ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM — Sometimes the metaphors deliver themselves, dripping in flame retardant foam. So it was in Belém, Brazil, on Thursday when a fire briefly engulfed an events stand at the annual United Nations climate talks.

The scenes of a summit supposed to stop the planet burning, halted by an actual inferno, reinforced the sense that things are almost cosmically stacked against the global climate conferences, which bring delegates from the world’s almost 200 countries together every year.

“What the fuck are we even doing here?” asked a European government official, nursing a caipirinha at a riverside bar halfway through the two-week conference held in a city on the banks of the Amazon delta.

It’s a question increasingly being asked at U.N. climate talks. But it was perhaps more true of this edition, COP30, than any of its predecessors in the 33-year history of the international talks.

The meetings have typically been used for three key purposes: to set new international law; to act as a huge clean energy trade fair; and to serve as a barometer signaling to investors how much politicians are likely to back green policies in the coming years.

But the process is running out of laws to negotiate. The landmark Paris Agreement is done — despite Donald Trump pulling the United States out. Which leaves the trade fair, where companies come to make deals and meet potential new contacts. Fine. And then there’s the vibe check.

That last part is what countries have struggled with during the past two weeks. What true signal about the state of the world could the conference produce when there were zero delegates in attendance from the U.S., the world’s largest economy and oil and gas producer?

Countries entered the talks on the back of a series of underwhelming announcements of new climate plans. A third of the countries ignored the requirement completely. It was the job of this conference to address that deficit. But little of substance took place.

At this conference, which was still locked in vitriolic final throes on Friday evening as talks moved past their scheduled end, the U.S. absence allowed a group of emerging economies that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — known as the BRICS —to team up with petrostates, isolating the more green-oriented European Union and refusing to countenance even a reiteration of past deals to end fossil fuels.

It felt, delegates said, like part of a larger power shift. Where confident rising powers trod over the interests of a divided West. “This is a BRICS COP,” a European diplomat said.

This is a problem. Because when it comes to the real world, the surge in renewable energy electric cars and other clean energy products is undeniably moving the needle. That is especially true in emerging economies, including the host country Brazil, where cheap Chinese technology is spurring new industries and markets.

But if the U.N. summits can’t even showcase the best of what is happening on the ground and instead the message is one of ambivalence, then it’s little wonder that most investors simply ignore the final outcomes at the U.N. climate talks these days.

Many are calling for these talks to take on a much more practical dimension. “We’re at a bit of a turning point on what happens at COPs,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former climate envoy. The conferences needed to bring the businesses and investors from the clean tech sector closer into the talks, she said, so there would be “the real doers engaging more with the actual policy makers.”

The Brazilian hosts tried to turn the conference from a discussion about setting targets to cut emissions and hollow promises to “transition away from fossil fuels” to something more concrete. Several ideas were discussed to encourage countries to lay out “roadmaps” for winding back the fuels that cause global warming, and for ending deforestation.

But these talks quickly got bogged down by the refusal of the wealthy countries at the talks to commit to increasing their level of financial support to help poorer countries deal with their own environmental problems. Without the diplomatic heft and experience of the Americans, there was no country that could break down the resistance from Saudi Arabia, China or India.

In lieu of fixing climate change, COP30 pivoted to another goal: Defending multilateralism. Which sounded a lot like agreeing to anything, just to project a sense that the show would go on — a soft repudiation of the U.S. president’s derision for the climate “con job” and his attempts to jolt the world back towards fossil fuels.

The disregard is mutual. Throughout Thursday, an unflattering statue of Donald Trump — a U.N. head of state — stood unmolested by the guards at the gates of the U.N. venue.

This process faces at least three more years of talks without the elephant in the room. It will need to change — or become further detached from reality.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at kmathiesen@politico.eu or on X (formerly known as Twitter) @KarlMathiesen.

What’d I Miss?

— ‘The Ukrainians will have to accept’: Why Trump officials think now is their best chance for a deal: The Trump administration believes the moment to pressure Ukraine into a peace agreement is at hand, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy particularly weak at home and plagued by a corruption scandal that poses the most direct threat to his leadership since Russia invaded in 2022.

“The Ukrainians will have to accept [the deal] given the weakness of Zelenskyy’s current position,” said a senior White House official, who, like others, in the story, was granted anonymity to discuss the negotiations. And President Donald Trump gave Zelenskyy until Nov. 24 to sign on or risk losing American intelligence and military support.

— RFK Jr. says he directed CDC to remove claim that vaccines do not cause autism: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he personally directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cast aside its long-held position that vaccines do not cause autism. The move marks an unusual instance of a Health secretary unilaterally establishing public health guidance, undermining a long-held consensus from mainstream researchers and doctors and coming in an area where Kennedy has shown significant interest for decades.

— Judge halts IRS sharing of taxpayer info for immigration crackdown: A federal judge on Friday barred the IRS from sharing tax return information that immigration officials aimed to use to deport undocumented immigrants, saying the practice violated a taxpayer confidentiality law. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Washington-based Clinton appointee, ordered the tax agency not to disclose the confidential address information of tens of thousands of undocumented taxpayers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement until the court can review the case further.

— Ghislaine Maxwell will plead Fifth in House Epstein probe, Comer says: Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted co-conspirator of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, will refuse to answer questions in the House Oversight Committee’s probe into Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling of the case, Oversight Chair James Comer said. Maxwell’s legal team said she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights if she sat with congressional investigators, the Kentucky Republican said in an interview.

— New Jersey may stop paying federal taxes under new governor: Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey is floating the possibility that the state withholds federal tax dollars in protest of the Trump administration. The comments from Sherrill — made on comedian Jon Stewart’s podcast — underscores how she’s trying to find ways to push back against President Donald Trump’s agenda. Sherrill won New Jersey’s closely watched gubernatorial race earlier this month in a blowout, with the results widely viewed as a referendum on Trump.

AROUND THE WORLD

OFF THE RAILS — Donald Trump has hurled a wrench into one of the most sensitive negotiations currently under way in Europe, potentially derailing efforts to help fund Ukraine to stay in the fight against Russia.

For months European Union officials have been trying — and failing — to work out a way to use around €140 billion of immobilized Russian state assets held largely in Belgium to support Kyiv’s war effort. The cash is desperately needed as Ukraine is at risk of running out of money early next year.

Talks in Brussels are now at an extremely delicate stage, diplomats said, as top officials try to finesse a legal text that would enable the frozen funds to be used for a loan to the Ukrainian government.

But the United States’ new 28-point blueprint for a ceasefire includes a rival idea for using those same assets for American-led reconstruction efforts once a truce has been agreed. The U.S. would take “50 percent” of the profit from this activity, the document said.

STARMER RELENTS — Keir Starmer is set to approve a new Chinese “super-embassy” in central London despite a string of security concerns which were raised through the planning process.

The Times reported Friday that intelligence services MI5 and MI6 are now satisfied that the project — long a source of controversy in the U.K. — should go ahead, with some “mitigations” to protect national security. A British government official did not reject the Times reporting when pressed Friday.

STANDING STUBBORN — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday resisted calls to oust his most powerful adviser, Andriy Yermak, amid a snowballing corruption scandal.

Earlier this week, members of Zelenskyy’s own party, opposition lawmakers and pro-democracy watchdogs pressured the president to fire Yermak, though anti-corruption agencies have not said the influential aide is implicated in a $100 million kickbacks plot in the Ukrainian energy sector. Zelenskyy met with his parliamentary party late Thursday and made it clear he won’t bend, according to one attendee at the meeting.

Nightly Number

$1 million

The amount that the House Democrats’ super PAC is planning to pour into Tennessee’s Dec. 2 special election contesting a deep-red congressional seat.

RADAR SWEEP

WELLNESS RETREAT — Country clubs are going out of style, being ousted by increasingly popular private wellness clubs: ultra-expensive, private havens for high-tech health. Memberships can run at tens of thousands of dollars per year. In exchange, clients may receive “performance-based bloodwork” and bone density scans; hot yoga, steam rooms and cold plunges; art galleries and social hangs. As the wellness industry continues to soar, business owners are betting that the wealthy, health-obsessed will shell out big bucks for these clubs, Sara Ashley O’Brien reports for The Wall Street Journal Magazine.

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