COP30 and the Myth of Green Growth: Low-tech and Robustness for a Fairer Transition

The irruption of protesters and indigenous representatives at COP30 in Brazil on November 11, 2025, exposed a harsh reality: this climate summit, and perhaps all previous ones, failed before they even began. The message was clear: for indigenous populations worldwide, the effects of climate change and their rights remain secondary to economic interests, often disguised as “sustainable development,” “green energy,” or “nature preservation.” When global powers, like the United States or the corporations orbiting them, feel threatened by others, such as China, only their national and geopolitical interests prevail, relegating climate justice to the background. The priority is not the planet, but their spheres of influence and their rates of return.

Historically, COPs have acted as if decreeing goals — such as not exceeding 1.5°C of warming — was enough for nature and humanity to obediently fall in line. But the climate crisis cannot be solved by mandate. And there is, in fact, an even more essential and urgent problem that precedes climate impacts: the energy issue. Our civilization — from its infrastructures and transport systems to its food production and technologies — was built and is sustained on fossil fuels, whose energy density is 30 to 100 times greater than that of current renewable sources. This is no coincidence: oil, gas, and coal represent solar energy accumulated over millions of years, the result of geological processes that transformed ancient biomass into hydrocarbon deposits. For a century and a half, we have lived by spending this geological inheritance as if it were infinite.

In this sense, addressing the climate problem before understanding the energy one was a mistake in approach. Humanity aspires to keep growing, developing, expanding its cities and economies; and to do this, it needs abundant, dense, and available energy. The paradox is that this energy — oil and natural gas — is finite. Although fossil resources are vast, their extraction is becoming increasingly costly and complex. The United States, for example, reached its peak conventional oil production in 1970, at about 10 million barrels per day, a figure that today is barely around 4 million for that type of crude. Its current “energy boom” is due to fracking, a technique that extracts light oil from shale formations, but which does not produce the heavy derivatives essential for moving global machinery: diesel and jet fuel. This is the reason behind the renewed US interest in Venezuela’s vast heavy crude reserves: without diesel, world trade would stop; without ships or trucks, globalization does not move.

Faced with this panorama, renewable energies emerged as a promising alternative. However, they only solve part of the problem. While they do not emit Greenhouse Gases (GHG) during operation, their manufacturing depends heavily on fossil fuels, generating GHG in the process. Furthermore, since they emerged as a possible solution in 1979, their contribution to the global energy mix has been modest: they generate only between 3% and 5% of the total energy humanity consumes annually. It seems, therefore, a chimera that they could replace fossil fuels, which still represent around 80% of world energy consumption. Moreover, the so-called “green transition” is generating unprecedented extractive pressure on critical minerals — lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earths — whose procurement requires enormous amounts of fossil energy and produces serious socio-environmental impacts.

That is why the energy transition is not primarily a climate problem; it is, above all, a purely energy problem and, therefore, an economic and social one. Without energy, there are no modern economies, no social welfare, and the entire global system collapses. Therefore, proposing an energy transition must start by rethinking our social foundations and conceptions of success, development, and survival. This implies affecting the interests of the wealthiest and safeguarding the dignified survival of the poorest, in pursuit of greater social equality. It requires setting aside dreams of grandeur and the hallucinations of mega-billionaires, who want to colonize Mars or create a race of superhumans, thinking their role is to accelerate natural evolution, while ignoring the tangible crisis on Earth.

In this context, I have written the chapter “Energy Transition or Inevitable Return to a More Sober World?” for the book “Energy Transition in Latin America, Global Crisis. Perspectives from Political Economy,” presented on November 7, 2025. This book, the result of collaboration between the International Integration Institute of the Andrés Bello Convention Organization (III-CAB) and the University of Puebla, analyzes alternatives to the prevailing social and energy hegemonic model, which until now has been based on a fallacious green transition. The ideas presented in my chapter are based on new worldviews. They are “new” in relation to the hegemonic vision of infinite economic growth, but “ancient” in their way of life, focused on caring for people and nature. Let us not forget that humanity has existed for 300,000 years without fossil fuels and has only used them massively for the last 150 years, a very brief period that, while enabling overwhelming and unprecedented development, cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The discussion on the energy transition cannot be separated from the geopolitical context that currently conditions global climate action. As the COP30 scenario demonstrates, the climate debate is permeated by economic interests and power struggles. On one hand, the fossil fuel lobby seeks to maintain its hegemony; on the other, proposals emerge that attempt to redefine global climate leadership. On this chessboard of forces, the energy transition ceases to be a merely technical issue and reveals itself as a field of dispute between models of development, sovereignty, and global justice.

This discussion is often presented as a simple substitution of fossil fuels with renewable energies. However, this reductionist view ignores the enormous chains of extraction, transformation, transport, and waste that sustain our modern lifestyle. Paradoxically, far from proposing a paradigm shift, the energy transition can reproduce and deepen the very extractivist model that the climate crisis seeks to overcome.

Becoming aware of this is not falling into pessimism, but preparing for a future in which we want to maintain dignity and social justice. If we don’t, the risk is clear: those who control the remaining energy will also control social and economic organization, deepening inequalities and concentrating power under new forms of what is already called techno-feudalism. Concrete examples illustrate this trend: today, there are plans to build nuclear plants dedicated exclusively to powering data centers for artificial intelligence and surveillance economies, while millions of people lack stable access to drinking water or electricity.

The dilemma is not only to reduce emissions, but to decide who bears the costs and who keeps the benefits. Powers and corporations are not willing to lose income, even if that compromises climate goals. Therefore, a true transition cannot reproduce the hierarchies of the past: it must be fair, redistributive, and aware of ecological limits. More than a market-driven “green revolution,” we need a civilizational change that rethinks who produces, who consumes, and who decides about the energy that sustains our lives.

In my chapter, I propose looking towards a low-tech approach, inspired by the ideas of Philippe Bihouix. Low-tech technologies do not reject innovation; they redirect it towards autonomy, durability, and simplicity. They are based on local, repairable, and accessible techniques, which consume fewer resources and strengthen community resilience. We are talking about low-energy mobility, agroecology, batteries made from common materials, decentralized electricity generation, and designs made to last.

Contrary to what some think, low-tech can even be more “pro-technology” than complex solutions: they promote continuity and self-sufficiency in the face of the vulnerability of hyper-digitalized systems. The CrowdStrike antivirus failure in July 2024, which paralyzed airports worldwide, or the Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025, showed how fragile our digital civilization is. Robustness, a central concept I develop in the text — proposed by Olivier Hamant — is precisely the ability to withstand disturbances and sustain functioning despite crises. It is not about maximizing efficiency, but cultivating radical adaptability. A robust system combines the technical and the social: territorial cooperation, neighborhood networks, community knowledge, and solidarity economies.

The energy transition is not simply a technological challenge; it is a civilizational challenge. It forces us to rethink what we understand by development, quality of life, success, and progress. Latin America possesses resources, knowledge, and historical experiences of resilience that can open alternative paths, to be applied worldwide, as well as learn from similar practices from other regions. However, to do this, it is necessary to abandon the idea that the future will necessarily be more technological, faster, or more abundant. The future may be more sober. The key is that it is also fairer, more human, and more supportive.

In the current juncture, we have a historic opportunity: to become aware of this problem and rethink the kind of transition we want. We can continue betting on an extractivist model disguised as green, or move towards a transition that recognizes our limitations, prioritizes social well-being, and respects planetary boundaries. The problem has never been a lack of resources — the world mobilized billions to rescue banks in 2008, to sustain the economy during the pandemic, and now to finance the AI race — but rather where we decide to direct them.

The energy transition is already underway. The question is which one we will choose: one that perpetuates the privileges of a few, or one that allows us to build robust, low-tech, and deeply communal societies, capable of living well within the planet’s limits.