19 May 2025 – Many crises face us, but two are existential: the climate crisis and the threats to democracy around the world. For 30 years, the world’s governments, working through the United Nations, have negotiated to keep global warming within “safe levels” of temperature rise. They failed. Now oligarchic and autocratic regimes deny the climate crisis, and strip basic liberties at will.
Most nations have negotiated in good faith through 60 UN Conferences of the Parties (COPs). It’s time for a change. It is time for people to reclaim sovereignty.
The climate crisis — which seemed so distant in 1985 when Carl Sagan warned the USA Congress about human-driven climate change, and even in 1992 when the UN began the COPs — is now upon us.
Nature does not negotiate.
The bottom-up alternative to the UN’s top-down COPs
If nations can’t protect us, who can? We can.
What’s been clear for years became even more apparent last November at the UN’s annual exercise in frustration in Baku: we need a global, bottom-up alternative to top-down COPs. We need to bring together and inspire millions of people around the world to protect our future and help make our efforts more effective.
It’s time for COPx: Conferences of People, Independently Organised.
For three years, a small team of us worldwide has worked to unleash COPx, a global citizens’ movement to solve the climate crisis by enabling people everywhere to implement the solutions on their own, in their own communities, in their own ways. As they solve this one crisis, they find their power to solve any crisis. They build real democracy.
Solving the climate crisis: Trust your gut
We are crafting the tools to enable you and people everywhere, and anywhere, to act where you live, in your own way, to draw ideas and inspiration from our global network and solve the climate crisis – sharing your success with the world so that others can be inspired by your work.
In April 2025 we settled on a digital platform, Open Impact, to enable us to form this global community. Developed by a community who shares our values and is not beholden to any of the tech bros, it is a powerful place for us to convene, share resources, tell our stories of success and find a home.
We’re going on guts. All of us are volunteers. But after the USA election, when yet another person plaintively asked us what they could do about the precarious times in which we now find ourselves, it became clear: we have to act.
Early in 2025, we sent a letter to the almost couple hundred people around the world who have been helping create COPx, saying, “We’re launching.”
Juan Echanove
Our friend Juan Echanove sent us this graphic novel that explains it better than we ever could.
COPx is personal
The failure of top-down approaches to solve the climate crisis is now obvious. While much has been accomplished, the world’s governments have moved far too slowly to ensure a climate-safe future. And, that’s inevitable, given that governments tend to be responsive to incumbent power centres, not to future interests, no matter how much scientific and financial data demonstrate the growing risks posed by climate change. Saudi Arabia makes a billion dollars every day it delays climate action.
Even the prediction by analysts in the insurance industry that the global economy could be lost to climate chaos this century does not seem to faze politicians. I guess that date is long after they are safely dead.
For us and our colleagues, COPx is personal.
Hunter: “Four years ago, I was about to hang up my spurs. I asked myself, “If you add up everything I’ve ever done, is it enough?” I’d taught thousands of students across the world, created schools of sustainable management, international think-tanks, written books like A Finer Future: Creating an Economy in Service to Life, showing that we have all of the solutions we need to solve this and most other crises.
Is it enough? No. We’re losing. The climate science is increasingly grim. The threats to democracy grow clearer each day.
I asked, “Do I know what enough is?” …Well, no.
Then why go down the road? Why burn carbon? I live on a beautiful ranch in Colorado. Stay home, ride my horse, watch an eagle fly. And wait for the end.”
Martin pitched me on COPx, and I realised I could not walk away.
Martin: “I conceived of COPx out of an insider’s frustration with the official process. It is a global community working together to share action and insights on all the ways we already know can protect our planet and our future.”
We reckoned that if we could raise enough money to bring COPx to main stages everywhere, with celebrities and musicians celebrating the work of everyday people in communities, that would kick it off in the right way. But that costs a lot of money, and we’re out of time to wait for the perfect moment. You know, I know, we all know, don’t we, that we need to move forward — now.
“What can I do?” you ask.
Take the first step now by joining COPx. Go to the COPx website and register. Share the COPx website and graphic novel with your friends and network. Invite them to visit. It’s the best description we’ve found to tell others what we’re setting out to do. You will be a first mover in creating the alternative the world so desperately needs.
If you are part of an existing group working on climate solutions, please keep doing that. We invite you to connect your group with COPx so that we can together build the global community.
COPx is a force multiplier, a community, an action network
New ideas and technologies are being developed constantly. And yet, as all the experts tell us, we already have the solutions we need to safeguard our future. We just need to implement them.
These solutions include the growing forms of renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, energy efficiency, resilience, a circular economy and self-reliance — all the approaches that cut energy use, and replace fossil energy cheaper, better, faster, as Tom Steyer put it.
It can be as simple as organising a local carpool, or as ambitious as convincing local politicians to shut down the biggest polluter in your area. Both of these are existing COPx projects. No project is too small. Or too big. What matters is your decision to act. Think of COPx actions as Lego bricks. Whoever first conceived of the little brick had no idea of the magnificent structures people would build. COPx is your Lego brick. Go amaze us with what you can create.
Since the launch, our numbers have more than tripled. People from 55 countries have registered to become COPx organisers. As we gain critical mass, our global climate network, organised by and for the people, will create or highlight events worldwide to build grassroots, “bottom-up” climate action. Even in the face of extreme fragmentation and polarisation, we must not forget just how big our common ground is.
Millions of people want climate action. COPx will connect us.
Globally representative studies show that huge majorities of people everywhere want aggressive climate action. So why isn’t this happening? Studies show that few people believe anyone else cares. And it’s scary to act alone. COPx will give us all the courage. Care for a climate-safe future is the most uniting concern there is for humanity.
Digitally connected, COPx will host “conferences of people,” everyone delivering action both right away and over the long term. These will make the millions of citizens committed to climate action ever more visible. It will give a megaphone to those too long ignored. At the same time, solutions will be implemented in every community, aggregating to a global commitment for action.
Convening people, ideas and organisations around the world like this will create a force multiplier and build the necessary political will to get governments and corporations to implement smart climate policies – constituency by constituency.
Juan Echanove
This is how movements begin, grow and succeed. We are creating a long-needed movement – and a gathering place – for the millions of people around the world who want to protect our collective health, wellbeing and future.
COPx will give you tools – and agency
Our global team of scientists, authors, consultants and leaders is committed to sharing the countless sustainable practices and their positive impacts. Some $10.5 billion was poured into the recent USA election. We’re hoping that now, people will realise that it’s time we invest in efforts to protect our health and planet.
We continue to pursue funding, taking meetings with potential donors every day and working every connection we have to find the money to build COPx globally with the urgency and resources that this moment demands. Here, as well, any advice and help is most welcome.
Increasing floods, fires, tornadoes and hurricanes leave people without homes and insurance, rising seas, millions of people displaced, political upheaval…. The data is clear: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history. We watched heartbroken as fires swept Los Angeles, intense heat bakes South Asia and climate disasters strike ever closer to home.
It’s time to stop doomscrolling. Want to help? We need you. What would you want COPx to look like? Email us: community@copx.global. We’ll continue to refine COPx, but please tell us how you think it can be improved.
Ursula Le Guin said, ‘Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality’.
The Club of Rome has always painted visions of the future, from The Limits to Growth to Earth for All. Let’s build that larger reality of a world that works for everyone.
Juan Echanove
