The COP30 climate doom conference in Brazil has been a comedy of errors, beginning with the conference hosts cutting down a rainforest to accommodate all the carbon-spewing vehicles the attendees were driving, and ending with indigenous protesters blockading the entrance to the conference resort on Friday because they were angry about their rainforest getting cut down.
The UK Guardian added to the black comedy on Friday by complaining that the event was teeming with lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry.
In fact, the Guardian cited an activist organization called Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) who said the fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered every delegation at COP30 except for Brazil itself, the hosts of the event.
According to KBPO, one in every 25 attendees at COP30 was a lobbyist. The lobbyist infestation rose by 12 percent from the already dizzying heights of oil company activity at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan – and that was the conference where the host, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, refused to apologize for presiding over a successful petro-state.
“The overall number is smaller this year than at Cop29 in Baku (1,773) and Cop28 in Dubai (2,456), but the proportion is higher this year as the Belém summit is less well-attended,” the Guardian pointed out, without dwelling on the hypocrisy of a “climate summit” that attracts thousands of jet-setting attendees.
“The fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of spreading misinformation and disinformation while blocking meaningful climate action, received almost 60% more passes to COP30 than the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined (1,061), according to analysis by KBPO,” the Guardian growled.
“Another COP, same playbook. This is corporate capture, not climate governance,” complained climate activist Lien Vandamme.
“From the halls of the UNFCCC to our lands and territories, fossil fuel corporations are wrecking our communities and environment. Yet the red carpet is rolled out for thousands of lobbyists to roam the corridors,” said another activist, Nerisha Baldevu of Friends of the Earth Africa.
The UNFCCC is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.N. agency charged with negotiating global climate treaties and arranging the COP conferences. Climate activists claim the fossil-fuel industry has been working for decades to infiltrate the UNFCCC and weaken the climate agenda.
Some activists have demanded fossil fuel lobbyists be banned from COP and other UNFCCC events, because the climate crisis has supposedly grown so severe that no one but true believers can be allowed at the climate revival meetings.
U.N. officials have been cool to these demands, since the energy industry is inextricably linked to the climate change agenda, so excluding industry representatives would be difficult to justify. Also, if thousands of paying attendees for the COP affairs were suddenly excluded, the events would become even smaller and less newsworthy.