Brazil stance on fossil fuel phaseout “contradictory”: COP30 interview
Fossil fuel phase-out has been a heated issue at the UN talks since a landmark resolution made two years ago in Dubai, and COP30 is no different.
Brazil’s attitude towards phasing out fossil fuels is bristling with contradictions, a climate expert told Gas Outlook in an interview on the sidelines of COP30.
Fossil fuel phase-out has been a heated issue at the UN talks since a landmark resolution made two years ago at COP28 in Dubai to “transition away from fossil fuels,” after which no concrete action was taken.
Both in the Leaders’ Summit as well as in the opening ceremony of COP30, Brazil’s President Lula referenced a map of the fossil fuel phase-out, however contradictions are rife, Renata Prata, an analyst at the Arayara International Institute, told Gas Outlook’s Brazil Correspondent Amanda Magnani in a video interview conducted in Belém.
“At the same time that Lula makes these very broad references to a possible fossil fuel phase-out, Brazil is still expanding its frontiers of oil and gas drilling,” she said. “Given that the Brazilian delegation and the COP presidency itself has been positioning itself as a climate leader, it is very contradictory that at the same time Brazil is hiring these future greenhouse gas emissions.”
On Friday, there was a meeting specifically on the fossil fuel roadmap, yet, the Brazilian presidency “did not send any high officials, meaning that the Petrobras president was not there, the Minister of Minerals and Energy was not there. This already shows that this attempt of leading a fossil fuel phase-out map really falls short from what was promised by Lula in the opening ceremony and also in the Leaders’ Summit,” Prata stressed.
“Unlike Brazil, that is far away from committing to no new oil and gas in the Amazon and decommissioning the current exploratory blocks, Colombia has taken this bold and important step of committing to [an] Amazon free from oil and gas,” she added.
Controversially, less than three weeks ahead of COP30, Brazil’s environment agency Ibama gave state energy major Petrobras a licence to drill for oil and gas at Block-59, in the Amazon Basin.
The timing of the licence’s announcement so close to COP has already been highly criticised. Observatório do Clima called it a “double act of sabotage”: it threatens humanity by “going against science and betting on more climate change,” and undermines COP30, “whose most important outcome must be the implementation of the commitment to phase out fossil fuels,” the coalition wrote.
Agenda fight
As COP30 in Belém enters its second week, the issue of fossil fuel phaseout is starting to take on more urgency, however countries are still fighting over whether a roadmap should even be discussed in the first place. Brazil, for its part, has remained neutral over whether it should feature in the formal agenda.
Over the weekend, Brazil’s Environment Minister, Marina Silva, urged all countries to have the courage to address the need for a fossil fuel phaseout, calling the creation of a roadmap an “ethical” response to the climate crisis.
The process would be voluntary for those governments that wished to participate, and “self-determined,” Silva was cited by The Guardian as saying.
However the minister did not explicitly commit Brazil to a roadmap. “When we have a terrain or environment that is quite grim, it is good that we have a map. But the map does not force us to travel, or to climb,” she said.
There is not enough time at COP30 to draw up a roadmap, which could take several years because many countries face complex issues around dependence on fossil fuels, or wish to use the proceeds from selling fossil fuels to finance their development, Silva said.
“Brazil raises the subject, because Brazil is both a producer and consumer,” she said. “But Brazil is different, because Brazil, if it wants to, need not depend on fossil fuels. We have to understand that there are some that depend on fossil fuels in their economies and don’t have easy solutions, and others where fossil fuels are the basis of their economy.”
Flood of lobbyists
This COP breaks the newest record in terms of the presence of fossil fuel lobbies, pointed out Prata.
“One in every 25 participants are fossil fuel lobbyists. That means that we have over 1,600 lobbyists, which mounts up to being the second largest delegation at COP30. The only delegation that is larger than it is the Brazilian one,” she said, referring to new research released last week.
New analysis published by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition on Friday revealed that more than 1600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the climate talks, significantly outnumbering almost every country delegation at COP30 – with only host country Brazil (3805), sending more people.
Proportionally, that is a 12% increase from last year’s climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is the largest concentration of fossil fuel lobbyists at a COP since KBPO started analysing conference attendees, it said in a press statement.
Prata warned: “Having this kind of presence here undermines the necessity of all parties to the Convention actually committing to a true fossil fuel phase-out with actual deadlines. These lobbyists have as their sole purpose hindering actual ambitious climate commitments.”
(Writing by Sophie Davies)