By Lenn Viken
As the category five man-made hurricane Melissa swept the shores and lands of Jamaica in late October this year, delegates from countries all over the world were preparing for the UN climate summit COP30, held in Belém, a large city in the Brazilian Amazon.
The stakes could not have been higher. For years now, we have witnessed our approach towards climate tipping points – the points of no return – and in the month before COP30 we actually reached one: sea temperatures have risen to the point that warm water coral reefs are experiencing widespread, irreversible die-backs. It is now too late to save these vital ecosystems on which a quarter of marine life and nearly a billion people rely on. This, combined with the increasingly desperate situation of capitalist mass deforestation, colonial exploitation of natural resources and extreme weather facing Indigenous peoples and people of the Global South, meant that this COP had to ensure action.
Unsurprisingly, however, the only thing this thirtieth conference ensured was world leaders’ lasting commitment to prioritising profit over people’s lives. Nicknamed the “People’s COP” by governments and the media and located in the Amazon, this COP made big promises to solidify roadmaps to ending deforestation and phasing out fossil fuels, as well as to create a framework for a just transition to renewable energy. In actuality, none of these promises were kept. Moreover, this COP ended up being the most militarised COP to date, with harsh repression of civic voices and a higher proportion of fossil fuel lobbyists compared to country delegates than ever before.
What happened at COP30, and what were the results of the negotiations?
Many hoped that COP30 situated in “the world’s lungs” and organised by a country promising to make it the “People’s COP” would prove to be different from the others. Surely, a Latin American COP in a location which is currently bearing the brunt of climate change, deforestation, and encroachment on Indigenous lands would ensure that Indigenous voices would not be able to be ignored and that proper implementation of climate action could not be avoided. However, as the conference zones were guarded by heavily armed military, and 1 in 25 participants at COP30 was a fossil fuel lobbyist, it is perhaps not surprising that the deal that concluded COP30 was another major disappointment. In reality, the deal proves that we are nowhere near stepping away from the capitalist colonial economic model that is at the root of the global heating and environmental degradation that we see today.
First of all, this COP was supposed to truly reckon with the fossil fuel industry, with host country Brazil promising a detailed roadmap to guide the countries out of fossil fuel reliance and into a renewable future (notably right after President Lula da Silva approved licences for the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras to drill for oil in the Amazon the month before). However, in the final deal, the words fossil fuel were not mentioned even once! While many careful journalists applauded the fact that we got any agreement at all in a time of “geopolitical turmoil,” and said that at least there was a conversation about fossil fuels, anyone who is truly dedicated to climate justice and recognise the suffering communities across the globe are enduring due to continued environmental and human exploitation, would firmly state that this is disgraceful.
In addition to the greenhouse gas emissions of the fossil fuel industry, another massive contributor to the rising temperatures is widespread industrial deforestation – destroying vital carbon sinks. Moreover, deforestation causes the loss of large stretches of Indigenous territories every day, particularly in the Amazon. That said, the word deforestation appeared only once in the final deal from COP30. This COP also constituted the second round of NDC collections. Most countries handed in their plans, however when we sum them up, the added promised emission cuts from each country only constitutes about a sixth of the cuts we need by 2035 in order to stay within the 1.5°C goal of the Paris agreement.
What was praised as the big success of this weak final deal was the establishment of a Just Transition Mechanism. This is a mechanism that seeks to ensure that workers in the fossil economy will not be abandoned as countries transition to renewable energy sources. This is a truly important conversation, and a win to get it in text, however the final deal had one major lack for the safety of workers worldwide. In the final deal, people working in critical minerals, an industry essential for renewable energy extraction and deeply entrenched in human rights violation and environmental exploitation, were not included. The exploitative nature of this industry can notably be seen in the horrific human rights abuses mining workers in the Congo are currently facing and in how mining is increasingly taking over Indigenous territories, notably in the Amazon.
The failure to include this industry clearly indicates that when countries and leaders talk about a “renewable” or a “green” transition, they are not actually talking about a change that tackles the roots of the climate crisis: capitalism and colonialism. Rather, they merely seek to fuel the very same capitalist system that exploits workers and their lands worldwide in a way that will allow them to perpetually increase profits even longer than fossil fuels would have allowed them to. And in this “renewable” capitalist regime of “green growth”, human suffering and land-grabs are clearly allowed to continue.
Indigenous protests and the issues of a “green transition”
The most inspiring and distinctive feature about COP30 was the resistance, in the form of direct action that multiple Indigenous groups and activists carried out in the first week of COP30. Indeed, after marching and protesting outside the COP, demonstrators forced themselves into the buildings, and occupied the restricted zone of the conference for a short period of time before they were physically forced out by security guards and police. This was a powerful action in which local Indigenous leaders demanded to be heard, stating that their land is not for sale nor up for negotiations. From these protests, a clip was widely featured in the news and on social media of a local Indigenous leader stating that “We can’t eat money!”, demanding freedom from multiple exploitative industries including mining, petrol and logging that are taking over and destroying their ancestral territories.
This protest shows a clear resistance to the institution of the COPs and the UN which have far too long excluded Indigenous communities from the conversation they should be at the centre of. However, the COP system’s unwillingness to change is shown in that instead of taking the words of these protesters into consideration, the organisers asked themselves questions of how this could happen and how they need to reinforce the security of the venue so it does not happen again.
What we need to consider when talking about a just transition away from fossil fuels is that it is not only in a world reliant on fossil fuels that Indigenous lands and workers’ safety is under threat. Indeed, capitalism demands infinite growth on a planet of finite resources. This means that, fossil fuel powered or not, our capitalist economic system demands the annexation of more and more land each year, which is disproportionately taken from Indigenous peoples and peoples in the Global South. Moreover, the constant growth embedded in capitalism demands a continuously increasing exploitation of workers as it values profits over people’s safety and wellbeing.
An example of how a renewable capitalist economy continues the same colonial systems of exploitation of Indigenous peoples as fossil fuelled capitalism, can be seen in how renewable energy projects are exploiting Sámi Indigenous lands in the Arctic. Indeed, the Norwegian state keeps building unlawful windmill parks on Indigenous lands, hindering local reindeer herding and the survival of Indigenous cultures. Moreover, the state is currently opening for the Canadian mining company Blue Moon to mine in Indigenous territories in the arctic Riehpovuotna (Repparfjord) against the will of the Sámi stewards of the land. And more insidious still, this mining project has gotten permission by the state to dump their mining waste in the fjord, destroying the ecosystem and livelihood of local peoples. All in the name of extracting essential metals for the “renewable transition.”
All this shows that what we really need is not merely a transition to renewable energy, but a reckoning with capitalism and colonialism at the root of climate change and environmental degradation. This can only be done through a centering of local and Indigenous voices and through a focus on genuinely radical ecosocialist alternatives, with workers and oppressed people – not billionaires and corporations – at the heart of all decision making about our planet.
