Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is pushing to approve exploratory oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River before November’s U.N. COP30, an initiative which clashes with his image as a climate leader. A staunch defender of the project, Lula and his allies argue that oil revenues will fund Brazil’s renewable energy transition, a claim environmentalists strongly reject. Critics challenge the lack of concrete plans to invest oil revenues in renewables and argue that the billions of dollars spent on fossil fuel subsidies and state-owned oil giant Petrobras’ offshore drilling could instead support clean energy and climate adaptation. “We don’t need to burn the planet to fund solutions to save it,” Ilan Zugman, director of 350.org for Latin America and the Caribbean, told Mongabay. “It’s not like there is no money for the energy transition — we are just missing political will.” The push to drill off its northern coast, in an area known as the Equatorial Margin, coincides with Brazil’s Feb. 19 announcement of joining three international energy forums, including the Charter of Cooperation between Petroleum Producing Countries (CoC) as a participating country. The CoC is linked to OPEC+, a bloc of major oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the UAE. The government claims this move will promote debate on energy transition within the alliance. But according to Brazilian climate news nonprofit ClimaInfo, the move signals Brazil’s alignment with major oil producers and increases pressure to expand fossil fuel projects. The Equatorial Margin spans across…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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