This week, around 90 Indigenous Munduruku people blocked the main entrance to the Blue Zone at COP30, the UN climate conference in Brazil. They held the blockade for one hour. The Brazilian army arrived with reinforcements. Ana Toni, COP30’s executive director, called their protest “legitimate,” then announced that more than 900 Indigenous participants were in attendance. The machinery absorbed the dissent and continued.
This is what institutional capture looks like when it succeeds: not through exclusion, but through the reproduction of powerlessness disguised as inclusion.
The Munduruku were heard. They were met with officials. The conference went on.
COP30 in Belém demonstrates the form perfectly. A climate summit in the Amazon’s gateway while the Amazon is being drilled. A hundred decarbonization sessions while climate action plan deadlines quietly pass by.
More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists secured credentials to COP30 — roughly one in every 25 attendees. That’s substantially more than the entire Philippine delegation, a nation that just suffered catastrophic typhoons. The International Emissions Trading Association alone brought 60 representatives, including staff from ExxonMobil, BP and TotalEnergies.
According to analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition, a network of 450 organizations that reviewed the official participant list line by line, approximately 164 fossil fuel lobbyists gained access through government badges, granting them entry to closed negotiation sessions. France’s official delegation included 22 representatives of the fossil fuel industry, including the CEO of TotalEnergies. Japan brought 33 representatives, and Norway, 17.
A separate investigation by DeSmog and The Guardian found that of 77 big agriculture lobbyists, one in four is participating at Cop30 as part of an official country delegation.
More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists secured credentials to COP30, more than the entire Philippine delegation – a nation that just suffered catastrophic typhoons.
These aren’t side engagements. They are official positions inside national teams. The credentials exist by design. Participants must disclose funding and objectives — except those holding government badges, a category that remains opaque.
The central problem is not that fossil fuel interests attend COPs, it’s that they help write the rules meant to constrain them. As negotiator Harjeet Singh noted plainly: “Their voices [will be] silenced in the very rooms where decisions about their survival are being made.”
Indeed, some of the countries most threatened by climate collapse were priced out of participating in negotiating responses to it. Belém has roughly 18,000 hotel rooms; COP30 attracted 45,000 to 50,000 visitors. Initial rates ranged from $360 to $4,400 per night, with some apartments listed at $228,992 for a two-week stay. Prices eventually fell, but even the reduced rates posed real barriers.
That’s forced some countries to stay back, Reuters reports. “The lack of affordable accommodation places its members at a severe disadvantage,” Ilana Seid, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, nations on the front line of rising sea levels, told media. Smaller delegations, she noted, would leave island nations “lacking expertise needed to participate in the negotiations which decide our future effectively.”
Meanwhile, the host nation perfectly set the stage for this crisis. Brazil approved exploratory oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon mere weeks before hosting a climate summit themed around saving it. “It would be incoherent if I, in an act of irresponsibility, said: Well, we’re not going to use any more oil,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva justified.
He was being honest about the contradiction. The summit’s location was meant to focus attention on the Amazon’s role in absorbing carbon; the host nation, meanwhile, was expanding the industry even as it destroyed it.
The negotiations being undertaken, too, are far from adequate. According to UN projections, current policies put the world on track to warm by 2.8 degrees Celsius by the year 2100; if countries fulfill the promises made in their national climate action plans, the increase will be reduced to 2.3 to 2.5 degrees. But about 95% of country governments — about 64 of 194 nations — missed the February deadline to submit updated climate plans, formally called Nationally Determined Contributions.
The problem is simple: Global climate agreements set targets without creating obligations.
COP28 in Dubai produced the first-ever commitment to “transition away from fossil fuels.” Two years later, fossil fuel consumption rose. The summit’s president — Sultan al-Jaber, a state oil company CEO — has advocated for continued oil use alongside renewable energy expansion through 2050, arguing that energy demand requires both.
The pattern is neither accident nor incompetence. Andreas Malm, scholar of political ecology at Lund University, has documented how the Paris Agreement — signed with tremendous fanfare in 2015 — established ambitious temperature targets but allowed countries to submit their own Nationally Determined Contributions without any mechanism to aggregate them into binding global cuts.
In their book Overshoot, Malm and Wim Carton argue that the framework creates a system without common dates, quotas or binding parameters — effectively a free-for-all where nations set their own targets but face no collective obligation to achieve them.
Nations won the right to set their own targets but lost any obligation to achieve them collectively. The framework guaranteed that ambition would be announced while accountability remained dispersed.
Besides, there is always the carbon offset machine: If emissions cannot be stopped, they can be traded. If traded, they become profitable. The logic is elegant in its perversity.
According to a nine-month investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, a majority of rainforest carbon offsets certified by Verra — the world’s largest offset certifier — were found to significantly overstate their climate impact, with the methodology used raising integrity concerns.
One study analyzing 29 Verra rainforest projects that used alternative baseline methods found that 94% had questionable claims. Cambridge research found forest protection claims exceeded reality by an average of 400%. (Verra has disputed these findings and updated its methodology in response, though debates over the validity of the new approach continue.)
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged a carbon credit project leader with fraud in 2024, revealing that millions of false credits had been issued using falsified data. The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, which has studied these schemes for two decades, says they are largely flawed and don’t work.
Journalist-activist Naomi Klein put the dilemma succinctly. “We have not done the things necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis,” she writes in This Changes Everything. A decade later, capitalism has simply incorporated her critique into market logic. Carbon markets exist to prove her wrong while proving her right.
For years, Kevin Anderson, professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester has argued that wealthy countries need to produce zero emissions by the year 2030 “if we want an outside chance at 1.5 [degrees] by 2035.”
It remains politically impossible. So we instead discuss net zero, a term that allows continued fossil fuel extraction today in exchange for hypothetical carbon removal tomorrow.
COP31 is already scheduled; so is COP32. Each will produce communiqués, frameworks and pledges. Each will absorb dissent without changing direction. Corporate participants will rebrand themselves as climate leaders. We will call it progress. We will call it governance.
“This is the most damning part,” Anderson noted in a 2021 interview with Democracy Now! “If you went back a few COPs ago, you would never hear the expression ‘net zero.’ You don’t have to phase out fossil fuels if you’ve got net zero, because you can unburden the fossil fuels and our children will find technologies to suck CO2 out of the air in years to come.”
It’s no wonder that, faced with this relentless greenwashing, Greta Thunberg simply stopped attending.
What would treating the climate crisis as a real emergency actually require? Ending fossil fuel subsidies immediately (developed nations spend at least $378 billion annually on them), redirecting that capital to rapid energy transition, and transferring technology to developing countries without debt conditions. It would require excluding the fossil fuel industry from negotiations rather than negotiating with them as essential partners: Indigenous land rights enforced at the table, not performances of inclusion followed by army-backed removals.
Of course, none of this is simple. Achieving these changes would require coordinated international resolve and the willingness to take on entrenched political and economic interests, something that has consistently proven elusive at COPs.
The ritual will continue. COP31 is already scheduled; so is COP32. Each will produce communiqués, frameworks and pledges. Each will absorb dissent without changing direction. Corporate participants will rebrand themselves as climate leaders. We will call it progress. We will call it governance.
What won’t change, as COP30 has made unmistakably clear, is a confrontation with the interests the conference actually serves.
The Amazon knows the difference. So do the people locked outside.
