Brazil’s Lula urges ‘defeat’ of climate deniers as COP30 opens

BELÉM, (Brazil): The UN’s climate conference opened in the Brazilian Amazon on Monday with pleas for the world to keep up the fight against global warming, even as the United States turns its back.

Some 50,000 delegates are gathering for the two-week COP30 meeting in Belem, the hot and humid metropolis at the edge of the rainforest where they are facing the daunting task of keeping global climate cooperation from collapsing.

“Climate change is no longer a threat of the future. It is a tragedy of the present,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said at the conference, which started with song and dance from a trio of Indigenous people wearing feathered headpieces.

Lula slammed those who reject scientific evidence and “spread fear, attack institutions, science, and universities.”

“It’s time to inflict a new defeat on the deniers,” he said, adding that it was far cheaper to fight to protect the climate than to wage war.

Weighing on the talks is the absence of the United States, the world’s top oil producer and second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, whose climate-skeptic President Donald Trump champions the fossil fuel industry and derides renewable energy.

Delegates will also have to face the world’s failure to meet the landmark Paris Agreement’s safer goal of limiting warming to 1.5C, after scientists and the UN warned in recent days that surpassing that level temporarily is now all but inevitable.