Black Gold, Green Promises: Brazil’s Climate Paradox

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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Can oil — the world’s climate villain — be used to pay for its own demise?

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva thinks so. He is pushing for expanded oil exploration, including offshore projects near the Amazon rainforest, while simultaneously casting himself as a global leader on climate change.

“The world is not yet ready to live without oil,” Lula, the host of this year’s COP30 UN climate conference, told a local podcast.

“I am against fossil fuels whenever we can do without them. But until we can, we need to use them. Oil money will help us develop biofuels, ethanol, green hydrogen, and other initiatives,” he said earlier this year.

Brazil is currently the eighth-largest oil producer, and Lula wants the state energy giant Petrobras to become “the largest oil company in the world.”

At the same time, he urges world leaders to step up in the fight against the climate crisis and has pledged zero deforestation by 2030.

Critics call Lula’s stance contradictory; others see it as pragmatic.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that developing countries won’t be able to count on rich nations to finance their climate agenda,” said Jorge Arbache, an economics professor at the University of Brasilia.

“It’s much harder to force a country like Brazil not to extract oil than it is to tell a rich oil-producing nation like Norway the same thing,” he said.

“The question should be how to use this oil — and within what environmental parameters. That should be an adult conversation.”

A Historic Mistake

Off the coast of the Amazon in northern Brazil, the world’s mightiest river crashes into the ocean, sending a muddy brown plume of freshwater hundreds of kilometers into the blue-gray Atlantic — a color contrast visible even from space.

Plans for oil exploration in the biodiverse Foz do Amazonas basin have become a symbol of Lula’s environmental contradictions.

After being denied a license to explore for oil in 2023, Petrobras recently passed a key environmental test by the Ibama environmental agency, despite serious concerns from regulators about wildlife protection in the event of an oil spill.

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Petrobras said in a statement it expects to receive a drilling license soon.

The Foz do Amazonas is part of a promising new offshore oil frontier, with nearby Guyana emerging as a major oil producer in less than a decade following large discoveries.

Petrobras says its models show that an oil spill at the offshore site “would not be likely to reach the coast” and would have “no direct impact” on Indigenous communities.

“There is no such thing as sustainable oil, period,” said Suely Araujo, a former president of Ibama and coordinator of the Climate Observatory NGO.

“We’re in the midst of a climate crisis, with a slew of extreme events, and the option to continue indefinitely increasing oil production is a historical mistake.”

Exporting the Problem

Even if Petrobras strikes oil, the new block could take a decade to enter production.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global oil demand will begin to decline after 2030, making continued drilling economically risky, Araujo said.

She added that Brazil’s existing oil wealth has not solved social problems.

The Federal Court of Auditors (TCU) this year flagged “severe dysfunctions” in the distribution of oil royalties, which multiplied by 40 between 2000 and 2022. It found that 87 percent of royalties went to only three states, under outdated rules drawn up long before Brazil became a major oil producer.

Brazil remains one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases — though with a unique profile, as it meets most of its energy needs through renewables.

According to Felipe Barcellos e Silva, a researcher at the Institute for Energy and the Environment, about 50 percent of Brazil’s emissions come from deforestation and another 25 percent from agriculture.

Brazil exports more than half of its oil, so the emissions from burning it do not count toward its own greenhouse gas totals — “but they will still be released globally,” he said.

Shigueo Watanabe Jr., a researcher at ClimaInfo, calculated that burning the estimated reserves from Block 59 alone would emit 2.5 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent — more than an entire year of Brazil’s current emissions.

“It’s incoherent to talk about a transition linked to destruction,” said environmentalist and Indigenous rights advocate Neidinha Surui, who has spent decades protecting native lands.

“What the president is doing is contributing to pressure on the climate and the destruction of the planet. I hope he changes his attitude and sets more realistic goals for protecting nature,” she told AFP.