Belem (Brazil): At this point, the COP30, which is the world’s largest platform to discuss climate change, invites as much derision as it does indifference.

As a Reddit commenter put it, part of it has to do with the fact that it is, “Basically important people saying nice things to a bunch of cameras and microphones.” There is news that fossil fuel lobbyists have turned up in the largest numbers ever, with more access to negotiation processes than many small nations.

The terms bandied about seem like mockery against the backdrop of the ferocious natural disasters that kill and displace more and more people each time they happen. The image of negotiators from various countries, locked in rooms cooled with air conditioners, discussing technicalities that many countries will never honour is an otherworldly one, especially considering that the US – the world’s biggest historical contributor to carbon emissions – is missing from the negotiations. 

In the grand dystopian circus that is Donald Trump’s presidency, the US has slipped out of the global agreement that promised to attempt to keep global warming down to a limit that would not totally kill everyone. Emboldened, men and women have begun denying the very truths that they themselves had, until recently, believed was common knowledge. 

If anything is worse than a ham-handed behemoth being obstinate about the collective loss of life, then it is the layers of hypocrisy that surround an effort like the COP. Since the UN began the meetings at the Brazilian city of Belem, it has had to send three press releases noting that the door leading to the main room for negotiations is going to be closed because of a protest being held outside it. On the day of filing this article, the protests were by the Amazonian Munduruku tribe who have begun seeing debilitating deformities in their children because of contamination from mercury that is used in gold mining.

Alessandra Koran, a member of the Munduruku Ipereg Ayu movement, spoke as Indigenous people held a protest blocking the main entrance to the UN COP30 climate summit in........

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