On Monday, November 10, the 30th edition of the Conference of the Parties (COP 30) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) officially opened in Belém, capital of the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon region.

With the world marked by increasingly intense and frequent extreme weather events caused by global warming, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party – PT) has dedicated immense resources and political attention to holding the event, aimed at showcasing the Amazon region and its environmental and climatic importance to the world.

The PT government’s rosy discourse is sharply at odds with reality. Its own policies are driving deforestation and the use of fossil fuels, with a particularly harmful impact on the region’s indigenous and riverine populations.

The Brazilian and world leaders gathered in Belém will do no more than throw out platitudes and empty proposals without addressing the real cause of the planet’s climate and environmental crisis: the capitalist profit system. Such feebleness and hypocrisy would have made COP30 a mere repetition of its earlier editions.

But COP30 is being held under conditions of the breakdown of the post-war capitalist order. As the imperialist powers are engaged in a tariff war and actively preparing for a new world war, the capitalist ruling classes are abandoning any pretenses that they will fight climate change.

Notably absent from this year’s ongoing Climate Summit are the leaders of China and the United States, the two main carbon emitters, as well as other top emitting countries such as India and Russia.

Speaking at the Leaders Summit last Thursday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres presented a threatening scenario if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced. Addressing President Lula, Guterres said, “the hard truth is that we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5°[C],” as determined by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

He said that the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted so far by countries and reviewed every five years by the signatories to the Paris Agreement, “represent progress, but... Even if fully implemented, they would put us on a path well above two degrees [Celsius] of global warming” by the end of this century.

By Monday, 110 countries, representing 71 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, had submitted their NDCs. Absent from the list are four of the world’s ten largest emitters, including India (3rd) and the US (2nd). Washington, under the administration of President Donald Trump, who dismisses climate change as a “scam,” withdrew from the Paris Agreement and has advanced a broad program of environmental deregulation.

According to the UNFCCC, if the NDCs submitted so far are fully achieved, carbon emissions should fall by around 12 percent by 2035 compared to 2019 levels, well below the 60 percent reduction needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century.

Guterres listed “dramatic consequences” if this does not happen, pushing “ecosystems to irreversible tipping points,” exposing “billions to unviable conditions,” and “amplifying threats to peace and security.” Denouncing this situation as a “moral failure” and saying that “what is still lacking is the political courage” to reverse it, he stressed that “it is no longer time for negotiations. It is time for implementation, implementation, implementation.”

Along the same lines, President Lula declared in the conference’s opening speech that this “will be the COP of truth.” He called on world leaders at the opening of COP30 to “accelerate climate action” in order to “overcome dependence on fossil fuels, halt and reverse deforestation, and mobilize resources for these purposes.”

Lula also criticized the trillions spent on wars, in contrast to the small fraction allocated to combating the effects of climate change, emphasizing that there is no solution to either problem without “multilateralism.” To this end, the Brazilian president proposed the “creation of a Climate Council, linked to the UN General Assembly.”

The idea that the imminent dangers of world war and environmental catastrophe confronting humanity can be solved through a pacific restoration of “multilateralism” via the UN is a gross illusion. The current crisis is rooted in the essential contradictions of the capitalist system—those between globalized production and the outdated national-states system, and between private profit interests and the social needs of the global masses.

As a faithful representative of the Brazilian and international bourgeoisie, Lula advances the claim that capitalism can be renewed and benefit all classes through a “fair transition” to a new sustainable economy. By “fair” he means an imaginary scenario in which the advanced capitalist countries commit to a “green economy” while allowing for the so-called developing countries, such as Brazil, to develop their national economies to advanced heights.

The complete bankruptcy of this “multipolar” perspective, which ignores the basic reality of imperialist capitalism, is graphically exposed in the absence from COP30 of the presidents of both the US and China, Brazil’s top commercial partners and the main powers between which Lula tries to balance. Moreover, Lula attends the event as the only president of the original BRICS countries, which were to play the leading role in the supposedly emerging “multipolar order.”

Lula’s desperate search for viable channels for his bourgeois nationalist program in the crumbling imperialist order also finds expression in a criminal promotion of figures like the reactionary French President Emmanuel Macron, a main star at the COP30 event. Macron—who is engaged in building dictatorial rule in French to crush the mass working-class resistance to his program of brutal social austerity and war against Russia—is criminally presented by Lula as a “green” and democratic opponent of “obscurantism.”

The class logic of Lula’s policies was expressed at the opening of the Leaders’ Summit on November 6, when the Brazilian president launched the Tropical Forest Fund Forever (TFFF) with great fanfare. Having already raised US$5.5 billion from countries such as France, Norway and Indonesia, it will be an investment fund managed by the World Bank. According to Lula, it “will generate returns for investors, and part of those returns will finance countries that maintain their forests.”

“The forest is not a commodity”

This proposal has been widely criticized by environmental organizations and activists. The Global Campaign for Climate Justice (DCJ) stated on its website that it is a “false solution” that “reflects the same extractivist and profit-driven logic that created the climate crisis.” In one of several statements by environmental activists against the proposal on the DCJ website, Chief Jonas Mura, of the Gavião Real Village, stated: “The [Lula] government talks about saving the forests, but what they are doing with this TFFF is putting a price on our lives. The forest is not a commodity.”

This is just one of the latest criticisms against the environmental policies of the Lula government, which since coming to power in 2023 has carried out a broad capitalist attack on workers and the poor in Brazil.

In March 2025, an editorial (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9113) in the prestigious journal Science, signed by scientists Philip Fearnside of the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) and Walter Leal Filho of the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, charged that, “as host of the conference, Brazil is not leading by example.” According to them, the Lula government is not implementing policies to “halt deforestation,” the main cause of carbon emissions in Brazil, and “to facilitate a rapid worldwide phaseout of fossil-fuel combustion.”

The article states that “virtually all branches of the country’s government are promoting activities that increase greenhouse gas emissions,” giving the following three examples:

• “the Ministry of Transportation is intent on opening large areas of Amazon forest to the entry of deforesters through the 408-km ‘middle stretch’ of the BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) highway and associated side roads;”

• “the Ministry of Agriculture subsidizes the transformation of pasture to soy, which is an important driver of deforestation;”

• “the Ministry of Mines and Energy is opening new oil and gas fields in the Amazon forest and in offshore areas, including its drilling plan in the mouth of the Amazon River, near the site of the upcoming COP.”

Since the publication of the Science editorial, the paving of the BR-319 highway and oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River have moved forward. In early September, Lula declared with conviction: “We are going to build the BR-319, I can guarantee you that.” By the end of October, when Petrobras began drilling an exploratory well, the Brazilian president defended oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River, stating dismissively: “I don’t want to be an environmental leader, I never claimed that.”

Important Brazilian indigenous leaders also criticized Lula’s government. A November 4 report on the Amazônia Real website heard from some of them after Lula visited indigenous and riverine communities in Santarém, Pará, in the Lower Tapajós River region, on November 2.

Alessandra Korap Munduruku denounced the privatization of more than 3,000 kilometers of navigable stretches of four major rivers in the Amazon region by the Lula government, a measure that “serves the interests of agribusiness and other economic sectors,” such as international giants Cargill and Bunge. She said that Lula is “selling the Amazon” and “handing [it] over ... to rich countries.”

The chief of the 28 villages of the Tupinambá people, also in the Lower Tapajós River region, Gilson Tupinambá, told Amazônia Real, “We do not accept that [Lula] uses the image of the Amazon and indigenous peoples to say that everything is fine.” He also criticized the president for not receiving indigenous leaders, explaining that “Lula’s lack of interest in dialoguing with ethnic leaders has to do with the ‘Ferrogrão’ project,” a nearly 1,000-kilometer railroad that will help transport Brazilian agribusiness production for export and will cut through countless indigenous communities.

What Lula is doing in his third term is a continuation of the attacks by PT governments between 2003 and 2016, particularly in the environmental area. Similar criticisms to those heard today were widely leveled at the then PT president Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016).

During her governments, the construction of the Jirau (2009-2013) and Belo Monte (2011-2016) hydroelectric plants in the Amazon region were also the target of protests by indigenous and riverine communities, who denounced their environmental and social impacts, including forced removals and threats to indigenous lands. Numerous strikes by construction workers were also reported during the construction of these plants.

This inescapable class logic also developed before COP30. At the end of September, a powerful strike by construction workers halted part of the COP30 construction work for 10 days in Belém and two other nearby cities. Denouncing the Lula government’s billion-dollar investment in large construction companies and the supposed legacy that the works would leave for the population, the workers demanded a “COP30 standard” wage increase and benefits.

The ongoing destruction of the Amazon region will not only have a local impact, but one that will be felt throughout Brazil and internationally. Scientists have warned that the Amazon Forest is very close to the point of no return, a critical threshold beyond which the forest could irreversibly degrade in the coming decades, with severe impacts to large urban centers thousands of kilometers away. The Science editorial mentioned above states:

...the catastrophic impact on Brazil if temperature increase is allowed to escape from human control. Brazil would lose its Amazon forest, including the vital role it plays in recycling the water that supplies greater São Paulo, the world’s fourth-largest city… the heavily populated semi-arid region in Northeast Brazil would become a desert, and the large populations all along Brazil’s Atlantic coast would be exposed to increased storms and sea levels.

To prevent this from happening, workers in Brazil and around the world must challenge the false illusions put forward by Lula and other capitalist leaders. Like all the world’s major problems, the climate crisis is a class issue that can only be resolved by developing an international socialist movement of the working class against its root cause, the global capitalist system.