Andreas Sieber is the associate director of global policy and campaigns at 350.org. Stela Herschmann is Climate Policy Specialist at Observatório do Clima, a network of 130 Brazilian organisations.

Four work pillars. Sixteen possible negotiated outcomes. Three advisory “circles”. One “ethical stocktake”. Councils, roadmaps. There are so many shiny objects garnishing the agenda of COP30 that it’s easy to overlook one key absence: the preparations for the Belém climate change conference are simply not addressing the main cause of our current climate disruption. 

Fossil fuels, the source of 75% of greenhouse gases, are nowhere to be seen in the negotiations. That must change if Brazil is really willing to make its mutirão – the term it is using to launch a global mobilisation – a turning point in the fight for a livable planet. 

At COP28 in Dubai – hosted by a petrostate under the helm of an oil executive – the Global Stocktake (GST) delivered a breakthrough: a clear call to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in an orderly, just and equitable manner”, with urgent action this decade. That this emerged despite, not because of, the host’s interests only underscores its significance.

The Global Stocktake may be dressed in the usual diplomatic language, but its message is unmistakable. It has set a new gold standard for climate action: putting the fossil fuel phaseout at the centre of the global response to the climate crisis.  

A few weeks after the landmark Dubai decision, however, some countries started voicing what a top diplomat has called “buyer’s remorse”. At the G20 summit in Brazil last year, some countries led a rebellion against the GST, and managed to prevent the leaders’ declaration from doing as much as reaffirm the commitment from paragraph 28d. 

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At COP29, in Baku, the bloody fight for finance, with rich countries’ intransigence denying many others the possibility of implementing the transition, meant that no progress was made on the crucial energy issue.  

Some countries argue that the Global Stocktake is not a buffet where countries pick and choose what to implement; all of its provisions must be followed up, including those on finance, which are anathema to developed nations. 

Furthermore, they say, the phaseout of fossil fuels outlined in Dubai must be delivered in each country’s climate plan, or NDC. The GST is but a guideline to better NDCs, and now it is up to each country to implement those guidelines as they see fit. 

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Meanwhile, in the real world, a fossil frenzy is going on with no end in sight. Rich oil-producing nations such as Norway, Canada and Australia, are expanding their production like there’s no tomorrow (and at the current pace, there really won’t be). 

Major developing economies like Brazil and the United Arab Emirates are using the Global North expansion as an excuse to “drill, baby, drill” themselves, each one betting on being the last seller of oil, all gambling with the future of humankind. 

Not to say anything, of course, of the world’s top oil producer, the United States, which has become a rogue state under climate-change denier Donald Trump. To countries profiteering from the post-Ukraine invasion fossil orgy, that Saturday morning in 2023 when the gavel came down in Dubai is a hazy memory indeed. 

Which brings us to COP30 and its host country. 

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Brazil is the only major emitter so far to go beyond merely reaffirming the GST language in its NDC. There, it said it would “welcome the launching of international work for the definition of schedules for transitioning away from fossil fuels”. 

That sentence captures one crucial thing about the Dubai energy decision that is lost to GST haters: it is not self-impl