COP30 Official Logo – Fair Use

With COP 30, the United Nations Climate Change conference, kicking of in Belem next month, some voices in the Global North are using the authorization of a new offshore drilling permit near the border with French Guiana as a platform to delegitimize the Brazilian government. Through misleading headlines claiming Lula authorized drilling “at the mouth of the Amazon River,” the government is framed as hypocritical for hosting the conference. Most of these articles fail to mention that Brazil’s environmental regulation agency, IBAMA, has only authorized testing, not commercial drilling, and that the site in question is actually located 540 kilometers from the mouth of the Amazon River and 175 kilometers offshore, near the border with the Guianas, where imperialist petroleum multinationals like Exxon have been drilling for years.

Without belittling the urgency of fighting climate change or transitioning to renewables, but to illustrate the perspective of Brazil’s organized working class on this issue, I interviewed Deyvid Bacelar, President of Brazil’s Unified Federation of Petroleum Workers (Federação Única dos Petroleiros, or FUP). Founded in 1994, the FUP is a federation of 14 labor unions that represents 180,000 workers at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company.

The new offshore drilling license for the Brazilian Equatorial Margin is drawing international criticism in the lead-up to COP 30. What benefits will it bring to Brazil, especially its working class?

Deyvid Bacelar: We are talking about the Equatorial Margin, which stretches from Amapá to Rio Grande do Norte. This is an area of oil reserves that encompasses two major Brazilian regions—the North and the Northeast. These regions have the worst human development indices in Brazil and have always been overlooked in terms of development,........

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