[an earlier version of this text was published in Portuguese at The Intercept Brasil - confira a versão em português aqui]

The attacks on oil refineries and desalination plants, once rare and considered dangerous escalations, now dominate newspaper headlines and signal a world in turmoil that has no regard for rules or boundaries. It has been the case for a while, mostly evidenced by the inaction and normalisation of the genocide in Gaza and whatever else Trump and Netanyahu are up to nowadays. Together, they test the waters of the absurd, just to see if the world will let them move the dial of death and imperialism a little further and, of course, get a glimpse into how much money can be made through war and ecocide.

Yet, it is deeply concerning that the debate that we keep focusing primarily on analysing the leaders involved and how their decisions impact economic and market factors, as if the scenario of widespread death, with its human and ecological cost, were merely a backdrop. In a world of general online betting on absolutely everything, it is problematic that we sit down and try to guess Trump’s next move rather than ensuring, through just transitions and structural transformation, that whatever he does won’t impact us as much as before. This is especially true here in the Global South, for our historical conditions are plagued by growing economic dependencies and unequal ecological exchange. Whereas the emerging powers in the region appear to be keen on reducing these dependencies, appealing to other international cooperation arrangements and important tools concerning green industrial policy or resource nationalisation, there’s still a big blindspot along the way for reducing unequal ecological exchange. In fact, industrialising at home is no guarantee that this exchange will be lessened. It might just be the case that the more we produce of something at home with the purpose of providing for the global market, the more we will extract, not even benefitting local uses.

One of my favourite cases for highlighting this contradiction is Indonesia. Whereas its policy on nickel is praised almost everywhere as a prime example of green industrial policy in the Global South, ensuring that unequal economic exchange is reduced and that better jobs are created out of nickel production, as it stands today, the growth in nickel processing has also meant more greenhouse gases emissions from coal-fired plants and more sacrifice zones from mining. All the while, the nickel processing and future nickel battery plants aim to service a market of nickel-based EV batteries that sits mostly outside of Indonesia, given that Indonesia’s domestic EV market is dominated by more affordable cars that rely on LFP batteries instead of nickel-based batteries. Therefore, it might be decent industrial policy, but whether it is actually green and whether it actually reduces dependencies on imports, that’s a whole other story.

But in addition to the mega-extractivist sector, we can easily point out the tunnel visions in energy policy. Global South countries looking to decarbonise or to become energy exporters instead of net importers have pushed towards more investments in national infrastructure. But what good is it when, at the end of the day, the more energy we produce, the more of it can be grabbed locally by agribusiness, dirty industries and, as is more and more the case, data centres owned by Big Tech?

Therefore, if we consider that wars and disputes over hegemony in such an unequal geopolitical system are, at heart, about the control of people and life, we understand that conflicts involving energy, water and other resources are never merely about accumulation. If, on one side, oil wells are seized, there is always another side without electricity, without fuel or without access to the basics for social functioning. In times of widespread energy crisis, it is worth understanding how this is an orchestrated crisis and how, once again, energy poverty exists as a tool for dominating the periphery. Allow me to bring in the context of Brazil and Cuba to the conversation.

What we mean by energy poverty

The Brazilian federal government defines energy poverty as “the lack of access to modern energy services by individuals or groups”. This formal definition is applied to guide public policy and is similar to the view taken in other countries. However, in the reality of a world in the throes of intense social conflict, energy poverty is much more than a problem of access to infrastructure, whether due to its absence or its cost.

In the field of energy justice and democracy, we understand energy poverty to be a state of systemic exclusion of people and groups from the resources necessary to meet their needs for a full life. This occurs through the commodification of energy and the capture of resources, infrastructure and strategic knowledge by dominant sectors. Consequently, energy poverty reflects class inequalities within a society and international disorder, such that peoples have their right to self-determination and autonomy denied in the energy context as well.

From this, we realise that energy poverty has many facets. Regarding economic access, we know that almost half a million people in Brazil still live without electricity. These are not people who choose to live without electricity, but groups and regions that have to improvise access to electricity and, as a result, are also denied their right to other public services, including healthcare and education. This is where energy poverty makes its daily home. In a world of intense energy expansion—whether in aggregate consumption or in the implementation of infrastructure projects focused on electricity, heating and fuels—the International Energy Agency warns: over 700 million people remained without access to electricity in 2024, thereby also undermining their stable and secure access to other basic rights.

This disparity has its historical roots in capitalism, colonialism and the imperialist system of domination. This explains the energy poverty faced by Ukrainians, Sudanese, Palestinians, Lebanese and Yemenis in situations of war, occupation and humanitarian disaster. The technology exists, as does the global capacity to guarantee the necessary infrastructure as a human right. But as energy is a commodity and a resource for the accumulation of power, entire peoples are excluded as both means and ends to achieve goals of domination.

In 2024, data centres consumed around 415 terawatt-hours of energy, and companies such as Microsoft are promoting the reactivation of nuclear power stations simply to ensure the supply meets their demand. Meanwhile, the world is accelerating the race for critical minerals to ensure the electrification of the capitalist way of life. Therefore, allowing hundreds of millions of people to remain in the dark is a choice.

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Dependence and power cuts designed by imperialism to punish Cubans into submission

Recently, the Brazilian historian Rafael Domingos Oliveira described a little of what it is like to be in Cuba during the most severe phase of its energy crisis. When fuel runs out, solid waste piles up in the streets and the lack of collection creates an environment conducive to the spread of disease. Rationing and prioritising generators for essential services such as hospitals cannot cope with the increase in demand, as the energy crisis acts as a catalyst for other crises, exacerbating problems and hindering structural solutions. The blockade, which has been strangling the Cuban economy for decades, has also left its energy infrastructure vulnerable, effectively cutting Cubans off from sovereign and free avenues to procure supplies, carry out maintenance and technical improvements, and invest in autonomous capacity – as would be the case if Cuba could participate in cooperation models aimed at expanding renewable energies such as solar and wind power.

It is not as though Cuba were oblivious to the benefits of an energy transition. Countries suffering from high commercial or political dependence on partners that supply them with fossil fuels, as is the case with Cuba, find in the expansion of renewable supply a path to autonomy and protection against external shocks and attacks. Although historically Cuba has depended on Venezuela, Russia and other allies to supply its thermal power stations, there has also been a recent effort to diversify this mix, to the extent that solar photovoltaic power reached 9% of the total energy mix in 2025, mainly through trade with China and Spain.

US sanctions hinder the establishment of fruitful and stable trade relations, as well as damaging the national economy, which has increasingly less revenue and more debt, making it difficult for the state and locally operating businesses to invest. The tourism sector, so central to the Cuban economy, nearly collapsed during the pandemic and today reveals a hotel sector – featuring many Spanish chains such as Iberostar and Meliá – with critically low occupancy rates and difficulty accessing supplies to attract the tourists who still visit the island. As an island mired in energy poverty cannot even maintain an optimal flow of flights, the crisis in tourism means further economic crisis.

And this is how Cuba, which could have escaped the systemic blackout through a solid energy transition strategy, is unable to secure the most basic tools for its independence. If European countries recognise the current oil price shock and import barriers as an energy crisis, what has been happening in Cuba for six decades is far more profound. Darkness is not a symptom of the crisis; it is the blocking of the capacity to confront a permanent colonial and imperialist crisis.

Unequal energy exchange - or the theft of energy in an increasingly electrified world

In the face of extreme cases of energy poverty, we must also speak of energy impoverishment. Here, we encounter situations distinct from rationing and widespread blackouts, as the process of energy impoverishment occurs by ensuring that countries and sectors already rich in energy retain their privileged access, hindering a fairer and more democratic distribution of energy expansion, and in certain cases capturing energy generation for the exclusive benefit of billionaires and large corporations.

The aforementioned example of data centres is particularly striking, especially as there are many projects to establish mega-centres for big tech companies in regions experiencing water stress or fragmented and scarce provision of essential services. We already know that the number of data centres grew by 628% in Brazil in just ten years, between 2013 and 2023, and that some of them consume as much electricity as an entire municipality.

Brazil and other countries in the region, such as Chile, are attractive to these companies, particularly in terms of their renewable energy expansion plans, as they guarantee access to decarbonised energy sources, supporting greenhouse gas emission targets that facilitate other corporate investments. In some cases, it is claimed that there is a local oversupply of renewable energy and that data centres can make better use of this, especially if they benefit from tax breaks and other incentives.

This logic is strange, yet typical of an energy market built without energy democracy in mind.

Recently, Brazil renewed the concessions for coal-fired power stations until 2040, and one of the public arguments – including that of the Minister of Mines and Energy – was that maintaining such a dirty source of electricity is necessary as a pillar of energy security, given that Brazilian electricity consumption is estimated to grow by an average of 3.3% per year until 2035. This growth forecast already incorporates the projected demand from new or expanding sectors, such as data centres. The message, therefore, is simple: since we do not manage the electricity sector for the sake of efficiency and democracy, we will expand all sources of supply, including dirty ones, so that there is no shortage of energy for the foreign data centres setting up in the country.

A similar logic is presented in the projects and memoranda of understanding regarding the production of green hydrogen in the Global South. There are many cases in regions such as Latin America and North Africa where investment and technical cooperation agreements aim to establish veritable private estates for wind and solar photovoltaic production, the megawatts from which will be destined for green hydrogen plants.

One of the central objectives is to invest in the technological development of ‘green’ energy commodities. Since it is not possible to export wind and solar energy directly to other distant continents, the approach is to use them as an electricity source for the production of green hydrogen and even conversion into green ammonia, which in turn can be exported for use as fuel or fertilisers. Although such investments lack technological maturity, particularly in terms of transport and efficiency, the actions of countries such as Germany indicate an interest in ensuring that the renewable energy generation capacity of the Global South can meet their ever-increasing demand for energy, given that they have no intention of curbing their high consumption.

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Energy privatisation threatens the sovereignty of the Brazilian people

This leads us to question the contradiction between discourses on energy sovereignty—reduced to the control and capacity to exploit energy resources such as oil—the priority given to exports, and the normalisation of a private sector that operates the domestic energy system, prioritising profit. If the presence of these corporations is already a threat to basic energy security, why would any country aiming for energy sovereignty let them operate with such freedom as is the case in Brazil?

Enel Distribuição São Paulo, for example, continues to insist that it has acted appropriately in the face of blackouts in the areas where it operates, particularly in light of Technical Note No. 36/2026 from the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), which may finally impose a penalty commensurate with the negligence and general precariousness practised by the company. On 7 April, the Aneel board unanimously decided to recommend the termination of Enel’s concession contract in São Paulo to the Ministry of Mines and Energy. Even the São Paulo City Council, which is firmly in favour of privatisation across the board, criticises the utility’s performance, claiming that “Enel is a company that fails to fulfil its commitments to the city, providing a deplorable service to the population”. This appalling service stems from a business model common to private concessions, which involves reducing staff numbers and under-investing in infrastructure and system maintenance, whilst profits and dividends are guaranteed.

Power cuts of this kind do not affect everyone equally. The elitist and racist dynamics of the organisation of urban space – and of the urban in relation to the rural – shape the focus of service provision and private infrastructure, whilst also affecting the capitalist public sector, which reproduces inequalities in its operations. As argued by journalist Ivan Costa, “in the favelas and suburbs, where access to energy is often unstable and the electricity grid is precarious, the impacts are felt more acutely”.

Whilst in major cities, middle-class and luxury housing estates have already begun investing in generators for emergency power supply in the event of prolonged blackouts, such investment cannot be expected in neighbourhoods and regions most marked by severe socio-economic inequality. This is also a symptom of energy poverty. And when a working-class family loses all the food stored in their fridge because they went 48 hours without electricity, this also contributes to a scenario of food insecurity. These crises are interconnected and deeply shaped by power structures, to the extent that the supposed quest for Brazilian energy sovereignty must take into account the damage caused by the private concession model for electricity distribution in the country.

Our Eletrobras was privatised for a mere R$ 33.7 billion in 2022 – a sum far below the approximate value of the company – and was renamed Axia Energia in 2025. It is responsible for 81 power stations (47 hydroelectric, 33 wind and one solar) and around 74,000 kilometres of transmission lines. Last year, it also sold its shares in Eletronuclear and effectively handed over the majority of the capital relating to Brazil’s nuclear energy production to Âmbar Energia, a company belonging to the J&F Group, owned by brothers Joesley and Wesley Batista. Âmbar also operates the Candiota coal-fired power station in Rio Grande do Sul and benefited from the law that renewed contracts with thermal power stations. The very same Ministry of Mines and Energy that encouraged the retention of coal in Brazil’s energy mix proposed paying a price of R$ 540.27 per MWh for Candiota, when, according to a report in Folha de S.Paulo, the average price charged by competitors using imported coal is R$ 359.50.

This is a context in which the national supply of electricity is expanding, but we are also paying more for it and cannot even be certain of a secure, continuous and equitable supply. It was in full awareness of the social and economic harm caused by privatisation in the electricity sector that Brazilian electricity workers launched a campaign as early as 2022 for the renationalisation of Eletrobras. At the time, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was still a presidential candidate and, according to the National Collective of Electricity Workers, had signalled his support for renationalisation.

In 2023, the Federal Attorney-General’s Office (AGU) filed a Direct Action of Unconstitutionality, also signed by Lula, with the Federal Supreme Court (STF), to challenge aspects of the privatisation, particularly the drastic reduction in the federal government’s voting power within the company. However, in 2025, the government itself abandoned this fight, proposing an agreement that validated the sale, despite public opposition.

Exploring paths to energy democracy

Although the approach that turns energy into a commodity demonstrates its flaws and injustices time and again, it has become quite normalised amidst crises. This makes crises appear as accidents or exceptional moments caused by external factors, such as authoritarian decisions by fascist regimes or mishaps along the way. A more holistic and peripheral view of the polycrisis suggests that this is not quite the case. If crises are not felt uniformly everywhere, the way of addressing them will not be the same either.

For this reason, agendas for renationalisation are very important, ranging from the field of energy production and distribution to sectors such as mining. Whilst cases such as Cuba’s require practical acts of solidarity—such as the dispatch of resources and photovoltaic panels by the government of China, as well as by Brazilian civil society groups—they also teach us the value of nurturing our autonomy. For us in the Global South, subject to these paths of dependency and vulnerability, it is our duty to refuse to hand over control of our infrastructure to private groups, placing energy democracy at the heart of our planning for supply and distribution. Only in this way will we have a sufficient foundation to build real energy sovereignty and contribute to a strategy that does more than help us navigate the shocks of the polycrisis. True sovereignty - as ecological sovereignty - is the pathway to actual economic immunity to these shocks and should be a priority for the Global South.

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Our region is abundant with riches considered “strategic” or “critical” to the rest of the world. Thea Riofrancos, author of the book Extraction, highlights that these terms are not random, but have a bellicose origin. Minerals and fuels are strategic not only because they can be used for important technology and development purposes, but also because they are not equally distributed. Some territories - and as a consequence, countries - have more of some than others. Therefore, in the geopolitical terrain, it is also important to secure access to these resources, even if they are sitting in/on land that is not yours.

Obviously, knowing the history of modern wars, we know that fossil fuels have played a strong role in the killing-for-resources machine. These are not often justified as the pursuit of oil, though. Although imperialism is profoundly illiberal, given that it operates through violence, authoritarianism, and domination, we witnessed a long period of imperial intervention justified on liberal terms. European nations that were responsible for slicing up entire territories, dividing up peoples, and plundering nature for resources during colonial times, later preferred to support war incursions, spying and political unrest in the name of freedoms, human rights, democracy and stability. How these terms were defined mattered little, as long as you could hold them to a higher stance and use them to lend legitimacy to some pretty illegitimate acts.

The United States, however, was the country to perfect this system. At the same time that it toppled democratic governments in the Global South to establish US-friendly dictatorships, it instrumentalised the ghost of communism to claim that real freedom was capitalist freedom, with the US as its major representative. This logic supported a narrative that still lives strongly in peoples’ minds. Whereas other countries ought to respect each others’ sovereignty and avoid intervening - unless it is done collectively through multilateralism and diplomacy - the US was different. Its fictional superheros are responsible for the whole world. When a meteor approaches, it is up to the US president to announce it to the Earth. When aliens arrive, it is the US politicians and scientists they want to meet. Our fictionalised planet is based on a version of reality where the US proclaimed itself responsible for the world, just so it could take on the whole world.

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Venezuela

Which brings me to the Venezuelan case. Whereas a lot of the narrative surrounding the last years in Venezuela concerned the 2024 elections and whether Nicolás Maduro had indeed won the presidency, Donald Trump's recent acts show that he is not concerned at all with pretending that he toppled some dictator to establish democracy, as was the trope of his predecessors’ interventions in the Global South. Even Maria Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, was sidelined by Trump, who claimed she did not have the support needed to govern Venezuela at this time.

If Trump had been convinced the narrative of bringing in democracy was important, he would have surely tried to highlight Machado and promote Edmundo González Urrutia as the rightful winner of the 2024 election and claim that he would be the next president instead. This is what Macron did, after all, and it would have been aligned with the strategy encamped by Juan Guaidó a few years ago, who was treated as a Venezuelan president by many other countries, even though he de facto governed the country as much as me.

Whereas his threats of even more military attacks in Venezuela could have been enough to impose Edmundo González Urrutia as president, who would have happily take on the role as Trump's loyal puppet, Trump clearly has other plans.

The actions of his second mandate are not justified according to the standard liberal order. He is not concerned with the appearance of bringing democracy anywhere, much less respecting human rights. On the contrary, his point is very binary: rights are capitalist rights, and those who oppose his crony capitalist plans should have no rights at all. This is obviously terrible for US Americans, especially the working class unable to make ends meet while the president makes sure his friends get richer by the minute. It's pretty awful for the rest of us, especially on the periphery, since his imperialism can now be legitimised through a handful more tools.

Turns out that we do not need to be living under a controversial government anymore (truly authoritarian or painted as authoritarian) to justify US intervention. The silly citizens of the world that helped to uphold the US as the global police, the global justice system, and an overall saviour, will surely get disappointed to find out that no, Trump is not going to save Jair Bolsonaro from conviction and prison due to his crimes against Brazilian democracy. Why would Trump do this when he wants our meat, our coffee, our minerals? It was never about some US-based version of democracy; it was always about commodities, and Trump is not afraid to say so.

His public speech on the military incursion in Venezuela and kidnapping of Maduro - who was, whether you like him or not, the governing president of the country - followed a completely different version than if someone like Bush would have done it. Venezuelans should be happy that Maduro is out, because, according to Trump, a lot of them wanted Maduro out anyway and because now, with the US in control, they will be happy, they will know things will be better, and they'll benefit from all the oil that Trump and US companies will develop and sell on their behalf.

Maduro stood in the way of the oil grab, so he had to be removed. It had nothing to do with how Maduro was governing and it wasn't even about fear of the chavista 21st Century Socialism and what it represented. It is not that cold war-like - as much as this interpretation may be popular with the left.

The nationalisation of Venezuelan oil was a much older endeavour, dating back to 1976, when president Carlos Andrés Pérez tookover the petroleum industry. It was a time when other countries were also nationalising their oil supply, like Libya, Algeria and Iraq. For the US, this was bad news. As much as the country is an oil producer, its reserves pale in comparison to Saudi Arabia, for example, and later would be absolutely no match for Venezuela and its ginormous oil reserves.

This nationalisation process was actually quite organised. There was expropriation and annulment of contracts, with clear losses in terms of future profit for the US companies involved, but there were also agreements and some level of cooperation. In capitalist terms, the expropriation left the Venezuelan state indebted to the foreign oil companies due to contract breaches. In anti-imperialist reparation terms, the companies had already benefitted from way too many concessions and favours, so whatever was paid at the time should make them even.

The big oil grab

Yet, the US is using this episode of nationalisation to justify its next steps in Venezuela. Whereas a fictitious war on drugs is useful to persecute state leaders, as was part of the rationale for indicting Maduro and is also an element in Trump's accusations of Gustavo Petro in Colombia, it is too weak to ensure grabbing Venezuela's commodity sector and putting it under US control.

Since Trump's intervention has nothing to do with really helping the Venezuelan opposition - it was, in fact, this opposition helping Trump along the way - the point is to establish a rationale that would allow the US to take over the Venezuelan oil industry. For Trump, this is just taking back what the Venezuelan state took from US companies. Rather than trying to collect a supposed debt for the oil corporations, what Trump wants it full access to the Venezuelan soil. It is not about forsaken profit due to nationalisation; it is a clear message that if you nationalise and impede our access to resources, we can find an excuse to take over everything.

Strangely, in Latin America, it is very common for the developmentalist left to claim that it absolutely has to drill for fossil fuels, because, if we don't do it, the imperialist will come and take them. There's a fantasy that the imperialists can only take what was not developed yet, rather than whole industries. The Venezuelan case is proof that this doesn't matter. As long as the world is powered by fossil fuels, imperialists can wage war and coups to take them.

While, of course, this calls on us to develop a better strategy for sovereignty - which I elaborate on as ecological sovereignty in a previous post - I'd like to call attention to something else. As the race of critical minerals is also determinant of geopolitics, especially in a green transition marked by capitalists interests and technologies, many countries are keen on nationalising their lithium or their rare-earth minerals before it is too late. Brazil, for example, is working on a rare-earth policy, given its vast reserves, but foreign corporations are already operating in the country before we get to say that the “Neodymium is ours"!

In fact, just like with oil, a battle for the ecological future of the planet is at stake here. Clearly, some extraction and mining has to occur to promote the climate transition, but the current system is uncoordinated and based on capitalist goals, not one that could determine how much extraction is allowed, at what price, at what conditions and for what purposes. As capitalist extractivism stands today, everything is up for grabs. Sacrifice zones are normalised and the only thing that matters is how much countries will get to negotiate with national and multinational corporations to determine the share of the bounty.

Undue compensation

The issue is that, more recently, attempts to nationalise natural resources, to close down harmful operations or to at least determine the form and purpose of extraction have been met with a series of pressure tools by foreign corporations and their states. When the people of Panama decided they did not want a Canadian cooper mine to continue to operate, as their contract was in conflict with the national mineral policy and their environmental laws, the company filed an arbitration lawsuit claiming damages that could sink Panama's economy if the state had to fully pay them. As a result, the state is now inclined to extend the operations of the company.

Other countries, such as Honduras, have been a major target for these type of lawsuits, known as Investor-State Dispute Settlements. So, when Trump decided to directly support a candidate in Honduras, it was not because we was concerned with the Xiomara Castro government or even the fact that the left was reorganising within that country. Honduras does not mean that much ideologically to Trump. But when Honduras says no to special economic zones and unrestricted mining, it gets in the way of the commodity flow. And Trump really cares for the commodity flow.

His interests in Argentina, Colombia, Chile and more are all related. It is, obviously, advantageous for Trump to have ideological partners in the region, but it would do him no good if all Kast did in Chile was praise Trump and talk shit about immigrants. Trump wants that lithium just as much as he wants to keep oil flowing as if there was no climate change at all. You don't need to be a green capitalist to want to secure of the strategic minerals possible, you just need to be a capitalist.

This is why it matters a lot that Trump is justifying occupying Venezuela economically and politically for a while - maybe a long while - as (1) payment compensation due to nationalisation and as (2) power to actually produce and develop the resource in question to the fullest. He gets to grab resources with a value much larger than whatever the companies supposedly lost in revenue while strengthening monopoly power that will shut up dissent from other nations looking to buy that resource. If, before, you couldn't buy Venezuelan oil because of the sanctions, now you get to buy it from the country that applied those sanctions. It's a genius evil capitalist move.

This move sends a message about resource nationalisation. From the ecological standpoint, it shows that resource nationalism is not enough to ensure sovereignty, while deepening a destructive logic of global production. From the security standpoint, it shows that any country can be targeted if they nationalise industries where there was previous US investment. It sends a message about national policies for oil and minerals that treat these resources as national, but are ceded in partnership contracts to multinational corporations too. It seems that if you nationalise anything that was once touched by the devil, the devil will come back to take it all.

It calls us to take international solidarity to the next level. As much as the current situation is about Venezuela, it is clearly not just about Venezuela. Resource nationalisation leaves us vulnerable to lawsuits, sanctions, and wars. Many countries have lived through all modalities of this for simply denying unrestricted access to the US companies. But, if in the past, the US had to orchestrate elaborate coups or to go through the trouble of pretending to replace a regime in the name of democracy, now regime change and resource ownership change can go openly hand-in-hand. To survive this, we need to assert our sovereignty, yes, but we also really need a change in the global paradigm of production where industries and goods are refashioned in a post-extractivist logic.

As it stands today, as long as there are many buyers for these resources, with no concern for how they were grabbed and extracted, some imperialist is on the lookout. As it stands today, having a healthy liberal democracy at home won't protect us either (the tariffs were proof of this!). To slow down US imperialism, we need to stand up to Trump today as he looks to expand their zone of influence, but to truly stop it, we need an eco-social transition that revalues resources, their use, and makes some of them - especially fossil fuels - so obsolete for global production that it won't be worth it to wage wars for them anymore.

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The UNFCCC system was once thought to be the best we had in climate diplomacy and multilateralism. It soon became stale, frustrating, and filled with climate denialists, but we keeping adhering to it because it might not be the best, but it is what we have.

(The final plenary was suspended for a while on Saturday, after delegates complained that procedures were not being followed)

There are many reasons for the UNFCCC system failure, but let's focus on three:

1. The system is designed to focus on emissions, not their source.

   1. The fact that we can't even mention fossil fuels in final texts is basic evidence that COPs will keeping failing us. This enables fossil fuel producers to blackmail their way through negotiations and helps false market solutions - which have twisted “mitigation” into credits and trade - appear reasonable in the fact of very little progress.

   2. This lets states make weak pledges in their NDCs (which they don't even feel like they have to update and submit anymore anyway) without any incentive or intention to actually transition the economic sectors responsible for most emissions. (This also applies to deforestation, since most states treat it as a magical phenomenon that they will reduce through strong policy, but without taking away the power of ecocidal agribusiness, mining and industry - let alone discussing the much-needed reduction of meat consumption!)

2. The system is based on flawed multilateral consensus rules and procedures.

   1. This point raised by Mann is of utmost importance: “A small number of rogue nations cannot be allowed to block progress for the rest of the world. One suggestion has been a rule change requiring a three-fourths (75%) rather than a “consensus” of all countries for reaching an agreement. The cruel irony here, however, is that such a rule change would also require “consensus” among participating nations. There’s an easier solution however. It simply involves looking up the word “consensus” in the dictionary. … By such a definition, three-fourths support seems more than adequate to constitute “consensus” and, thereby, pass an agreement, under current rules, that meets the moment and commits to a rapid phaseout of planet-warming fossil carbon emissions.”

   2. When unanimity is not reached, the tendency has been to celebrate a handful of voluntary proposals and mechanisms led by some cooperating states, but that they may not even feel inclined to implement anyway. (This was Brazil's answer for the failure of lack of a fossil fuel roadmap. Ambassador Do Lago said “I will create a roadmap” and, while better than nothing, it feels like another consolation prize that we have no idea what will look like in the end.)

   3. So, if full unanimous agreements are becoming weaker or are being disrespected anyway, leading countries to do their own thing, one might say the procedures are failing no matter what.

   4. This one is just because it annoys the hell out of me: soooo many congratulatory texts and celebratory clauses about things the countries have failed to properly implement! Why are these even doing there? Just out of diplomatic tradition of giving each other a pat on the back? Do we really have all this time to waste?

3. The system opened the doors to big capital and polluters and they're running the show.

   1. I started looking into the influence of big corporations into the UNFCCC system back in 2011. There was even a report back then when I was just a Master's student. The fact is: it's only gotten worse. Every year is now a record year for big oil and big agribusiness. They get in through BINGOs, they get in through Party delegations (nice little credentials with extra access for polluters!), they get in as sponsors, they get in to showcase their good good green work at the green zone, they get in through hosting side events that will feed and entertain tired delegates. It's a disaster.

   2. “Oh, but scientists, research institutions, and civil society organisations are getting more badges too.” Obviously, the UNFCCC loves to talk big about inclusivity and democracy, but when you include everyone to a conference designed to fight climate change, including the people and orgs that are hoping to let the planet burn, you're using “inclusion” to mask injustice.

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Obs: COP 30 brought some really disgusting partners and sponsors, I recommend you look at this post by A Growing Culture":

That said, what to do?

Well, we have at least two options:

1. We can go for a big and urgent push for UNFCCC reform.

   1. This is already part of the agenda of civil society. Here's a document from earlier this year with suggestions called “Reclaiming Climate Justice: United Call for an UrgentReform of the UN Climate Talks”. It gives us a really interesting blueprint and we should be acting on it to pressure the UNFCCC before COP31. I particularly like the part about ending the trade show, because, let's be honest, this is what the Blue Zone pavilion has become outside of the negotiating rooms as of late. So, seriously, if you're by any chance reading my tiny humble blog, then I know you know it's way more important that you read this document and discuss it with your organisation:

      

      This need for change was even recognised by Brazil's COP 30 Presidency. Basically, everyone who presides a COP and actually wants to get things done knows that the system is broken. Yet, we haven't had a since state (president of COP or not) actually push for reform talks. What we get is a few more committees, a few more civil society badges, and (when we're lucky) a few of a our critical demands actually included in the agenda. This is basically what happened in Belém: we got the just transition points in from the beginning, which secured a victory, but Lula (a big supporter of oil drilling in Brazil) only mentioned a fossil fuel roadmap when the COP was about the begin. If we had UNFCCC reform, maybe two weeks would have been enough to draft and aprove a roadmap to a roadmap (not an actual one, with expert-led parameters, as it should be, so let's all be honest and stop telling ourselves a reeeeeal roadmap would have been produced so fast). But in the current system, we get shut down by merely wanting to mention fossil fuels in the final document (something accomplished in Dubai, but that major petro-states won't allow anymore).

2. And/Or we can build the treaties and agreements we need through different platforms, but starting only with the states that actually want to help.

   1. It can be platforms we are already familiar with. This is what the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative is trying to accomplish. It can build on past successful examples and existing tools to get the ball rolling on the topic that never seems to make it to the stage that is needed during COPs. It is not supposed to be an alternative to the UNFCCC system, but it could be a way to breathe life back into it. So, all eyes on Santa Marta, Colombia, next year!

   2. We can also push for a global mechanism that could integrate and govern climate-related aspects of other treaties and negotiations. Something like a benchmark against 2C warming. This initiative could be hosted copying and improving the UNFCCC rules, but what matters is that it could, just like the Treaty initiative, start with the states that actually want to cooperate on the matter (leaving rogue ones out!) so they could establish a common benchmark to govern their other spaces of cooperation. It could help to form blocs when it comes to trade negotiations, labour standards, and even influence economic blocs such as the BRICS or impact G20 talks (yey, multipolarity! Isn't it what a bunch of people are excited about anyway?)

None of this is detailed or foolproof. My point is to offer a bit of brainstorming on the much needed way out of this constant COP stalemate. All of us who are climate scientists and/or climate activists are getting sick of how mournful we get at the end of each COP, only to devote so much energy to it again the next year. It feels like we are stuck in a very toxic relationship with the UNFCCC at this point.

That's why I believe it's important to dedicate more of our energy not to COP eulogies, but concrete strategies that will help us escape this prison.

What forces can strengthen the call for UNFCCC reform right now? Which organisations? Would any states embrace it? Can our most prominent climate scientists make the global call for it? Most importantly, do we have time to create meetings to discuss ideas to draft proposals to debate at conferences and see if we finally get UNFCCC reform before it's definitely too late?

And if we focus on the latter, the parallel mechanisms, how do we choose which ones, the rules, and the priorities, especially when we know the majority of states will only do something when we make them do it?

This even goes for the climate-friendly states, since many of them are only willing to pay the costs of transition if they know others are paying too, after all, they're in competition. In the meantime, the states that need help to transition, to deal with their loss and damage, to properly adapt, are being held hostage in this game.

Countries in the Global South are very excited about multipolarity nowadays. They talk about China, BRICS, building outside of the Bretton Wood Institutions, or about reforming the UN Security Council (which just handed Gaza back to colonial mandate times), the World Bank and the IMF (reforming this one seems like pure rhetoric to me). So why won't they embrace reforming the UNFCCC? It's easy to say the system is broken, but who will help to echo the call by civil society to make climate negotiations work - and fast?

We can also say that reform is not possible, that we need to outgrow not just COP, but the multilateral system completely. While I agree with it in principle (especially in my activist principles), the reality is that we need states to cooperate on this matter too. We're not quite yet living my dream of pluri-national ecological sovereignty, but still in this messed-up Westphalian state system where they call very important structural shots. This means that parallel initiatives such as the Peoples’ Summit are still fundamental, but they're not quite yet how we'll manage to break away from fossil fuels and big agribusiness. They're how we organise and refine our arguments and our politics, but we still need to translate these politics into mechanisms that states will use (or that will be used on them).

In the end, it's about a multi-prong approach that will still be imperfect. But it's definitely going to be better than this horrible system that we deal with every year.

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Ps: if you're interested in a recent academic paper reviewing UNFCCC reform debates, check out: Nasiritousi, Naghmeh, Alexandra Buylova, e Björn-Ola Linnér. “Matching Supply and Demand? Exploring UNFCCC Reform Options”. Earth System Governance 23 (2025): 100241.

Part of my concern to address this comes from the fact that, since science is not neutral, the climate and social science I practice is deeply influenced by what's going in the Global South, particularly my home country, Brazil.

Many eyes are on Brazil right now, given that it is hosting COP30 in the Amazonian city of Belém. Symbolically, it is a win. Brazil had been expected to host a COP before, but this effort was crushed by the denialism and pariah behaviour of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro government (2019-2022). Moreover, after a few years of COPs in countries denying freedom and space to grassroots and democratic voices for climate justice, Brazil's young democracy could offer more opportunities for popular dissent. This is specially sought after by Indigenous peoples, whose territories continue to be violated by agribusiness, mining, oil companies (both state and private), and whose claims of sovereignty are downplayed even by governments friendly to environmental issues and native populations. After all, the real sovereign can only be the state.

This is evident in the current battle between Indigenous voices and Lula's government in Brazil. Opposition to drilling for oil in the Equatorial Margin, a delicate marine ecosystem close to the Amazon Forest, is big. Indigenous leaders have voiced their opposition, including Cacique Raoni, who accompanied Lula up the presidential ramp during inauguration in 2023. Environmental groups and NGOs have showed how much a disaster this could be, both to the local ecosystem (which is, of course, connected to nearby ecosystems) and climate change in general.

Brazil is a bit of a shadow climate villain: its colonial period left a legacy of extreme land inequality and an economy based on the production of primary goods. It means that since 1822, when Brazil obtained independence from Portugal, the country failed to shift directions over use of land and to fight deforestation, with a strong period of land-use related emissions that began in the last century and continues until today:

When I point this out, I usually hear (from other Brazilians and from Global South colleagues) that Brazil cannot be held responsible for this, since it's colonialism's fault. Yet, emissions are clearly tracked to Brazil's Republic and the modern ideal that occupied both right and left-wing leadership over how to use the land, how to extract natural goods as resources, and the growing dependence on commodity exports for capital income.

This is to say: we did not create our dependent capitalism, but we sure perfected it - at the expense of Indigenous and quilombola communities, rural workers and peasants, and of course, our forests and global climate. Brazil may be a post-colonial state, in historical terms, but it never really decolonised. Our Indigenous peoples and descendants of formerly enslaved peoples are still waiting on proper reparations and for their perspectives to count beyond symbolic acts of representation. In fact, if their voices began to be treated as fully legitimate by the state, and not only when demands coincide with state development priorities, this would already be of big help.

However, the truth is that our territorial-based peoples are still treated as enemies of “development” when they voice their concerns about fossil fuels, mining, mega infrastructure projects and agribusiness expansion.

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Political cognitive dissonance over climate and development

We keep hearing from Brazilian leftists that fossil fuels are one thing, deforestation is something else completely. The failure to address climate change as a global catastrophe promoted by greenhouse gas emissions from multiple sources and to acknowledge, as many scientific institutions have begged us to, that our carbon budget is shrinking and emissions cuts should be radical and everywhere is a convenient failure. It lets us play nice, promoting policies that fight deforestation and gives us legitimacy for financial funds that further commodify forests while leaving only a small percentage of the dollars raised for the communities that actually care for them (yes, I'm talking about TFFF and how, unfortunately people read “forever forests” and immediately think it's a good thing rather than another market mechanism).

And when we play nice, we get to conceal all the other problems in how we approach climate: we say that we didn't emit as much from fossil fuels, so we get a “quota” to keep doing it; we say that it's okay that we keep drilling, since we'll export most of it and the emissions won't be ours, so our NDCs will be fine; we say that we need to drill for more oil, because this is how we'll finance our energy transition, but our budget shows that this isn't true; we say that we get to expand fossil fuels, because our electricity matrix is already so decarbonised due to hydropower, as if fossil fuels were a problem only for electricity production; and we say that we need to keep drilling for all the oil we can find, because: (1) others are doing it; (2) if we don't, then the imperialists will come and will use our resources.

I went over some of these arguments in my recent essay for The BREAK-DOWN and, later, during my talk for their podcast with Adrienne Buller. But let me stress the last point, since it connects for these last three years of work I've been doing on the concept of sovereignty and the need to re-work it completely if we are to survive the odds of global climate catastrophe.

The way Global South countries, especially under progressive governments, have weaponised the anti-imperialist struggle to justify fossil fuel expansion is not only problematic of an argument, it is also suicidal.

For some reason, everybody loves science when it is about pointing out the denialism behind Trump or Bolsonaro. But state developmentalists on the left don't like to acknowledge their own tendencies towards denialisms. Climate change is a global problem created through inequality and felt through inequality. This statement should be the main motivator for radical ecological transition based on strong reparations and compensation mechanisms. Acknowledging climate science should lead to a strong push for global fossil fuel phase-out, where the only debate would be over how to make it just and gradual to avoid collapse and more pain for developing countries.

But fossil fuel phase-out is not really on their negotiation table. Oil-dependent emergent economies are right to demand that the rich countries carry most of the burden, but if we are to wait for the people who broke the planet to be the ones with the strongest initiative to save us all, then we are fooling ourselves. In addition, it is highly problematic to address the need to make the transition just and equitable as just a matter of who does it first. To quote myself in the introduction to our “Energy Transitions: Just and Beyond” dossier:

“To believe that a fast Global North transition allows the Global South more time to do so in the future, after having its own turn with conventional fossil-fuel pathways of development, is to promote development and sovereignty with an expiry date. By then, the climate will have worsened for all, but the conditions for mitigation and adaptation in the Global South will be even more adverse, with the Global North having benefited from cheap extraction and technology without any reduction in its energy footprint or adjustment for energy sufficiency.”

Right now, the Global South is divided into at least two groups: the ones demanding full transition and capacity (including reparations) to do their own; and the ones demanding transition in principle, but hoping others do it first to buy time to squeeze every last drop of oil of each available field.

Unfortunately, whereas countries like Tuvalu and Colombia seem to be leaning towards the first group, Brazil has joined OPEC+ and pushed hard for a license to drill in the Equatorial Margin despite major outcry. In typical “tunnel vision” - especially connected to the Amazon forest - Lula went as far as to say that drilling in the area was not a problem, because it wasn't that close to the forest anyway. It's almost as if Brazil's climate duty was to the Amazon and nothing else.

If only that were true, it would mean that we'd be actually confronting the power of agribusiness that has devastated Brazil's Cerrado, is expanding its business to the Amazon at alarming rates, while greenwashing itself through flimsy claims of “regenerative livestock farming” and bogus carbon credits. But the opposite is true: we are funding agribusiness more than ever and Lula even met with Trump to defend the interests of Brazil's largest meat corporation, JBS.

But don't you worry! This is all very very very anti-imperialist!

At least this is what many leftist leaders, economists and pundits tell us. Their reasoning for anti-imperialism is based on a very narrow and chauvinistic view of sovereignty not only incompatible with the ecological challenged posed today, but also deeply colonial in relation to other sovereign claims to territory and ecosystems.

It is based on the idea that if resources are available, they ought to be used by the state for the good of all. The principle is not a bad one and I fully support it, for example, when it comes to public sanitation, public electricity, public transportation. In fact, I support it because I would like this to mean not just state-control, but full decommodification of goods and services that improve workers’ lives and empower peoples and communities who actually take care of our planet and indirectly make our lives possible and healthier.

But when it comes to fossil fuels, there is a big difference between asserting state control over resources against imperialist threats and equating control with extraction and full use.

For starters, it is not the fact that a country is drilling and promoting its own national-state operations that will protect them from the United States big global oil-grab. Venezuela is proof of this. What ensures that oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia hold their ground is a combination of state and capital capacities, including regional alliances and common investment deals, that makes them less of an easy target.

In the Brazilian case, it is not like Trump could just arrive here anytime, say that since we are not drilling within our oil-rich margins, so he will! I'm sure this kind of stuff crosses the mind of someone like Trump anytime, but oil-grabs come in many forms, including when Brazil's National Petroleum Agency is the one auctioning oil field for foreign corporations to exploit in alliance with Petrobras. Foreign powers have learned that they can access our oil, our minerals, our water, our soil and - they hope - our renewables through cooperation, deals and joint ventures. So, in such cases, when we do the drilling, when we open new extraction frontiers, we are actually opening doors for foreign use of our resource. The difference is that we keep telling ourselves that we are doing it in our own terms, not under the boots of imperial domination. But this is another lie that we tell ourselves to pretend our big national investments aren't following cues from international market pressures that might let us into the big leagues, but only as long as we play nice.

We should aim for “ecological sovereignty” instead

Our issue is that even though the anti-imperialist struggle is real and should be at the centre of how we evaluate state action in the polycrisis, this anti-imperialist struggle needs to be ecological too. The idea that the only way we can assert our sovereignty is by depleting resources to ensure capital income at the expense of global climate - with horrible consequences even for ourselves - is actually not very different from how the imperialists define their own sovereignty claims.

Earlier in the year, I wrote a chapter about this for a book that will come out next year (edited by Dena Freeman at Shanghai University) on precisely this topic. I go over the failures of framing sovereignty through a capital-nation-state Borromean ring (drawing on the brilliant work of Kojin Karatani) and then proceed to make my case for ecologising sovereignty. Of course, I can't go over elements of it here, but since I've been dropping “ecological sovereignty” or “popular ecological sovereignty” as my choice of conceptual framework in many other articles and pieces recently, I wanted to bring in two short paragraphs from my chapter, which also inform another paper I'm working on right now (hint: so if you have feedback on this, let me know now - it's how we advance work collectively):

“When sovereignty is framed through capitalist interests, the incentive for international solidarity is weakened and cooperation ends up limited to short-run economic and security goals. Thus, an eco-territorial internationalism, which includes states but is not restricted by statism, has to look for sovereign interests of many peoples at once, requiring an alternative frame and conceptual basis for sovereignty. “Ecological sovereignty” contributes to this alternative by focusing on interdependence with the rest of the planet in relation to the ecological and material conditions we share at various scales.

Ecological sovereignty is an encompassing frame that learns from building and interweaving different kinds of sovereignties globally - food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, territorial sovereignty – to inform another kind of economic thinking, less aimed at comparative advantage and more focused on global immunity to catastrophe. As a concept of sovereignty fit for building alternatives, based on “permanence, the capacity to stay and thrive”, ecological sovereignty helps to ensure mutual survival, while setting the tenets of a more “solidaristic mode of living””

I want to emphasise ecological sovereignty because I fear efforts for internationalist just transitions will fail if those promoting alternatives (progressive, leftist, socialist ones) keep insisting that we can do this by playing the game the way imperialists do. As of now, whereas Indigenous peoples demand sovereignty over their territories, states and NGOs are more likely to offer them participation in carbon markets than to fight the classes that continue to invade even legally recognised Indigenous land. Nowadays, when we say we want to protect an ecosystem, we find a way to attach a number to it, put it under the trust of some fund, and even use it to leverage our debts (as was the case of loss of sovereignty in Galapagos in a debt-for-nature swap that, in the end, has nothing to do with debt justice).

A framework of sovereignty that is based on ecological understandings is capable of overcoming tunnel visions that have favoured false market solutions to climate change and treating nature as divisible pieces that can be commodified at will. Ecological sovereignty looks not only at climate change, but at all planetary boundaries. It confronts the imperative of capitalist growth and identifies where we can reduce waste and damaging economic activities to make room for good and desirable growth, the kind of expansion that helps to restore Earth's metabolism while improving lives for a majority. Ecological sovereignty connects to other important debates on sovereignty as a way to guide their goals through staying under planetary limits: on food sovereignty, it means agroecology, restoring dignity to rural life, agrarian reform where needed, less meat production and more diverse foods on our plates; on digital sovereignty, it means addressing the excessive energy demand by Big Tech billionaires and their data centers so that peoples and states have control of their own data to limit how much is produced and how we use energy, land and water to upkeep it.

Protesters clash with COP30 security

Unfortunately, this is not the view of sovereignty at the core of COP30 today. Yes, there is more diverse representation. Yes, there is even more room for climate scientists to warn us all of the dangers of delayed action. But the parties in this Conference of the Parties still view sovereignty as a zero-sum game. This is understandable, as we are driven to self-protection and should not lower our guard when the far-right is taking over some many states all over the world. But this also means it is a good opportunity to reframe our demands away from market-solutions, kick the polluters out of the conferences, and learn from Indigenous dissent that shows us that the territory is not about a piece of property, but about the creation of life.

This is the basis for overcoming the contradictions of our anti-imperialist approach, where we challenge our opponents, but not the rules of their game. Ecological sovereignty will require that we impose some big “No's” on what can be exploited, by whom, for what purpose, for how long and these questions matter a lot, since they can qualify what we can do with climate financing to actually make climate action more equitable. It is about laying foundations for true longevity, something that should be at the core of how we interpret the word “sovereignty".

Right now, all states want their sovereignty and no one wants to be big losers in the polycrisis. But as long as we keep framing the hard tasks of transition through exploitation rather than custodianship, any sovereignty attained will always be sovereignty with an expiry date. Of course, it may expire for some faster than others, but our fight shouldn't be to be the last survivors in this mutual annihilation system, but the ones to break the system and lead us all into a common and good life.

Assine agora

The fact is that, as much as I've become a COP skeptical, I'd still have a bit of faith in Brazil hosting it if we weren't under so much distress, domestically, trying to hold on to what is left of our environmental legislation. But, in one more chapter of "Brazil is hosting COP30, but environmental destruction is still the norm at home", our Congress passed legislation that will destroy environmental licensing and allow harmful industries to "self-license". We've named it the Devastation Bill.

One day we're fighting the presidential office because of its promotion of fossil fuels as development and the flaws of the corporate energy transition. Our struggle for a fossil fuel phase-out is still dismissed even among allies and our industrial policy may be greening, but with lots of problems and an overly technocratic approach that reduces social participation to meetings. We have to hear constantly that “we need to invest in more fossil fuels in order to finance the energy transition", even though I'm confident that the people in government and at Petrobras who say it know it to be a big fat lie. In fact, it's quite the opposite. We have studies that show that we use oil revenue to invest in more oil. To top it off, we hear another lie. The one that Brazil is not at fault for climate change, so it has credit to spare in fossil fuel exploitation. Well, just because we're not among the top 10 biggest emitters in history because of oil, but due to land use change and deforestation, it doesn't mean that we can claim to be victims in this process. Our economic history is written through colonisation and agribusiness interests that added a lot of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and we are liable for those emissions, whether they led to development or just more dependency.

Since most days we're also fighting our Congress, we're pretty tired. Just yesterday, Congress also approved use of fossil fuel social funds to renegotiate the debts of agribusiness producers when they lose their crops due to extreme climate events. So, they create the problem, then they take the royalties that were supposed to at least help with education, health care and our energy transition and use it in their favour when they are impacted by the problem they created. With the Devastation Bill, they'll be able to create even more climate and ecological problems, caring nothing about climate leadership and fighting ecocide. Not as long as they profit from it.

To sum it up, the Devastation Bill takes away power from federal environmental agencies, allowing industries to negotiate directly with local governments, which poses specific threats to biomes and water access, since every jurisdiction can promote their self-interest. It gives agribusiness the green light to circumvent licensing. It benefits big infrastructure projects that cut through conservation units, privileging mega dams and roads, posing even more of a threat to our Indigenous peoples who continue to be persecuted and murdered by criminals from mining and agrobusiness.

The Devastation Bill will let many enterprises simply "self-license" by filling out a form online. This will become the rule and a licensing assessment, the exception. "Upgrades" to existing enterprises won't need licenses anymore, even if it means expansion. Banks are also celebrating, since they'll be immune to lawsuits associated with environmental damage from enterprises they finance. With the Devastation Bill, these enterprises are not even required to deal with damages. Public funds will end up footing the bill, even more than usual!

Disasters like Mariana and Brumadinho will tend to become more common. It is the normalisation of ecocide, while Brazil already faces the impact of big climate collapse and disasters. Congressmen from Rio Grande do Sul, which was under water for over a month last year, voted in favor of this bill.

This means that Brazil's obsession with oil developmentalism is not the only threat to meeting our climate targets anymore. The rule will be: fires, deforestation, more cattle and animal exploitation, and new roads, rail and waterways to make paths for commodity exports.

COP30 has been celebrated for being different this time: it's in the Amazon! But our traditional peoples have been excluded from strategic decisions, inhabitants of Belém are being evicted by landlords who want to make money from airbnb during COP, and greenwashing will be everywhere. The same congressfolk voting against nature and the very conditions of human life in Brazil will parade themselves during COP30, hoping to close deals, to grab a piece off the climate financing and bioeconomy pies. We hope Lula will veto this bill, knowing that climate action starts at home! We're not sure, but the next few days will be dedicated to pressuring the presidential office - without forgetting that Congress probably has another package of horrors waiting for us the next day.

Our climate struggle is a class struggle and those keeping an eye on COP30 should know we are tired, but still ready for battle.

I've been doing work on the dangers of green colonialism for a while, in an attempt to show that previous tendencies by Global South states to try to emulate development patterns from the North (and failing) are now rebooted through a line of green industrial policy, green developmentalism, and commercial dealings that ensure access to our resources by Global North countries, while also limiting our imagination and prospects for alternative development that reconciles the planetary limits with higher quality of life. I was given the opportunity to write the preface for this study, and I was able to elaborate a bit more on it:

“Because these green initiatives operate within the current rules of capitalist accumulation, the global disparities of energy demand and consumption, the impacts of new technologies, the negative effects of supposedly green infrastructure and projects (leading to old and new sacrifice zones), and the economic growth imperative are left out of the conversation. Not only that, but the different meanings of development are taken for granted. Cooperation between states, which sounds benevolent and beneficial in theory, often means providing technical, industrial and technological assistance that contributes to a specific version of development. This technocratic veil provides legitimacy to models that continue to occupy, displace, and negatively impact entire regions in the name of development, but now as green development.” (Fernandes, 2025, p. 6-7)

I really enjoy researching green industrial policy not only because it is necessary, but also because I firmly believe that Global South scholars and activists can create and tell our own path of access to industrial goods without the fancy and false promises made by the North that continue to treat resources as infinite, even when they acknowledge “planetary limits". This happens because the “decarbonisation consensus” (shout out to Breno and Maristella for their great work on this!) will reckon with climate emissions and its thresholds, but chooses to ignore other ecological limits, negative impacts and the abundance of sacrifice zones generated in the name of development.

So in my collaboration with other Global South researchers (and a few excellent Global North allies), I really want to ask the questions: is technological transfer enough to bridge the gap and prevent the Global North from kicking away the ladder, or should we also be claiming for different technologies, with local development, and with different purposes? Do we really want to simply industrialise our strategic minerals ourselves, only to end up making batteries for individual EVs in the Musk-filled supply chain, or should we be planning and defining priorities of usage to ensure that we don't exploit everything and find a balance between ecological needs and other material production needs?

This is also very important for our reflections on jobs in the just transition. I published a long analysis on this already:

But a key matter I could emphasise here is education. One of the things that emerged in the case studies by the RLS publication is how Germany is in cooperations with ministries in the Global South to shape a green curriculum at the universities. While this is absolutely necessary, to ensure that we are already capacitating new workers into a transformed industry, without needing to retrain and move jobs, why is it that we need a foreign country, with its resources, to strike a deal to influence this new curriculum? Don't we have here an issue with methodology, intervention, but also the danger of misguided purpose? So, I added to the preface:

“These practices raise questions about the structure of decision-making in such projects and the level of autonomy local ministries and public servants exercise on projects and objectives set by countries like Germany. Moreover, many of these projects can also involve the private consultancy services of foreign companies, as is the case with a €5.5-million Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) project with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labour in Brazil on green employment and curriculum (GIZ 2024).” (Fernandes, 2025, p. 8)

The fact is that not everything that is “green” is the kind of green we need when applying principles of just transition and confronting green capitalism. In a few months, I'll be able to share with you the excellent articles written by our collaborators on the Nacla issue on “Green capitalism in the Americas” I am co-editing. It will help to expose the traps behind false solutions and financial mechanisms, hopefully making the case that we need to go green, yes, but we need to paint it ourselves and in a truly sustainable way.

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Striking a balance

In the past few years, I shared my work with an audiences of hundreds of thousands, in Portuguese, English and Spanish. I swam in the deep waters of social media and communication platforms to find myself a YouTuber, a streamer, instagrammer, podcaster and, mind you, for a few months a TikToker - which was definitely not my thing. In f…

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