A-Infos (en) Brazil, UNIPA: Press Release #83 - Only the People Can Save the Planet: COP 30 and the Three Disputed Lines for the Climate Future (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

They are relying on the arsonist to put out the fire: COP 30 between 
climate statism and green capitalism ---- COP 30 is the 30th UN climate 
conference, held in Belém (PA), in November 2025, bringing together 
countries to negotiate actions against the climate crisis. It seeks to 
accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement and maintain the 
1.5°C target, discussing national emission reduction targets, climate 
finance, and the transition away from fossil fuels. For Brazil, hosting 
the event brings diplomatic prominence to the federal government, but 
also highlights contradictions such as deforestation and 
socio-environmental conflicts, while the Lula government tries to 
present itself as a climate leader, proposing initiatives such as a 
Climate Coalition and a US$125 billion fund for tropical forests.

From the perspective of social class analysis, COP 30 represents the 
confluence of different national technocracies and international 
capitalist factions, along with a minority of social movements 
integrated into the capitalist-statist order, to discuss our climate 
future within the framework of this same order. In this sense, they 
ignore the class and political aspects of the climate emergency, part of 
the broader ecological crisis promoted by capitalism, focusing 
discussions on illusorily technical and financial measures. The 
solutions proposed by these agents of climate statism and green 
capitalism range from palliatives that a more or less regulatory state 
and a financial capital duly greened for the climate problem can provide.

On the other hand, indigenous peoples and traditional communities have 
in fact contributed to mitigating the climate crisis because their 
territories, when recognized and protected, concentrate disproportionate 
carbon stocks and systematically exhibit lower deforestation rates than 
other areas, a direct result of their own forms of territorial 
organization and management. In other words, the fact that these 
territories remain forested is, in itself, a global climate "service" of 
enormous scale (Tropical forest carbon in indigenous territories: a 
global analysis, UNFCCC COP21, 2015).

Since the beginning of COP30 in Belém, indigenous peoples have already 
staged at least three direct actions against the official climate 
theater: one led to the occupation of the event's main pavilion, and 
another blocked the entrance to the so-called "blue zone," where the 
planet's destinies are negotiated behind closed doors. The immediate 
response from the UN Convention bureaucracy was to demand increased 
security and perimeter control, attempting to contain what the press 
calls "incidents" but which, in practice, is the eruption of real 
struggle within the sanitized space of green diplomacy. On Saturday 
(November 15th), hundreds of indigenous people marched with social 
movements through the center of Belém in protest, while the Brazilian 
government, in a calculated move, avoided open criticism of the 
mobilizations. When the Munduruku people blocked the entrance to the 
pavilion on Friday (November 14th), the conference president, André 
Corrêa do Lago, and ministers Marina Silva and Sônia Guajajara rushed to 
negotiate with the leaders and end the blockade-a clear example of how 
the State seeks to manage and neutralize the indigenous offensive, 
preserving the "normality" of negotiations that keep intact the 
structures responsible for the climate crisis itself. COP 30 in Belém 
reproduces on a micro scale the contradictions of the statist-capitalist 
order we live in, where the arsonists responsible for the climate crisis 
are called upon to put out the fire, while those who have built a 
sophisticated system of socio-ecological relations with nature and who 
are currently preventing the worsening of the climate situation are 
repressed and expelled.

Towards a proletarian climate policy

We understand that the climate issue permeates the issue of territorial 
disputes over mineral and energy resources, central elements in dispute 
in this Second Cold War that we have already addressed in previous 
statements. The struggle for land for the extraction of minerals 
necessary for the "energy transition"

Thinking about climate policy from the perspective of the working class 
and oppressed peoples means inverting the starting point: it is not "how 
to save the climate without hindering growth," as the agents of climate 
statism and green capitalism reason, but how to organize the class 
struggle on a warming planet. Therefore, climate policy is not a 
separate "environmental" issue, but a central field of contemporary 
class struggle, as it concerns the dispute over who has the power to 
decide what to produce, for whom, under what conditions, and at what 
human/ecological/territorial costs.

Three-line struggle in climate policy

The working class, oppressed peoples, and anarchist revolutionaries need 
to correctly discern the different lines at play when it comes to 
climate policy. The 1) liberal and 2) social-democratic lines enjoy 
greater visibility in public debate, while a 3) proletarian line only 
sketches its existence and outlines its minimal and revolutionary 
programs. The first two lines lead to the reproduction of the interstate 
and capitalist system as we know it, not to its overcoming in political, 
economic, and ecological terms. In this sense, they are auxiliary lines 
of the current order, prolonging the climate problem instead of solving 
it. The solution to the ecological crisis, of which the "climate 
emergency" is only one of its constitutive aspects, necessarily involves 
the end of capitalism and the state as forms of organizing social life 
on local and global scales.

A line centered on the working class places climate directly on the 
terrain of class struggle. The difference between this and the other two 
approaches is not merely one of "degree of state intervention," but also 
of starting point, political subject, tools, and historical horizon.

The liberal perspective starts from the idea that global warming is 
essentially a market failure: carbon does not have an adequate price, 
and economic agents do not incorporate "environmental costs" into their 
decisions. Climate policy, in this context, is conceived as a set of 
mechanisms to "correct" this failure through prices, incentives, and 
technological innovation. The main actors are national governments and 
multilateral organizations in dialogue with capitalist companies and 
investors. The stated objective is to reduce emissions "at the lowest 
possible cost," without undermining economic growth and maintaining the 
structure of private ownership of the means of production: the energy 
source is changed, processes are improved, a carbon market is created, 
but the pattern of accumulation and reproduction of capital is not 
questioned. The state appears as a neutral mediator, guaranteeing a good 
"business environment," and the market is treated as the privileged 
space for the solution. In this context, class struggle tends to 
disappear, replaced by problems of "governance" and investment.

The social-democratic line recognizes the same crisis, but formulates it 
as a public problem that cannot be simply handed over to the market. 
Here, climate policy combines environmental regulation, carbon taxes, 
subsidies for so-called "clean" technologies, and compensatory social 
policies. The political subject expands: the welfare state, progressive 
parties, institutionalized unions, NGOs, and multilateral organizations 
enter the picture. The idea of a "just transition" becomes central: 
reducing emissions, yes, but with compensation for losing sectors and 
regions, negotiated productive reconversion, and job protection through 
a social pact between the state, companies, and unions. The market 
remains important, but "tamed" by regulation; the state, in turn, is the 
actor that coordinates and redistributes. Class struggle is 
acknowledged, but channeled into forms of institutional negotiation and 
gradual compromises between capital and labor: the horizon of rupture is 
replaced by a regulated capitalism, with a "cleaner" energy matrix and 
some reinforcement of the welfare state.

However, the perspective from the working class shifts the axis of the 
debate. Here, the climate crisis is not seen as a market failure, nor 
merely as a problem of public management, but as a historical result of 
class exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy under 
capitalism. Climate politics is seen as a central field of contemporary 
class struggle because it concerns who decides what to produce, for 
whom, under what conditions, and with what impacts on territories and 
peoples. The political subject is no longer the "well-intentioned State" 
nor the abstract "civil society," but the working class in its broadest 
sense: rural and urban workers, formal and informal workers, indigenous 
peoples, peasants, quilombola communities, residents of the peripheries, 
women and precarious youth, organized in grassroots movements, combative 
unions, assemblies, and territorial councils.

If in the other two lines, the "lines of order," the central criterion 
is "reducing emissions" in an economically efficient or socially 
sustainable way, here the criterion becomes more incisive: reducing 
emissions and ecological destruction while expanding the power and 
autonomy of the working class and oppressed peoples. This implies 
shifting the question "how much does it cost?" to "who pays and who 
decides?" Instead of financing the transition with regressive taxes and 
tariffs that fall on workers, from the point of view of a minimum 
program, it is proposed to tax fortunes, extraordinary profits, and 
fossil and agrarian-export income, as well as the expropriation of 
explicitly destructive assets. Instead of a transition designed by state 
technocracies negotiating with corporations, the focus is on 
ecological-democratic planning, with social control of key sectors such 
as energy, transport, sanitation, and food through workers' and 
community councils, with real veto and decision-making power.

This "breaking point" also alters the role of territory in climate 
policy. In liberal and social-democratic frameworks, territories appear 
primarily as spaces where projects are implemented - wind farms, 
hydroelectric dams, "low-carbon" agribusiness, regional development 
programs. From a class perspective, territory becomes a front of 
conflict between the state and capital on one side, and rural and urban 
communities on the other. Climate policy necessarily involves the active 
defense of indigenous peoples, peasants, extractivists, quilombola 
communities, favelas, and peripheries against extractivism and 
megaprojects. Instead of viewing forests, savannahs, or coastlines as 
"carbon assets" to be integrated into global markets, an ecological 
agrarian reform and a radical urban reform are proposed that recognize 
traditional territories and peripheries as subjects of climate policy, 
and not as mere spaces for compensation and top-down directed development.

Another important shift is in the reproduction of life. The liberal 
approach tends to make domestic and care work invisible, focusing on the 
"resilient" and entrepreneurial individual. The social-democratic 
approach introduces social adaptation programs, insurance, and shelters, 
but still within a sectoral policy framework. From the perspective of 
the working class, the focus becomes: who takes care when everything 
collapses? Extreme events increase the burden of domestic work, almost 
always borne by women, and put pressure on public services. Thus, a 
class-based climate policy places public and community-based care 
networks at the center, valuing invisible labor (waste pickers, health 
workers, educators, informal rural workers) as key actors in the 
proletarian climate response, and forms of income and protection linked 
to the maintenance of life, not to market productivity.

Finally, the dispute between the two "lines of order" and the "line of 
rupture" is evident in the forms of organization and struggle. 
Liberalism relies on controlled consultations, business forums, and 
global governance; while social democracy expands councils, conferences, 
and institutional spaces for participation, without breaking with the 
structural asymmetry between capital and labor. Climate policy from the 
working class demands grassroots democracy and direct action: popular 
assemblies, company and neighborhood committees, rural-urban alliances, 
climate strikes, blockades of destructive infrastructure, and productive 
boycotts for ecological reasons. Climate policy is no longer just a 
specialized "environmental issue" but returns to the classic vocabulary 
of class struggle, updated by the fact that today the dispute over 
labor, land, and territory is, at the same time, a dispute over the 
material conditions of possibility for social life itself.

The climate future between the forces of order and rupture

Ultimately, what is at stake are three distinct historical horizons: a 
financialized, green capitalism that transforms the ecological crisis 
into a new round of accumulation for capitalists; a regulated, green 
capitalism with a reinforced welfare state and a supposedly "clean" 
energy matrix; and a horizon of social ecology, based on the socialist 
self-government of the people, on the self-management of production 
geared towards collectively defined needs, and on an ecological 
mutualism between nature and society, in balance with ecological limits, 
articulating the overcoming of class exploitation with a critique of 
colonial, patriarchal, and racial domination. It is within this context 
that climate policy, conceived from the perspective of the working 
class, is situated: not as just another "thematic agenda," but as a 
strategic field in the struggle for a socialist and self-governed society.

The three lines of climate policy today - liberal, social-democratic, 
and proletarian - are three ways of imagining the planet's climate 
future. The liberal and social-democratic lines, despite differences in 
instruments and language, remain within the established order: they 
accept the statist-capitalist system as given and attempt to 
"decarbonize" or regulate capitalism without addressing the logic of 
accumulation, the private ownership of the means of production, and the 
centralized command of the State. Thus, they may mitigate impacts and 
partially redistribute costs, but they continue to reproduce the same 
historical form that produces global warming and ecological destruction: 
intensive extraction of energy and matter, territories transformed into 
sacrifice zones, and the State acting as manager of this dynamic.

The perspective from the working class emerges as a breaking point 
because it places climate directly within the context of class struggle, 
colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy. Instead of simply asking "how 
to reduce emissions?", it asks "who decides, who pays, who benefits?", 
proposing a radical democratization of decisions regarding energy, land, 
transportation, and food; the dismantling of structurally destructive 
activities; and the reorganization of production and life based on 
collective needs and ecological limits. This materializes in climate 
strikes, blockades of megaprojects, the defense of territories, and 
experiences of ecological self-management led by workers, indigenous 
peoples, peasants, and urban peripheries. If statism-capitalism is the 
historical form that produces the crisis, then there is no sustainable 
climate future within it: both lines of order manage the disaster; only 
the proletarian breaking point opens the possibility of a minimally 
habitable post-capitalist and post-state world for the majority and for 
other forms of life.

https://uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com/2025/11/19/so-o-povo-salva-o-planeta-a-cop-30-e-as-tres-linhas-em-disputa-pelo-futuro-climatico/
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