The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As the Philippines reel from historic typhoons. As Caribbean countries like Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba rush to recover from a historic hurricane as Iran scrambles amid a historic drought that as people’s water taps running dry, the weary eyes of a battered world turned to Belém, Brazil, where the 30th UN Climate Summit is currently taking place. The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, began on November 10th and will conclude on November 21st. Our guest today just returned to Baltimore from COP30 in Brazil and is here to give us a breakdown of what’s happening over there, what’s not happening, and what it means for humanity’s future on our boiling planet. Dharna Noor is a fossil fuels and climate reporter at The Guardian US, and she was also once upon a time, our climate reporter here at The Real News. Thank you so much for joining us here in studio and welcome back to The Real News.

Dharna Noor:

Thanks so much for having me. I feel like I’m coming home, being in here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I mean, we just could not be prouder of you, and so from all of us to you. Yeah, keep kicking ass. And it’s really, really great to see you out there writing for The Guardian doing really vital work, and you’ve been doing a whole lot of reporting on COP30 in Brazil. So I want to dive into that. But I guess before we dig into what’s happening at this year’s COP conference, let’s take a step back and just kind of set the global scene for folks. It has been 10 years since the Paris Climate Agreements were adopted. President Trump infamously withdrew the United States from those agreements. But let’s talk about where we are in terms of the climate crisis right now and what role these climate summits have been playing or not playing.

Dharna Noor:

Yeah, I swear I’m not going to say this before every question, but it is such a complicated question. I feel like so many things in climate action, there’s the yardstick of history that we can measure progress against, and then there’s the yardstick of what is needed and what the top scientists in the world have long said is needed. So on the former point, I mean, no matter how you look at it, the Paris Agreement has delivered some results. I mean, if we looked at the kind of trajectory that we were on for global warming for the end of this decade, back in 2015 before the Paris Agreement was signed, we were on 3.6 degrees Celsius of warming, which I mean with all these numbers, it’s like that may not sound like a lot, but that is truly catastrophic. That’s like many of the world’s Islands, completely underwater storms.

That would be unsurvivable heat waves, that would be unsurvivable. You get the idea. We are now still looking at a catastrophic, albeit very much less catastrophic scenario of warming, which is 2.6 degrees. So we’ve averted a degree of warming, and I mean that might not sound like a big deal, but it really is huge when we talk about a problem that has this much of the global economy kind of wrapped up in it. So yes, the Paris Agreement has delivered results. The point of these conferences that the UN has where parties come together, where countries come together to talk about their future action and flush out their climate plans, is really to make good on the promises of the Paris agreement. And right now what we’re seeing is not enough progress from countries. I mean, as you mentioned, the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement.

We can talk about this more, but this is the second time Trump has pulled the US out of the agreement. And this time they didn’t even send, the Trump administration didn’t even send a delegation. Even last time Trump was in office, he at least had some of his people from his administration go to COP, talk to people, I mean, probably what they were mainly doing was making oil deals and trying to thwart progress, but still they are not present. And that is a big change. And we’ve also not seen the level of ambition that scientists have said that we need from countries. So this year was big because countries had to update their climate plans. That’s something they have to do every five years. We saw some relatively progressive plans, especially from countries that will be really badly affected by the climate crisis. But some of the world’s biggest polluters really did not kind of measure up to that level of ambition. China’s plan pushed them forward a little bit in terms of emission reduction, but not again, to the degree that scientist say is necessary. India has not submitted their plan as yet, even though it was due before COP even began. So lots of work to be done, to put it very mildly.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think that’ll be the continuing theme this conversation. And COP30 is currently taking place, like we said in Belém, Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Let’s talk about the significance of that and the dire state of things in the Amazon and this tangled knot of contradictions surrounding the conference, including the fact that leftist president, Brazilian president, Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, recently granted the state owned oil conglomerate Petrobras to drill for oil in the Amazon.

Dharna Noor:

Yeah, totally. That is a fact that did not go ignored at COP from what’s called Civil Society, which is basically just anybody who’s not a government official who is present, all the activists, all the advocates come together as civil society. I mean, look, the Brazilian government is in a really complicated place right now. As you said, Lula is kind of a leading figure of the left center, left globally and has done a lot of work to bring a lot of Brazilians out of poverty and things like this, and has been celebrated for those things also targeted by the Trump administration, but we can get into that later. But he’s in this really complicated position where there’s an ascendant right now in Brazil. There’s this sort of specter of authoritarianism, and his administration seems to be indicating that that’s why they’ve made some of these kind of concessions.

So as you mentioned, opening up some of the Amazon for oil drilling, which is, I mean just like horribly disappointing obviously, especially to the many, many, many indigenous activists from Brazil who were present at COPs both inside and outside protesting. And then also part of the conference itself. There were some other concessions. He made some concessions to agribusiness, which was also really frustrating to people. Agribusiness is a major polluter within Brazil, and those contradictions, I think made a lot of the presidency’s work. What Brazil this year is called the presidency of COP. It made that really complicated. Interestingly, this is also the first year in a while that COP has not been held in an explicitly right wing authoritarian country. Last year, for instance, it was an Azerbaijan, not exactly known for democracy, pretty fascist. And that meant that some of these contradictions were able to be properly examined in a way that they would not have otherwise been.

So for instance, one day last week, there was a group of indigenous protesters from the Amazon who, well, first on Tuesday, some indigenous protesters broke into the COP building to try to basically stand up for the rights of indigenous people in the Amazon, highlight some of these contradictions. And then there was this major protest a few days later from indigenous activists outside where the president of COP, an environment minister from Brazil came outside and was like, Hey, I will talk to you directly, these indigenous activists, and ended up doing that for three hours. So I don’t know. A lot of this I think is just having these negotiations in a city that’s so close to the Amazon forces you to take on some of the real world effects of climate policy, of the lack of climate policy, of these polluting sectors that we need to phase out in a just and equitable way. And that happened a little bit more I think, because we were in Brazil. But the fact of them being highlighted, I think also highlights the amount of progress that has yet to be made, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. And again, it underscores the ongoing theme of this conversation, right? It is catastrophic but less catastrophic than it could be

Dharna Noor:

Exactly. Things have happened, not enough things,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Not enough things. And it was only a couple years ago that the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro was opening the Amazon up even more to deforestation, drilling, mining, so on and so forth. So this is an ongoing constantly sort of morphing issue with a lot of different stakeholders and a lot of different struggles determining the end outcome.

Dharna Noor:

And I think it’s worth noting too, that if you look at the chart of this is not at all to be like a Lula defender, it is a fact that if you look at the chart of deforestation under Bolsonaro and previous administrations versus what we saw under Lula, it was much, much less. So we’re talking about a problem that has still been present, albeit less,

Maximillian Alvarez:

But again, a problem that can’t be ignored and people are right not to be placated by that when we’re reading that for the first time in history, the Amazon known as the lungs of the world are emitting more carbon than they’re absorbing. So this is underscoring again, the dire state of things and where the passions are coming from.

Dharna Noor:

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I want to zero in on something you were talking about. It’s been a years long process of people losing their faith in the COP summits and lowering their expectations of what’s actually going to come from them. So I wanted to ask you, in the year of our Lord 2025, what can people reasonably expect to come from COP? What are the issues that are actually being debated and negotiated in Brazil right now?

Dharna Noor:

This COP is even more complicated than previous ones, and so that means that the answer to this is multifaceted and broken up over a million different things. Last year, for instance, COP was largely focused, not exclusively, but you could reasonably be following what was happening at the conference and only be paying attention to one issue, which is climate finance, how much finance rich countries are giving to poorer countries to do the energy transition, adapt to climate change. That was the one big thing. This COP is very different. It’s what is called an implementation COP, and that means that it’s focused on the implementation of a bunch of different pledges. So there’s one exciting sort of thing that’s happening right now, which is that there were dozens of ministers that came together to call for a roadmap to phase out of fossil fuel usage. This is two years after a country has agreed to not phase out, but transition away from fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels obviously responsible for 90% of all planet heating, carbon emissions, so not really possible to have climate action without phasing out fossil fuels, despite what oil companies and their allies and government love to tell us constantly. So that’s a big thing to watch for is what happens on this language around fossil fuels. Another big thing and the sort of big demand from climate advocates and labor and indigenous advocates a lot of the time is this call for a just transition. And so that’s a transition away from fossil fuels that does not leave workers and communities behind. And millions of examples of this, when you close down a coal plant, what kinds of jobs do the people who are working at the coal plant get to have? Are they going to be unionized? Are there going to be benefits with them? Are they going to be well-paid? Are they going to exist in the first place? So those kinds of issues, I mean similar issues in every sort of polluting sector, from gas to agriculture to industrial farming, et cetera. So that’s a big issue is the just transition language. And again, there was a big push there where the G77 and China, which is enough countries to represent 80% of the world, called for something like this, called for language to secure a just transition for workers and communities, which is pretty huge. Again, that doesn’t mean that the climate crisis is going away,

But, that is not the place that we were in 10 years ago at all, and that would be a big deal. Again, the implementation of that is going to be more complicated, but having the text in there is a big thing, and then there’s a million other things to be looking at. I’ll just mention one more, which is called adaptation indicators, and that’s like what countries should have to do with the finance that they’re giving to adapt to climate change. We know well that we have to phase out fossil fuels that we have to take climate action to rapidly, rapidly slash emissions, but there’s some amount of warming that’s baked into the world. If we stopped all of that today, there would be some amount of warming that’s baked into the world. And I don’t say that to be, there’s climate deniers who say this, but it is also true. And so one big thing that’s getting worked out is which countries should be able to get finance to adapt to climate change and what they should be using that finance for. So there’s a billion little things like this. There’s not the one headline, there’s many, many different intricacies that are getting sorted out, and they say that they’re going to do that by before the end of this week, but I don’t know, there’s still a lot of progress to be made, clearly there’s still a lot of fights happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and we’ve mentioned fossil fuels quite a bit. Again, how could not, when you’re talking about climate change and the fact of the matter is that there are more fossil fuel lobbyists, I think the tallies around 1600 at this year’s COP, but at the same time, even though that’s more fossil fuel industry lobbyists that have ever been at a COP, there is also the largest delegation of Indigenous peoples from around the world also in Belém, Brazil, right now. So talk about the significance of that and the competing visions for humanity’s futures that are embodied in these different converging forces in Brazil right now.

Dharna Noor:

Yeah, I mean the presence of lobbyists and other representatives from the fossil fuel industry, or even just honestly people who have their interests wrapped up in fossil fuels generally is, I mean, whatever, this is my opinion, but it is a huge problem obviously for the COP process, and it is one that has been raised over and over and over again by the climate justice community since the beginning of these, since before the beginning of these negotiations. The idea that these interests, these companies that have their profit wrapped up in the continued sale and use of fossil fuels is outright contrary to the very goals of the Paris Agreement, including the less radical ones, including the least ambitious ones.

And it’s something that is increasingly confronted by a lot of activists who have pointed out that there’s now tons of evidence that the fossil fuel industry has directly influenced, not just been there tinkering around the edges, but directly influenced some of the texts that’s made it into these agreements. I mean, years ago, Kate Aronoff did this great report showing that Shell helped write some of the text that’s in the Paris Agreement, which is wild. There’s another major issue, which is that the lobbying for a COP, the PR for COP, is being done by Edelman, a public relations giant that has long taken fossil fuel clients and currently has Shell as a client. So just a massive, massive conflict of interest. And there’s obviously, I think there, there’s a lot of hand waving away for this issue, A lot of like, oh, they need to be at the table because they’re the ones who know how to run the energy industry, whatever.

I think we’ve seen that that does not work. Now it’s time to try something else. That said, civil society was out in full force. This COP still is lots of folks from the Amazon, lots of Indigenous folks from the Amazon and other traditional people from around Brazil. So I think all of the stakeholders who have very, very different interests are getting to duke it out in this COP. And I feel like we’re moving further in that direction where all of those sort of hidden contradictions are kind of coming to the fore bubbling up, and that could be a good thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s decidedly not something that we’ve seen at the recent COPs that, as you mentioned, were held in authoritarian regimes where these kinds of civil society protests weren’t permitted. But you were there on the ground in Belém like reporting on these protests, and I wanted to ask if you could just take us there, give us an on the ground sense of what you saw and heard during these protests.

Dharna Noor:

Yeah, I mean, the big protest traditionally at COP and this year was on the sort of middle Saturday COP is usually two weeks, and the big protest is usually on the middle of Saturday. And this year, thousands of people came out into the streets and it was truly beautiful. I mean, just to kind of paint a picture for folks, COP is held in this giant gray, drab temporary conference building that they erect without any character, without any personality that they erect for the purpose of holding these conferences. So you’re stuck inside this gray windowless conference center for, I mean, for me for 14 hours a day. So just the fact of being able to be like, I’m going to go outside and walk around with people in the first place is already incredible. And then you go to the protest and you’re like, oh, this is all kinds of people from all over the world speaking every different language, wearing every different kind of outfit and every different kind of color, and bringing these very, this vast array of demands to the fore that there’s often no place to bring in COP.

This is for a good reason. But so often climate negotiations happen with a ton of jargon in ways that feel completely disconnected to people’s lives. And the protests, I think are where you actually can see there are people at the center of all of this. When we’re talking about emissions, that can seem like you’re just talking about a little chart that you look at sometimes while you’re making little plan that you’re writing down in your spreadsheet or whatever. But no, this is about people’s lives. And the protests make that really, really clear. I met so many incredible people at Saturday’s protest. There was one group that had erected this giant cobra. It was this cobra that was made by a group of a dozen artists or more than a dozen artists in the Amazon. And then that came over that was brought over by activists in a ship to Beam Brazil for this protest. And Cobra is kind of like a double entendre because the snake, the Cobra is sort of like a protector, is a sacred protector for indigenous peoples in the Amazon. But then also Cobra also translates to pay up Cobra, give us our money, so that what they were demanding basically is climate finance for people in the Amazon. That level of creativity is, I mean, obviously there’s creative accounting and creative whatever stuff in the negotiations in some sense, but being able to see that kind of world in action was so, so beautiful and fulfilling personally.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And like you said, these are not just statistics. These are not just headlines. These are real felt crises in people’s lives. I mean, just last year, Brazil experienced some of the heaviest floods that they’ve ever experienced where people’s houses were underwater.

Dharna Noor:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, people in the Amazon are losing their lived habitat.

Dharna Noor:

People in the where they lived for thousands of years,

Maximillian Alvarez:

For thousands of years, my home of Southern California is burning more and more every year. People in the Caribbean, their homes are being destroyed by these hurricanes all the way up to Asheville, North Carolina. These are the real felt kind of impacts of the climate chaos that we’re talking about here. And you’re right, you often don’t see people experiencing these different conditions, like people living in effective climate sacrifice zones from around the country,

Dharna Noor:

Being

Maximillian Alvarez:

Able to converge in one place and speak in one chorus of multiple voices about the real felt effects on the ground all over the world. So I really highly encourage anyone watching, if you haven’t already, go read the report that Dharna co-reported on those protests. It was very enlightening.

Dharna Noor:

Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know I got to let you go here in a minute, but I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the fact that, as we’ve mentioned here, President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he does not give a shit about climate change. He’s actively called it a hoax. Many times he’s withdrawn the United States from the Paris agreements, and he refused to send a high level delegation to this year’s COP. And given everything we’re talking about the state of the climate, this feels like the worst possible time for the United States to be walking away from the table. But at the same time, the United States has been one of the staunchest forces like preventing serious climate action on the global stage. So what does it mean on the good side and the bad side that the US is not a major participant in this year’s COP?

Dharna Noor:

Yeah, a hundred percent. You’re right. It’s hard to talk about this without, it’s really easy, I think to fall into the trap of romanticizing the United States past role in climate negotiations and to anyone who’s been paying attention to multilateral climate policy at all ever that that’s laughable. The US has been the biggest obstructor of any serious climate action in many, many, many fora. That said, it’s a big deal that the US isn’t there. I talked to a bunch of people who actually said that it was a good thing that the United States was not present because it’s sort of like the school bully’s out sick one day, as my colleague put it, one person I was very kind of surprised to hear, say this was Christiana Figueres who I interviewed. She was sort of the mother of the Paris Agreement. She used to be the head of the UN’s climate body.

And when I was like, what does it mean that the US is leaving? She said, ciao bambino. Bye little boy. Boy, bye, basically. Because there’s this idea that there’ll be room for more action to be taken when the world’s biggest historical emitter who is now led by a climate deni is not present. However, one, the US not being present does not mean the US does not have influence. I don’t want to get too on the weeds in the weeds in on this, but a few weeks ago there was this big conference had by the International Maritime Organization, which is basically where countries come together to decide on maritime and shipping policy and industry and countries were totally on board to pass a fee on carbon. Basically, if you are emitting planet heating, pollution, you have to pay for it. Everyone was on board with this except for the US and Saudi Arabia.

Maybe a couple other people are on the edges, but those are the two powerful forces. The United States had a delegation there that was literally reportedly going around during coffee breaks and being like, Hey, you better not vote for that. You better not support that. We’re going to come for you and we’re going to make sure that it’s not so easy for people from your country to get into our country. And then Trump was like, Hey, by the way, we’re going to tariff anybody who supports this. It’s like true bully crazy shit. And that’s the kind of thing that people are nervous is going to happen around the edges at this COP, the US basically, if it calls in favors, it can often get them. And that’s the kind of thing that would have to be happening behind the scenes. But I feel like people should be on the lookout for it.

On the point of whether or not climate progress can be made without the us, the answer is obviously yes. The rest of the world is obviously, much of the rest of the world is moving in the direction of, at the very least, more renewable energy in all cases, actually renewable energy that’s displacing fossil fuels, which is a whole other kind of problem. But there’s, I think this big debate happening among people at COP and generally people who pay attention to climate about whether or not the market can kind of solve this problem. So Christiana Figueras, for instance, was like the US not being here. That’s again the sort of mother of the Paris Agreement. She sort of said, the US not being here can’t really have an effect. Even if they try to meddle, it’s not going to have that much of an effect because there’s basically runaway change in the market right now where renewables are cheaper.

People are bringing on renewables because it’s better for their economies. You’re not going to be able to change that. And then you talk to other people and they’re like, yeah, okay, maybe that’s happening some, but it’s not happening at the pace that it needs to happen. And I think just as importantly, if that happens again in a way that leaves workers behind, leaves, communities behind, people are not going to be down for it. That is both an ethical problem and a political problem. Of course, people are not going to be gung-ho about climate action if it doesn’t deliver real material positive change for their lives. That is a much thornier question that I don’t think that any one sort of UN climate summit can untangle. But again, I think that it’s one that it’s really good that people are bringing front and center because it’s something that in the real world is so crucial to all of these climate questions, whether or not it actually ends up being in the text or not. I feel like we cannot forget that when we’re talking about climate action ever.