Well, so much for COP30. It ended November 21st, 2025, and despite the rhetoric including boilerplate like “Canada leaves COP30 with renewed ambition and deeper partnerships for global climate action”, nothing of substance was achieved. The conference merely highlighted the air of unreality around wealthy Westerners, and wealthy elites from poor nations, throwing fits over tiny temperature increases and speculative science while real issues go neglected. Including, as Canada’s upstart Rebel News documented disgustingly, that in the streets of Belém not far from the conference, geographically at least, the gutters literally run with human waste. Rebel News also located a dump in the poor neighborhood of Vila de Barca where the UN was tossing the construction waste from the conference facilities. What was that Bill Gates was saying again about the world’s poor having far worse problems than the climate change he recently treated as a looming apocalypse?
As Rebel’s Sheila Gunn Reid explains:
“My videographer, Kian Simone, and I travelled into a favela called Vila da Barca on the edge of Belém. There’s no proper sanitation. There’s very little electricity. Homes aren’t hooked up to a sewer system. And it’s dangerous. Most residents don’t even legally own the land their houses sit on. If the city decides to bulldoze everything tomorrow to make way for some shiny new project, that’s it. They’re gone.”
We say again, shades of our Senegal documentary. Including that issue of missing property rights. But back to the dump:
“We went there because we saw local Instagram videos from residents accusing the United Nations and the city of Belém of using Vila da Barca as a personal garbage dump. For years, people here have complained that sewage from richer parts of the city is routed straight through their community and out into the bay, turning the water into a filthy, dangerous soup. On the ground, we saw the evidence. And then we found something else. The UN – the same UN holding a climate conference just a few kilometres away – has been dumping its construction waste from conference facilities in this vulnerable community. We tracked it down, and wouldn’t you know it, we found the very dump site the UN is using. We found the discarded UN-logo’ed signs and trash hiding in plain sight.”
When we attended COP29 last year in Baku, Azerbaijan, or more precisely inside a sealed sociological zone that might as well have been a UFO landing in Baku, we ourselves went outside the bubble to see at least a bit of how ordinary people lived. And we felt strongly that we were in a very small minority of those at the conference in doing so.
Well, how many of the COP30 delegates set foot in Vila de Barca? How many knew it existed? How many stood by an open sewer and thought just maybe these people need affordable, abundant energy not the sanctimony of privileged snobs staying on diesel cruise ships and dumping their crud on the poor without a thought?
It’s getting hard to ignore. Matthew Wielicki commented sourly that:
“For years, I’ve watched as well-intentioned environmentalism morphed into a crusade that elevates hypothetical future scenarios over the immediate, tangible suffering of billions. This conference, nestled in a city where raw sewage flows openly into waterways, exemplifies the ultimate hypocrisy: global elites, Western scientists, and politicians jetting in – often on private planes – to lecture the world on reducing emissions, while ignoring the far more pressing environmental crises right under their noses.”
To be sure, they’ve had years of practice brushing off such criticism. Which ironically is fast becoming a liability because they can’t brush it off anymore yet keep trying.
"wealthy Westerners", "Western scientists", etc.
I would use a word other than "West" or "Western" if we're referring to the developed countries. If we're in an academic or technical mood, let's used "developed" or "industrialized" instead. If we want to be more colloquial, let's use "rich" or "the rich world" or maybe "First World" (although the latter is an artifact of the Cold War). All of these alternative terms more neatly cover not just Western Europe (and perhaps post-Communist Eastern Europe west of Russia etc.), the US/Canada, and Australia/New Zealand, but also Japan and the Asian Tigers (which clear aren't Western, in culture anyway). "West" or "Western" is an inadequate term, also because Latin America - especially those areas like Argentina/Uruguay that are of predominantly European ancestry - is of thoroughly Western (especially Iberian and also Italian) cultural heritage.
Excellent investigative journalism John! I note that such efforts only come from the right these days, the smug, sanctimonious left hasn't looked outside their rosy little bubble for decades!
A look at the setting for Cop30. What an eye opener. As Michael Shellenberger insists in Apocalypse Never, there are real environmental issues in poorer areas of the world that should be remedied instead of spending vast sums of money on the so called climate crisis.
Are we not doing a bit of virtue signalling of our own with all that stuff about dumping conference waste and untreated sewage into the ocean? Ditto that four-lane highway and the trees that had to be chopped down to make way for it. I rather suspect that there would be many other issues more important to the lives of those suffering life in Vila de Barca.
Perhaps the most appalling,hypocritical COP yet.The whole event is montrous and contrary to their reason for being there.And all about a harmless,odorless gas that gives life to plants,and ultimately all of us.
From Harper’s Weekly…
The 30th annual United Nations Climate Summit convened in Brazil, where eight miles of protected Amazon forestland were felled to build a new four-lane highway for the event.
Sure there are Max and some of those "issues" where mentioned. But the main point was to highlight the hypocrisy of the COP 30 gang so I don't see the virtue signaling.
I heard that the fire at COP30 was electrical in source. Right from the start it looked to me like it might have been an electric battery or device that was being displayed at one of the booths. If so it was a good demonstration of the dangers of electrification of everything in the new world of clean energy.