The world’s nations will meet for the 29th time next month for another discussion of what to do about global climate change. In recent years, their mission at these Conferences of the Parties (COPs) has been to take stock of progress under the 2015 Paris climate accord.

However, when they meet Nov. 11-22 in Baku, Azerbaijan, they should also check their moral compasses. The Paris agreement has generated lots of good intentions so far, but insufficient action against a threat to life on the planet second only to a nuclear holocaust.

The problem is not a lack of good technologies–we have them–or that they are too expensive. Many are competitive with fossil fuels, whose pollution is causing the planet to warm. And even the more expensive technologies to reduce or eliminate that pollution are inexpensive compared to the cost of letting global warming proceed virtually unabated.

The moral dimension in these protracted climate talks is that the decisions nations make right now will determine the quality of life for many, many generations to come. Some of the expected impacts of global warming will be irreversible, while others will persist for hundreds, even thousands, of years.

Yet the world remains addicted to fossil fuels. The habit is fed by the powerful fossil-energy industry, which is enabled by the public subsidies provided by nearly all of the world’s countries. Government subsidies, direct and indirect, totaled $7 trillion in 2022, the most recent year analyzed by the International Monetary Fund. In other words, a worldwide cartel composed of nations and the oil, coal, and gas sectors, stands in the way of effective action against climate change, along with the inertia of the oil age.

After nearly 30 years of hemming, hawing, jawboning, and bowing to big oil, national leaders have yet to establish a timetable or make a plan for the world’s transition to clean energy and climate stability.

Yet, climate change is only one of many critical environmental crises humankind is causing on the planet, most of them contrary to our species’ health and welfare. For example, the World Economic Forum anticipates that extreme weather events will be the top global risk over the next decade, while the next three most important risks are changes to Earth systems, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and natural resource shortages, in that order.

In fact, no person alive on the planet today has ever breathed truly clean air or drunk truly clean water without the help of a device that scrubs out contamination.

A decade ago, BBC correspondent Rachel Nuwer analyzed whether there are any pollution-free places left on the planet. She concluded, “While nature sometimes produces its own damaging contaminants–wildfires send up billows of smoke and ash, volcanoes belch noxious gasses–humans are responsible for the lion’s share of the pollution plaguing the planet today. Whether our contaminants take the form of a discarded lunch, human excrement, or billions of metric tonnes of airborne pollutants, we’re left with an unfortunate but clear answer: there probably is no place on Earth without pollution.”

Earlier this year, data from more than 30,000 air monitoring stations in 134 countries showed that only seven nations met air pollution levels that health experts define as “safe.” Only 10 countries, territories, or regions had acceptable levels of airborne particulates, the microscopic particles linked to a variety of disease and premature death. But “safe” is not the same as pristine.

We are learning that bad news, warnings from science, and slow-moving crises do little to motivate nations. Relying on voluntary action has proved ineffective, too. The world is awash in good intentions, codified in scores of environmental agreements designed to protect species and ecosystems from threats ranging from the ozone hole to oil spills in oceans.

Yet modern civilization’s environmental footprint remains so large, diverse, and growing that many of the world’s top geologists believe it justifies the declaration of a new geological period in Earth’s history. Their proposal to declare that human “perturbations” have pushed the planet into a new Anthropocene epoch was finally voted down only because humanity’s damages to the biosphere are too new on the geologic timescale.

Moral appeals and shaming have not worked, either. Past climate conferences featured emotional appeals from young environmental activists such as Severn Cullis-Suzuki and Greta Thunberg. They admonished and pleaded with world leaders to leave them a livable planet. The assembled dignitaries gave them polite applause, then moved on to business as usual.

If we needed inspiration about what life could be like without human perturbations, we got a taste during the COVID epidemic when many of the world’s people were confined indoors. In that brief interlude, captured in the film “The Year the Earth Changed,” nature began flourishing again.

So, thousands of delegates from around the world will assemble in Azerbaijan next month to take stock of their nations’ progress against global warming. If they are honest, they will acknowledge the real inconvenient truth:

The developed world is addicted to fossil fuels and the developing world is eager to become addicted, too. The addiction is fed by a worldwide carbon cartel of oil and gas producers, aided and abetted by governments, typically with forgone tax revenues and money collected from pollution’s victims. The age-old principle in which polluters must pay for the damages they cause is turned on its head, with victims paying for degraded air, water, and soils with their taxes and health.

The oil industry has no intention of stopping. Its lobbyists have prevailed for decades against climate negotiators even using the words “fossil fuels” in their concluding documents. It wasn’t until last year’s COP in Dubai that nations agreed to mention the need to “transition away from fossil fuels.” Again, there were no details.

Instead, a recent analysis reported in The Guardian shows fossil fuel companies are spending more money to develop new oil and gas sites than any time since nations signed the Paris agreement. Five wealthy countries–the United States, UK, Canada, Norway, and Australia–are responsible for more than two-thirds of all the new oil and gas licenses issued worldwide since 2020, The Guardian reports.

Rather than investing in clean energy, big oil companies are spending record profits to increase the salaries of CEOs, buy smaller companies, and reward their shareholders with larger dividends.

Big oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobil have begun preparing for the day when the world cures its oil addiction. But they are not investing much in clean energy. Instead, they are expanding their production of plastics, another petroleum product whose pollution is ubiquitous. It’s such a serious problem that 175 nations have agreed to develop a legally binding agreement to end the world’s plastics “epidemic.”

But if global action on climate change is an example, we should not hold our collective breath. Climate change is the first-order test of whether we have the character to save ourselves and future generations from the insatiable greed of a rich and powerful industry. So far, the jury is still out.