The world’s leaders gathered last week to tackle our greatest shared crisis: climate change. The summit, CoP 29, promised a historic breakthrough — a financial deal to compensate the Global South for the damage caused by the Global North. But instead of the $1.3 trillion requested, the Global South walked away with just $300 billion, a fraction of what’s needed and an even smaller fraction of what’s fair.

One key reason for the failure to meet financial goals is the looming threat of the United States of America abandoning climate action under Donald Trump. Midway through CoP 29 and just a week after the US presidential election, Republican representatives made it clear who would soon be calling the shots.

Despite the Joe Biden administration’s efforts to project optimism at CoP 29 in Baku, Trump’s election cast a long shadow over the US’s climate commitments. Trump, who calls climate change a “hoax”, has vowed to enact a climate activist’s worst nightmare. Trump has promised to undo federal electric vehicle subsidies and promote oil, fracking, beef production, and mining in protected wilderness areas. While Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, Trump previously withdrew and had signalled plans to do so again if was re-elected.

At a bombastic press conference, Republican lawmakers had one message — and it was an unequivocal endorsement of oil, natural gas, and coal. “Last week, people in the United States overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump’s promise to restore America’s energy dominance and lead the world in energy expansion,” said the Republican representative, August Pfluger, who represents Texas’s oil-rich Permian Basin. He was joined by Troy Balderson, who represents a part of Ohio with plentiful shale gas and who touted a defence of fracking, and Morgan Griffith, who represents a coal-rich area of western Virginia, who expressed support for so-called ‘clean coal’ power outfitted with carbon capture technology as well as natural gas mined from coal beds.

Despite all of this, some are still pinning their hopes on Trump’s ‘disrupter-in-chief’, Elon Musk. As the world’s richest man who publicly backed Trump’s campaign and who runs Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle company, some are hoping that Musk may use his position as a Trump whisperer to steer him towards climate protection. To put Musk’s wealth into perspective: Musk’s own net worth is an estimated $322 billion, $22 billion more than the entire climate finance deal of CoP 29. But no one should get his/her hopes up.

In a conversation in August on X, the website formerly known as Twitter and which is now owned by Musk, Trump and Musk discussed a wide range of topics, including climate change. In that conversation, Trump delivered standard lines about how it was no problem if the sea level rose because it would just create “more oceanfront property”. But more perplexing is Musk’s capitulation to Trump’s climate denialism. After all, Tesla’s success has been mostly driven by government subsidies driven by efforts to slow carbon pollution. As they heaped praise on each other, feeding each other’s planet-sized egos, a clearer picture emerged. The conversation was called by Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org, “the dumbest climate conversation of all time.”

While Musk has called himself “super pro-climate” and has praised himself as having done “more for the climate than any single human on earth,” he is a natalist more than he is an environmentalist. He has said that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Musk has more in common with Trump’s climate denialism than he likely would previously admit. They share a commitment to a vision of man dominating nature — Musk, too, shares this with his space exploration fantasies. Musk himself wishes to exert human dominance over the unclaimed frontier of space.

When Musk talks about “civilization collapse”, he means the West. Musk is right that birth rates in Europe and in the US are declining but there are plenty of people in the world, particularly people who will become displaced due to climate change, mostly from developing nations. But make no mistake: ‘civilization’ for Musk is the Global North and West, which he aims to bolster with his own brood of 12 children and his newfound support for the far-Right’s obliteration of women’s rights when it comes to birth control, which Musk has blamed for population decline.

The fact is the world is at no risk of civilisational collapse. There are enough people in the world. They just might not be White, or northern, or Western. While population decline has been pronounced in affluent countries, population growth has remained relatively stable in developing countries. All of this paints a picture of a devastating climate migration crisis. At least 40% of the world’s population lives in coastal areas while some four billion people live under highly-stressed water conditions for at least one month of the year. The Global North-West may indeed become a confederation of geriatric police states obsessed with maintaining border control. Perhaps Musk hopes this will then lead states to pony up for his plans to colonise other planets, leaving this barren, tragic earth with its bodies trapped by barbed wire borders behind.

India will be especially impacted. In his award-winning novel, Ministry for the Future, the author, Kim Stanley Robinson, begins his climate-fiction narrative with a traumatic event in India where temperatures reach a deadly ‘wet-bulb’ level wherein humidity is so high that sweat cannot effectively cool the body amidst deadly high temperatures. In the book, thousands die due to the heat wave — a hypothetical scenario that seems increasingly real: this past June, 37 cities across India reported surpassing 45 degree celsius.

Chandni Raina, a negotiator from India, slammed the climate-finance outcome of CoP 29 as “abysmally poor”. She said the deal reached at CoP 29 was little more than an “optical illusion” meant to obscure Global North countries’ commitment to the climate crisis they caused for the rest of the world.

The world’s richest man cannot and will not steer Trump towards our planet’s salvation. CoP 29’s failures and Trump’s looming return show the brutal truth: the Global North talks, the Global South suffers, and the planet burns — while some harbour sci-fi dreams of more babies to colonise distant, still dead, worlds. This will be for Trump and his ‘pro-environment’ adviser, Musk, the triumph of Man.

Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC