AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Global negotiations at the U.N. climate summit ended Saturday in Belém, Brazil, with a watered-down agreement that doesn’t include a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal — doesn’t even mention fossil fuels, the world’s largest contributors to the climate crisis. The final agreement went into overtime after two weeks of contentious negotiations in Belém, the gateway to the Amazon.

A coalition of more than 80 nations, from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Europe and U.K., had supported a just transition away from fossil fuels, but the efforts were derailed by petrostates, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia, as well as the more than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists who were granted access to the climate talks this year. A fossil fuel phaseout was also a key demand by the thousands of Indigenous leaders who attended COP30.

This is Colombia’s environment minister, Irene Vélez Torres.

IRENE VÉLEZ TORRES: Particularly the oil-producing countries are only trying to focus on adaptation. But adaptation is an empty bag if mitigation doesn’t come next to adaptation. Adaptation alone and the finances for adaptation are not sufficient if we don’t deal with the problem.

The root cause of this problem is fossil fuels. How are we dealing with that? How are we going to come out from this COP to say and to tell the people that we deny the most basic scientific truth, which is that the fossil fuels are the cause of more than 80% of the emissions that are generating climate change? We cannot look at the people in the future generations if we don’t do something now. And we cannot accept a text that is not dealing with the real problems.

AMY GOODMAN: While in Belém, the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands announced they’d be co-hosting the first international conference on the just transition away from fossil fuels next year in Colombia. The landmark gathering will take place in the Colombian port city of Santa Marta in April.

The COP30 agreement also makes no new commitments to halt deforestation and doesn’t address global meat consumption, another major driver of global heating. More than 300 agribusiness lobbyists attended the climate talks in Belém as the expansion of industrial agriculture, including the production of soy, has led to worsening air pollution and deforestation in the Amazon.

This all comes as the Trump administration boycotted COP30 after the White House withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement for the second time when Trump returned to office.

We’re now joined by two guests. In Belém, Brazil, Jonathan Watts is with us, The Guardian’s global environment writer, usually based in Altamira, Brazil. And in Washington, D.C., Brandon Wu is the director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, just returned from COP30 in Belém.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Jonathan, let’s begin with you. You’re right there in the gateway to the Amazon. You had a major piece with other Guardian writers summarizing what happened. Why don’t you do it for us here? What took place over these last two weeks? What agreement did it lead to? What didn’t it agree to? Would you call it a total failure or an incremental, very slow transition away — though they wouldn’t talk about transition away — from what some call the F-word, fossil fuels?

JONATHAN WATTS: The first thing I would say is that it’s not as bad as I expected. I had the lowest of expectations, which were almost realized. This COP conference came perilously close to breaking down. And if this had broken down, then the whole Paris Agreement, that’s put in place 10 years ago, could have collapsed. So this was a very dangerous moment.

And I don’t think we can understand what happened in Belém without looking at the terrible, terrible geopolitical situation. The absence of the United States was critical. The United States, of course, is the world’s biggest historical emitter and the richest country, the one that in past conferences has leaned on countries like Saudi Arabia to be a bit more giving. It wasn’t there, and President Donald Trump has been openly hostile to the whole multilateral, global environmental governance system. Then you have the wars. Then you have the fact that Europe is rearming. So, in this context, I think it’s amazing that anything came out of this.

Your summary is excellent, that this conference didn’t go — get anywhere near close enough to where we need to be going to keep global warming to a reasonably safe level of 1.5 C. All the scientists I talked to here — and that was something new about this conference, bringing in more scientists, as well as more Indigenous people — all the scientists here were incredibly alarmed. We’re approaching a number of tipping points with regards to the Amazon rainforest, with regards to Atlantic currents and so forth. So, yes, that’s frustrating, but that’s not new. Last year was a very similar outcome. This year, what I think there was — it’s really disappointing there was no mention of fossil fuels. But Saudi Arabia just said really clearly, if you talk about a roadmap and transition, these talks are going to collapse. So, it just wasn’t on the table.

But what we did see was the start of a new just transition mechanism, a tripling of funds, adaptation funds, for developing countries, and, more than anything else, a kind of a radicalism that’s come into the talks that wasn’t there before. It was there on the streets. For the first time in four years, civil society was out in force, amazing color, dynamism, flotillas in the bay, tens of thousands of people in the streets, more Indigenous people in the conference than ever before. That was incredibly encouraging. So was the fact that, as you mentioned, Colombia and a group of other high ambition nations have decided to go it alone and create a parallel series of conferences for a just transition away from fossil fuels. That’s really going on the offensive.

And then, finally, kind of in the background of all of this was China and what’s happening in China with its fossil fuel shift away — sorry, a shift away from fossil fuels, incredibly, incredible ramp up of wind, solar, electric cars, that is transforming the world. Despite what the talks do achieve or don’t achieve, it’s absolutely incredible how fast things are moving in that area. So, it seems, from where I’m sitting, that the United States under Donald Trump is trying to go backwards to the 20th century in a fossil fuel era, whereas a huge part of the rest of the world wants to move forward into something else. So, yes, I wish there was much, much more on the table here, but given everything that’s happening in the world right now, the whole process lives to fight another day.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the role of China. I want to bring in Brandon Wu. China and the United States. You’ve just returned from Belém, flew in to Washington, D.C. If you can talk about the significance of the U.S.? So, you don’t say the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and UAE and other countries blocked the final declaration mentioning fossil fuels, but that’s only because the U.S. boycotted. So, the significance of this? And did you expect that China would more fill the vacuum, as it becomes a leader in the production of renewable energy technology?

BRANDON WU: Yeah, China’s role in this, in all this, is extremely interesting. You know, let’s talk about that.

I actually want to back up a moment and say I’m extremely angry, right? I’m angry at a really weak outcome. I’m angry at the fossil fuel lobbyists roaming the venue freely, while the Indigenous activists, that both of you have mentioned, were actually met with militarized repression. I’m angry at all the governments that aren’t standing up for their people.

But I have a special level of incandescent outrage at a particular set of countries, and it’s actually a slightly different set than the one that we’re naming so far, and that is the rich, developed countries of the Global North, who come in to these conferences, and they act like they’re the heroes, when, in fact, what they’re doing is shifting the burden of a crisis that they caused onto the backs of the poor.

So, you have — of course, you have the United States, but also the European Union, which was part of this so-called high ambition coalition pushing a fossil fuel roadmap. They are not on track in any way to phase out fossil fuels themselves. At this point, 10 years after the Paris Agreement, the countries of the Global North should be pretty close to near-zero emissions. None of them are anywhere close to that. And so, to come in and to push a fossil fuel roadmap, you know, it strikes as a little bit hypocritical. Of course, we need a fossil fuel phaseout. We need it as fast as possible. But it has to start in the Global North, and the Global North has to provide the finance to the Global South to enable that to happen.

That is part of what China is doing, frankly. China is also doing some unhelpful stuff, you know, continuing investment in coal, but they are also investing in renewables in a way that the Global North just isn’t doing at scale, and that’s what’s undermining trust in the agreement. That’s why countries, like most of Africa, not just Saudi Arabia and Russia, were opposed to the fossil fuel roadmap in Belém, because they had no assurance that the Global North would be moving first or would be providing support for them to have a transition.

AMY GOODMAN: Brandon Wu, when you talk about adaptation, it’s become a buzzword. Everyone understands it at the U.N. climate summit, but outside of that, I don’t think people really get it. Explain what you mean by funding adaptation.

BRANDON WU: So, adaptation is really just supporting communities to be resilient to climate impacts. Climate impacts are not — you know, we all know climate impacts are not something that’s going to happen in the future. It’s happening now. It’s been happening for decades, particularly in the most vulnerable countries in the Global South. Many of those communities had zero contribution to the climate crisis, but they’re the ones that are feeling the brunt of its harmful effects. And they need to be supported with resources to be able to adapt to those impacts. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about adaptation finance.

And again, it’s the wealthy countries of the Global North, that have caused this crisis, that are responsible for providing that support. We did get a tripling, in theory, of adaptation finance at this COP. But if you look at the actual text, it’s really ambiguous. So, the developed countries, led by the EU, they took out the baseline. It was supposed to be adaptation tripling from 2025 levels by 2030. They took out the baseline, so now it doesn’t reference 2025 levels, so we’re not sure what we’re tripling from. And they pushed the deadline from 2030 to 2035, 10 years from now. That’s like an interminable amount of time for communities that are facing the brunt of the impacts right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you calling for a ban on fossil fuel lobbyists — 

BRANDON WU: Yes, absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: — at the U.N. climate summit?

BRANDON WU: Absolutely. You know, we can criticize this process in any number of different ways. It’s been 30 years. It hasn’t delivered what we need. A big part of that is the presence, as you say, of fossil fuel lobbyists at this talk. So, it’s fossil fuel lobbyists. It’s intransigent Global North governments. And part of the reason that they’re so intransigent is those fossil fuel lobbyists that have their ears. So, yes, absolutely, they do not belong at talks that are designed to solve the climate crisis, which means getting rid of fossil fuels altogether.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk — if you can talk, Brandon, about the Belém Declaration? I want to get Jonathan’s view on this, as well. So, on the one hand, you have the COP30 not mentioning fossil fuels. But I think what Lula will focus on, the Brazilian president, as he did as he headed to G20 and was there this weekend, was what’s called the Belém Declaration. Explain that.

BRANDON WU: So, the Belém Declaration is, essentially, a coalition of countries that want to, or at least say they want to, move on fossil fuels and are frustrated with the U.N. climate negotiations, because it is a consensus-based process, and so you can have individual countries blocking progress. And so, they want to take something outside of this process and move forward on phasing out fossil fuels with a sort of coalition of the willing, if I can use that term. And so, this is a genuinely exciting development. This is the kind of energy that we need. You know, we need all the initiatives we can get to phase out fossil fuels and, I might add, to stop deforestation. That’s sort of the second part of this, that you have, thankfully, mentioned, but that a lot of people forget about — phase out fossil fuels and stop deforestation. And we need all the initiatives they can get — we can get. And so, the fact that they’ve started something outside the COP, you know, that is an exciting development.

I’m glad also that Jonathan mentioned the exciting development also that came within the COP process, which is the conversation on just transition. This is about how do we actually have a transition from a fossil fuel-based economy that doesn’t leave communities and workers and ordinary people behind. We did have some incremental progress on that at this COP, which mitigates an otherwise very bad outcome. And I don’t think we would have gotten that outcome if the U.S. had been there.

AMY GOODMAN: Jonathan Watts, you mentioned the large presence of Indigenous people. I think nearly a thousand were accredited. Thousands more were outside, though there was serious repression of those that tried to go from the outside in. Last Friday, the Indigenous leaders actually shut down the COP for a few hours. But I want to talk about the dangers Indigenous people and their allies face, who are land defenders, who are water defenders. You are an editor of the book — and I went to a bookstore in Belém last week, where you, as well as others, spoke — How to Save the Amazon, a book by Dom Phillips, The Guardian reporter. At one point, I think, he was a Guardian reporter, who was murdered, together with the Brazilian Bruno Pereira, when they were investigating what was happening in the Amazon. If you can talk about the dangers people face? And then I’d like to make my way into what’s happening with Bolsonaro right now and how he enabled so much of this, a man who’s about to go to prison, who President Trump has defended, the former president of Brazil. But start with the dangers people face.

JONATHAN WATTS: Sure. Something like 200 environmental land defenders are killed around the world every year. It’s an incredible toll. It’s the toll of a war. And this is a war against nature.

Dom Phillips, who worked for The Guardian, but he was a freelancer also for The Washington Post and many other organizations, he wanted to write a book where he asked as many people as possible how to save the Amazon, so from a position of great humility, to try to understand. He found out just how dangerous it was, when he was traveling with an Indigenous expert called Bruno Pereira, who is Brazilian, who had worked for the government, worked with Indigenous people for a long time, and he was targeted and killed. Dom witnessed it and paid the price. This case got a lot of attention because Dom had a lot of journalist friends, because — frankly, because he was from the Global North. But these kind of cases are happening all the time. It’s often unreported. Very often it’s Indigenous people who are killed.

And going back to the conference a little, there was this kind of contradiction. There were more Indigenous people inside than ever before, including Brazil has for the first time got an Indigenous minister, and many senior Indigenous leaders were in the Blue Zone, the main negotiating area. But they weren’t there for the final talks. And that’s something that really needs to change, so that the people on the frontline, the people who know the forest best and other biomes best, are represented and their voices are heard when these kinds of decisions are made.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to do another show on How to Save the Amazon, this book that has just come out. But I wanted to ask Brandon Wu, as you come back from Belém, where you think global movements to deal with the climate catastrophe are headed. And the significance of this Colombia meeting that’s happening in just months from now, the leadership of Petro, the president of Colombia? They’re going to be doing it in conjunction with, sponsoring it, of a country of the North, of the Netherlands. Talk about the signficance of that.

BRANDON WU: I think this is really important. I think Colombia’s initiative, President Petro’s initiative, on this has been really admirable. And I also think that none of this is going to happen unless there is more ambition and more finance coming from the big Global North countries, including the United States. Obviously, the political situation is difficult. Politics are difficult everywhere.

But here in the United States, you know, I think what Trump has done over the past year has really shown that the line we’ve heard from the U.S. and other rich countries over the past 30 years in these negotiations, which is that we don’t have the money to give to the Global South to enable a worldwide transition away from fossil fuels, that’s just a lie. Right? We have been fighting tooth and nail for $100 billion a year, which was the original goal for climate money flowing from Global North to Global South. It’s now $300 billion, is the new goal. It’s still far too little. But, you know, the response from the U.S. and the EU has been “We just don’t have the money.” But this year, we saw the Trump administration just sort of magic up $200 billion for ICE and CBP, right? We have consistently magicked up lots of money for Israel. Our military budget is nearing a trillion dollars. We subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. It’s just not true that the money isn’t there. And I think it’s actually quite useful that this administration is showing how muth of a lie that is.

And so, in answer to your response about the role of movements, you know, I think our movements, especially in those wealthy developed countries, really have to lean on our governments to show how the money is there. It’s just the political will that’s not, and it’s up to us to change that.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to end by asking about former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Jonathan. He was just arrested this weekend after there was evidence that he tampered with his ankle monitor while under house arrest, the arrest ordered by the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice de Moraes over fears that he would, Bolsonaro would, attempt to escape his compound days before he was headed to a 27-year prison term, back in September sentenced to that for plotting a military coup and assassination against Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Can you talk about the significance of what happened? His son was calling for Brazilians to rally at the compound and to fight. It was feared, in the chaos, he might escape to, what, the U.S. Embassy there or the Argentine Embassy there. Why don’t you summarize the significance of this moment, even in terms of climate change?

JONATHAN WATTS: This is hugely, hugely important. We are — we are in a battle around the world between those who want to keep the world habitable and those who want to just exploit it until there’s nothing left. And Brazil is one of the frontline states. The Global South is bearing the brunt of this. The Global North absolutely has more responsibility and should be doing a lot more. And it’s politicians on the far right, of which Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro, is one of the figureheads, at least in Latin America, that are pushing forward this extractivist agenda, come what may. This leads them, very often, towards authoritarianism. And we’re now seeing that, of course, in the United States, as well.

And so, I think it’s hugely significant that the Brazilian courts stepped up, intervened and have put Jair Bolsonaro behind bars. And what’s really important is it’s not just Jair Bolsonaro. Several of Brazil’s top military generals have also been sentenced. And this is so historical. It was only — it was up until 1985, Brazil had a military dictatorship. And after that, there was a kind of an amnesty, let’s not [inaudible] —

AMY GOODMAN: Thirty seconds.

JONATHAN WATTS: Sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.

JONATHAN WATTS: Oh, OK. Just look, it’s really important that when people break the rules, they’re punished for it, and that someone like Jair Bolsonaro, who, while he was president, oversaw the greatest destruction of the Amazon in any recent presidency, it’s great that he’s not above the law, that there isn’t impunity. But there will be a fight back. You can be sure this is not over.

AMY GOODMAN: Jonathan Watts, I want to thank you for being with us, The Guardian's global environment writer, speaking to us from Belém, Brazil, where the U.N. COP took place, and Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, just back from Belém. I'm Amy Goodman, also just back from Belém.