Why We Ignore the Smoke Until It Chokes Us?

A fire at a climate summit is too perfect a metaphor to ignore. It forces us to ask: Are we negotiating with physics, or just with ourselves? This piece explores the psychology of denial and the urgent need to wake up.

Is the irony of a burning climate summit too perfect to handle?

I watched the news of the fire at COP30 and felt a strange, sinking recognition. It was almost too on-the-nose, like a scene from a satirical novel that an editor would cut for being heavy-handed. But reality has no editor. The very people tasked with cooling the planet were forced to evacuate because their immediate environment became uninhabitable. It begs the question: How much more literal does the warning need to be? We often treat climate change as a distant abstraction, a line on a graph that moves uncomfortably upward. But here, the abstraction became ash. It reminds me of the stark wisdom of James Baldwin, who understood the cost of willful blindness better than most.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

– James Baldwin

We are facing the fire, but are we seeing it? Or are we just waiting for the ‘all clear’ so we can go back to arguing about commas in a treaty?

Why do we prioritize the schedule over the emergency?

There is something deeply human, and deeply tragic, about the urge to ‘get back to work’ while the building is still smoldering. The UN chief’s call to finalize the deal despite the interruption speaks to our addiction to normalcy. We believe that if we stick to the schedule, we are safe. It is a form of magical thinking disguised as pragmatism. We are so terrified of the chaos outside that we build fortresses of bureaucracy to keep it at bay, even as the walls catch fire. This isn’t just about politicians; it’s about all of us. We optimize our recycling while the forests burn. We sign petitions while the oceans rise. We are bargaining with a physics that does not accept currency. We need to stop pretending that the schedule matters more than the survival.

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Can we learn to sit with the discomfort of the flames?

The interruption at COP30 shouldn’t be brushed aside; it should be the main event. It should be the meditation. What if, instead of rushing back to the plenary session, the delegates sat in the silence of the aftermath and smelled the smoke? That visceral connection is what is missing. We have intellectualized our extinction. We need to feel the heat to understand the stakes. As the philosopher Simone Weil noted, the ability to truly pay attention is a moral act.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

– Simone Weil

We need to be generous with our attention now—not to the documents, but to the fire. The fire is telling us something the documents cannot: that the time for negotiation has passed, and the time for transformation is already burning beneath our feet.