‘We will exterminate ourselves’ if we keep on extracting fossil fuels, activists say
Oliver Milman
An international group of activists here have issued impassioned pleas for a treaty to phase out fossil fuels, urging the Brazilian presidency of Cop30 to prod countries towards ending the era of coal, oil and gas that has caused the climate crisis.
The proposed Fossil Fuel Treaty is already backed by 17 countries and advocates in Belem said that countries needed to hurry up and act on the root cause of the climate crisis. In 2023, the Cop in Dubai resulted in countries vowing to “transition away” from fossil fuels, although there is little evidence of this happening as yet.
“If we continue to extract hydrocarbons from the Earth, we will exterminate ourselves,” said Olivia Bissa, president of the Chapra Nation in the Peruvian Amazon.
“We worry what will happen if we don’t have concrete action now. We as indigenous people in the Amazon are tired of being sacrificed by a group of powerful people who want to rule the planet. If we don’t do something together we will be complicit with ecocide and the assassination of humanity.”
Activists from the Fossil Fuel Treaty at Cop30 climate summit in Belem, Brazil, on 13 November 2025 Photograph: Oliver Milman/The Guardian
Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, praised Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for urging a fossil fuel phase out but criticized the Brazilian president for allowing a new oil drilling project near the mouth of the Amazon, pointing to a recent International Court of Justice ruling that demands countries address the climate crisis.
“We know fossil fuel production continues to rise, pushing the world past planetary limits and deepening inequality,” said Berman, singling out the US, Australia, Norway and Canada for ramping up oil and gas drilling since the Paris agreement a decade ago. A treaty to end all this would be a “major act of love and justice for our time,” she added.
Given the format of this Cop, and pushback that is already happening from Saudi Arabia and other big oil producers, it’s unclear what, if any, language on fossil fuel phase out will be included in this year’s agreement.
A major opponent of any such pact would be Donald Trump, who has called for the US, and the rest of the world, to “drill, baby, drill.” Crystal Cavalier, a Native American woman from North Carolina, is at Cop30, unlike the US government, and said a new treaty would at least put international pressure on the US to kick its fossil fuel habit.
“We are being targeted in sacrifice zones that are pushing our ecosystems to the brink,” she said. “Our current government is aggressively rolling back environmental protections.
“The Fossil Fuel treaty can be a tool, a pressure point that frontline communities can wield when their governments avoid accountability. We need external pressure in the US, we can’t do this alone. The US isn’t showing up, but the rest of the world can show up for us.”
Updated at 12.33 EST
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Day four of the 30th UN climate summit has drawn to a close. Here’s what you need to know:
My colleague Matthew Taylor will be back on the blog tomorrow for day five of the summit.
Away from the conference halls of Cop30, parts of the world are reeling from recent weather extremes. Here are some agency photos from Ca Mau, Vietnam, where floodwaters have not yet receded. In recent weeks, countries in Southeast Asia has been pummelled by extreme rains and deadly typhoons that have killed hundreds of people.
Partial flooding remains visible in various parts of the Mekong Delta, with some areas submerged for several weeks, as seen in Ca Mau, Vietnam, on November 12, 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesPartial flooding remains visible in various parts of the Mekong Delta, with some areas submerged for several weeks, as seen in Ca Mau, Vietnam, on November 12, 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesPartial flooding remains visible in various parts of the Mekong Delta, with some areas submerged for several weeks, as seen in Ca Mau, Vietnam, on November 12, 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesShare‘Completely immature’ – Paris agreement architect on US global standing
Dharna Noor
Christiana Figueres. Photograph: Dharna Noor/The Guardian
“The United States has lost credibility” on the international stage, Christiana Figueres, the mother of the Paris Agreement, told me on Thursday.
The Trump administration is treating multilateral politics like “two and three year olds” who cause a ruckus while “playing house,” she said.
“It is completely immature, irresponsible, and very sad for the United States,” she said.
Donald Trump chose not to send an official delegation to the Cop negotiations this year – a first for the US – after pulling the country from the Paris Agreement on his first day in office this past January. But Americans are still very much involved in Cop30 goings-on, said Figureres, who earlier this week moderated a conversation with California governor Gavin Newsom, the topmost US official at Cop.
California Governor Gavin Newsom with Christiana Figueres. Photograph: Fernando Llano/AP
“There are many forces of the United States that are representing the fact that everybody understands that climate is undeniable, but more importantly, that those forces understand that there is a huge social and economic business opportunity in addressing climate change,” she said.
In interviews with the Guardian, some delegates expressed concern that Trump could try to impede the negotiations by using backdoor bullying tactics or via private dealings with allies such as Saudi Arabia. I asked Figueres about these worries.
“Is the United States administration working here through other countries? Maybe likely, let’s see,” she said. “For the time being, no bomb has been dropped.”
Right now, a hot button issue in the negotiations is the phaseout of fossil fuels. At Cop28, nearly 200 countries agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” for the first time. Though some countries are backing the inclusion of a “roadmap” for coal, oil, and gas phaseout in this year’s agreement, some oil producers are pushing back.
“The word of choice of the moment is ‘road map,’” said Figueres with a smile, noting ahead of these negotiations, officials also worked to create a roadmap to secure climate finance. But whether or not language on the transition off of fossil fuels materializes in Brazil, the transition is happening in the real world, said Figueres.
“We have to understand that we have both a political sphere and we have an economic sphere,” she said. “Whatever documents come out of the political sphere are important for that political reality, and that is definitely important, [but] there is also economic reality that is moving forward independently.”
There are signs that fossil fuel producers are grappling with the wind down of coal, oil, and gas, said Figueres. As those companies have reaped unexpectedly high profits after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they have not used those monies to expand extraction. Instead, they have paid higher dividends to their shareholders and worked to decrease their debts.
“They understand that they are no longer competitive, and I believe that they’re getting ready for the demise of the industry,” she said.
Figueres was pleased that Cop30 is being held in Belem. The city is nestled into the Amazon rainforest, which is teetering on the edge of a climate tipping point.
“It is very symbolic, it’s very important that it is here, because it reminds us first, that we have these tipping points in front of us [and] that forests and Indigenous rights need to be front and center,” she said.
Over in the US, Nancy Pelosi, a senior Democrat and former Speaker, has “sounded the alarm on America’s absence from Cop30”.
She said the lack of American presence was not just because of the government shutdown, but also blamed Republicans for not cooperating to send a bipartisan delegation to Brazil.
President Donald Trump has pulled the US out of global climate diplomacy, but his administration has actively opposed action to tackle pollution in other global fora.
This morning, I stood with my Democratic @SEEC colleagues to sound the alarm on America’s absence from COP30.
As the world confronts the climate crisis, the United States must lead.
We owe our children action, urgency and a commitment to be good stewards of God’s creation. pic.twitter.com/8xNsaHCXd1
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) November 13, 2025
The absence of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter in the Belém conference halls has been welcomed by some diplomats.
The US’s absence is “actually a good thing”, said Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations framework convention on climate change. Responding this week to the US’s departure from the Paris agreement, which she help draw up, she said: “Ciao, bambino.”
The reality of climate breakdown depends on where you live. Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a Quechua-speaking farmer in the Andean highlands who I met in a courtroom in German earlier this year, is living through one extreme example of this. Here is his story, as told to Fernanda Solorza.
Saul Luciano Lliuya. Photograph: Angela Ponce/Reuters
I was born on a farm in Huaraz Independencia, at an altitude of 3,100 metres. From Huaraz, you can see the mountains. The mountains are up to 6,000 metres high. There’s a snowcapped mountain that can be seen quite close from the farm. It’s called Nevado Churup.
I live in the highlands, near the mountains. I’m the son of small farmers. I’m a farmer and a mountain guide. The fields aren’t easy. Everything is manual, but little by little you adapt. The geography is different: there are slopes here. There are ups and downs. It’s muddy when it rains. It’s very hot when it doesn’t, and there’s plenty of sun. But when you harvest as a child, you already begin to taste the first fruits. Corn, sugar cane, and tender broad beans. You begin to enjoy the countryside.
We have cows in the mountains, in the ravine, here in Quilcayhuanca. You go twice a month, depending on whether the cows are pregnant or not. When they get pregnant, we have to take them out of the ravine because it’s dangerous. A condor or a fox could eat them. The ravine is roughly a 13- to 12-hour walk there and back. It’s a great challenge to go to the mountains from home. I used to go with my sisters, starting when I was eight or 10 years old.
The ravine was different than it is now. I remember there were many more wetlands, it had more life. There were more ducks, other birds, which you don’t see now. I remember birds flying almost like they were in the sea. There was also more grass, there were more waterfalls. Now it’s different. There’s less grass, fewer waterfalls. I remember that when we approached the mountain, I used to see a lot of deer, taruca. Now you don’t see much. There are some, but not as many as before.
The glacier is slowly melting. It’s clearly visible when you’re on the mountain. There are people who live in the city and haven’t visited the mountains. They’ve never been close. As a farmer and as a mountain guide, when you reach a snowy peak and return the following year, and years go by, it impacts you. It makes you feel sorry for the mountains. You feel sad about what’s happening, and it creates a feeling of helplessness, of not being able to do anything about it. If someone has an illness, you treat it, but unfortunately, the mountain can’t be treated. You can’t do anything.
With the passing of time and the melting of glaciers, lagoons have started to form, and the authorities and experts say it’s very dangerous. In the year 1941, the upper part of an avalanche fell into the Palcacocha lagoon and overflowed, causing a mudslide, killing many people. Some say 18,000, others 20,000.
Sometimes there were years when it rained heavily, the rivers were full, you could hear them carrying rocks, and I remember my sister and I would get scared. The neighbours were also scared, and they would say: “That lake burst its banks once and killed a lot of people. We hope the lake doesn’t burst again.”
Dharna Noor
Thousands of media professionals are at the United Nations climate talks in Brazil. Almost none of them appear to be from the four major US broadcasters, my colleagues Dharna Noor and Jonathan Watts write from Belém.
Nearly 4,000 members of the media registered to attend the global climate conference, known as Cop30, according to a preliminary list released by the United Nations climate body on Tuesday. But none of the “big four” US broadcasters – CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox – appear to currently have teams present at the talks.
According to the list, no representatives from CBS, NBC, or Fox signed up to attend the talks. Two US staffers from ABC signed up to attend, and though they are reporting on the summit, it is unclear if they are in Brazil.
The big four television outlets also appear not to be covering the climate negotiations in a significant way. In a review of TV coverage of Cop30 shared exclusively with the Guardian, the non-profit Media Matters found that weekday morning and evening national news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC had not covered Cop30 from 6 November through 11 November. Fox News aired two segments that totalled roughly five minutes of coverage, one of which promoted “anti-climate narratives”, Media Matters said.
The Guardian has contacted all four major broadcasters for comment.
It’s “unimaginable” that major western broadcasters would choose to sit out the talks, said Stefano Wrobleski, director of InfoAmazonia, a non-profit independent media outlet focused on the Amazonian region.
“I can’t see how or why an outlet with funds would choose not to come to Brazil for this,” he said. “We are here and we have a much smaller budget than the big outlets in the US.”
Share
Ajit Niranjan
As European negotiators in Belém urge countries to raise their climate ambitions, their politicians at home have voted to lower their own.
The European Parliament voted on Thursday to cut planet-heating pollution by 90% by 2040 from 1990 levels and allow 5% of that to come from foreign carbon credits – a landmark plan that falls short of what its scientific advisors recommend.
MEPs in Strasbourg earlier today also backed proposals to weaken a delayed law to stop deforestation in supply chains and to restrict the scope of corporate green rules.
European countries are some of the biggest historical polluters of greenhouse gas but have long championed stronger action at UN climate summits. Yet in the last two years, the EU and many of its member states have begun to roll back and “simplify” ambitious climate policies under the banner of increasing the bloc’s competitiveness.
A German wind turbine and power pylons obscured by fumes from a coal-fired power plant. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images
The EU’s 2040 target with room for carbon credits – a compromise solution that won over climate ministers last week, just in time for Cop30 – is among the most ambitious interim targets of any major polluter. But it falls short of the 90-95% domestic cuts recommended by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change.
Green campaigners were also angered by the vote to weaken the EU’s corporate sustainability rules – the first of several “omnibus” deregulation packages – which removes an obligation on companies to create climate transition plans. The requirement would have forced companies to explain how they plan to align their business practices with the Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global heating to 1.5C (2.7F).
To obtain a majority in the Parliament’s plenary, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) voted with far-right parties that pro-EU centrists have traditionally shunned.
“While the world looks to Cop30, the EPP banded with the far right to make sure business actors no longer have to create and adhere to climate transition plans,” said Frances Verkamp, a corporate accountability campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe.
“They betrayed their own promises by ignoring several moderate centre-left proposals,” she added. “If this is the dynamic, the centre-far right alliance on the next deregulation omnibuses will bulldoze protections for citizens and the environment.”
The positions adopted today will be negotiated with member states and the European Commission before final versions of the laws come into force.
Updated at 12.32 EST
‘We will exterminate ourselves’ if we keep on extracting fossil fuels, activists sayOliver Milman
An international group of activists here have issued impassioned pleas for a treaty to phase out fossil fuels, urging the Brazilian presidency of Cop30 to prod countries towards ending the era of coal, oil and gas that has caused the climate crisis.
The proposed Fossil Fuel Treaty is already backed by 17 countries and advocates in Belem said that countries needed to hurry up and act on the root cause of the climate crisis. In 2023, the Cop in Dubai resulted in countries vowing to “transition away” from fossil fuels, although there is little evidence of this happening as yet.
“If we continue to extract hydrocarbons from the Earth, we will exterminate ourselves,” said Olivia Bissa, president of the Chapra Nation in the Peruvian Amazon.
“We worry what will happen if we don’t have concrete action now. We as indigenous people in the Amazon are tired of being sacrificed by a group of powerful people who want to rule the planet. If we don’t do something together we will be complicit with ecocide and the assassination of humanity.”
Activists from the Fossil Fuel Treaty at Cop30 climate summit in Belem, Brazil, on 13 November 2025 Photograph: Oliver Milman/The Guardian
Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, praised Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for urging a fossil fuel phase out but criticized the Brazilian president for allowing a new oil drilling project near the mouth of the Amazon, pointing to a recent International Court of Justice ruling that demands countries address the climate crisis.
“We know fossil fuel production continues to rise, pushing the world past planetary limits and deepening inequality,” said Berman, singling out the US, Australia, Norway and Canada for ramping up oil and gas drilling since the Paris agreement a decade ago. A treaty to end all this would be a “major act of love and justice for our time,” she added.
Given the format of this Cop, and pushback that is already happening from Saudi Arabia and other big oil producers, it’s unclear what, if any, language on fossil fuel phase out will be included in this year’s agreement.
A major opponent of any such pact would be Donald Trump, who has called for the US, and the rest of the world, to “drill, baby, drill.” Crystal Cavalier, a Native American woman from North Carolina, is at Cop30, unlike the US government, and said a new treaty would at least put international pressure on the US to kick its fossil fuel habit.
“We are being targeted in sacrifice zones that are pushing our ecosystems to the brink,” she said. “Our current government is aggressively rolling back environmental protections.
“The Fossil Fuel treaty can be a tool, a pressure point that frontline communities can wield when their governments avoid accountability. We need external pressure in the US, we can’t do this alone. The US isn’t showing up, but the rest of the world can show up for us.”
Updated at 12.33 EST
Hello, this is Ajit Niranjan here with you from Berlin – I’ll be taking over the blog for the rest of the day. As always, please send in tips and suggestions for what we should be covering to ajit.niranjan@theguardian.com.
Chloé Farand
A row over the definition of the term “gender” threatens to bog down pivotal talks at the Cop30 climate summit, writes Chloe Farand for the Guardian.
Before the UN talks in Brazil, hardline conservative states have pushed to define gender as “biological sex” over their concerns trans and non-binary people could be included in a major plan to ensure climate action addresses gender inequality and empowers women.
A Brazilian flag flies outside the venue for the Cop30 summit in Belém, Brazil. Photograph: Joshua A Bickel/AP
Gender rights advocates said the move would backslide on decade-old language within the UN system.
“These are unprecedented times to negotiate on gender equality and women’s empowerment,” said Lorena Aguilar, the executive director of the US-based Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls, and Costa Rica’s former vice minister for foreign affairs.
“There are some countries that want to push us back to 30 years ago. But we will not accept anything less than what we already have.”
ShareBrazilians “optimistic” Cop30 will be first to finish on time since 2003
Damian Carrington
Optimism is an important part of the fight against climate change and the Brazilian presidency of Cop30 are a putting a lot of energy into creating good vibes, at least when it comes to finishing the summit on time, writes Guardian environment editor Damian Carrington. Cop meetings usually wildly overrun as decisions on difficult issues are pushed to the brink.
“We are positive and optimistic that we’ll be able to conclude on time, or with a very short delay, maybe five minutes, 10 minutes, on [Friday] 21st,” said Liliam Chagas, director for climate at Brazil’s foreign affairs ministry, on Wednesday.
Liliam Chagas, director of the climate department of Brazil’s ministry of foreign affairs has said she’s optimistic that Cop30 will finish on time. Photograph: Fernando Llano/AP
She said the presidency had already fulfilled a promise to start on time, being just 30 minutes late. Haggling over what issues go on the agenda often pushes the actual start of negotiations into day two. Brazil solved this by hiking off tricky issues, like finance and fossil fuels, into consultations, which are still ongoing.
Cop president André Corrêa do Lago was also optimistic: “I am hoping that we’re going to end on the 21st – we will try hard. I think that we have some [good] indications. This is a [country]-driven process, and the countries have been very constructive. We’re having a very good mood among them.”
“There is a strong indication that everybody that is here wants to show the world that multilateralism works and that we’re all together to prove that,” he said.
A chart shows how the likelihood of Cops overrunning has increased over the years. Photograph: Carbon Brief
However, history suggests a prompt finish is very unlikely. Only three of the previous 29 Cops have ended on time and the most recent was Cop9 in Milan in 2003. In the last decade, most Cops have overrun by 24 hours or more – last year’s, in Baku, was 36 hours over time.
Updated at 12.22 EST
A man shouts slogans demanding climate justice and more protection of indigenous territories at the Blue Zone of Cop30. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty ImagesPeople hold a huge cobra doll during a demonstration demanding climate justice and more protection of indigenous territories at the Blue Zone of COP30. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty ImagesAlthough Brazil’s left-wing president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is a staunch supporter of indigenous causes and Cop30 is the first UN climate conference to be held in the Amazon region, some indigenous people in Brazil do not feel they are being heard enough. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty ImagesShare
The Associated Press has circulated this chart showing how projections for the temperature rise caused by climate breakdown have fallen over the past decade since the signing of the Paris Agreement.
The chart shows that the world is currently on track for about 2.6C (4.7F) of heating by the end of the century, which would still present dire prospects for humanity and the biosphere as we know it, but is a marked improvement on the 3.6C of heating expected ten years ago.