I wasn’t in Belém this year. After over a decade in those rooms, I watched this COP from Oman, tracking the collapse through virtual calls, news alerts and WhatsApp messages from colleagues still inside. The exhaustion finally caught up with me. Not the physical kind from red-eye flights and all-nighters, but something deeper. The weariness of watching the same patterns repeat, the same language get deleted, the same urgent science meet the same political resistance.
I was in Davos in 2019 when Greta Thunberg told world leaders, “our house is on fire.” I remember the stillness in that room, how her words cut through years of carefully negotiated language. We agreed, nodded and promised action. Six years later in Belém, the metaphor became literal. The building burned while inside the final draft erased any mention of fossil fuels.
Brazil’s presidency had launched the Mutirão Call, a road map for fossil fuel phase-out that attracted over 80 countries. Colombia rallied 35 nations to defend the language, issuing the Belém Declaration when it became clear the text would abandon them. Then Thursday’s draft landed. Fossil fuels: gone. Not softened, not bracketed, simply erased.
More than 30 countries opposed the omission. It changed nothing. Colombia and the Netherlands announced they would co-host the first International Conference on Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta this April, pushing ahead whether the COP process joined them or not.
Saturday afternoon, 24 hours past the deadline, the gavel fell once. My colleagues messaged: no one cheered. The final 38-page text appeared on screens. The words “oil”, “gas” and “coal” were nowhere to be found. “Fossil fuel phase-out” had vanished between Friday’s evacuation and Saturday’s sunrise.
There were no closing speeches. Brazil’s presidency thanked the interpreters, the cleaners and the boat drivers who had ferried delegates through flooded streets. Then the room observed one minute of silence. Not for climate victims, though many thought of them, but for the idea that these summits might still deliver what the crisis demands.
In a hall of ten thousand people, one minute is very long. My friend said you could hear the air-conditioning click off section by section. When the lights came up, Colombia’s delegation refused the consensus applause. Small island nations joined them. Ministers walked out without handshakes. The document was adopted anyway.
In Paris, as the gavel fell in Belém, 150 scientists and 50 musicians gathered for a 10-hour performance. They played Verdi’s “Dies Irae', Day of Wrath, on loop for two hours, a sonic protest against what we had failed to produce.
Outside the convention centre, Belém’s night rain turned the dirt roads to red mud. The Amazon flowed past, wide and brown and completely indifferent. While negotiators argued over brackets, the river carried sediment toward the sea as it has for millions of years.
Greta was right. The house is on fire. They evacuated on Thursday, then went back inside to negotiate over the flames. The gavel has fallen. The river never even noticed. And I don’t know anymore if that’s tragedy or just truth.

Rumaitha Al BusaidinThe writer is environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development