Citing the global increase of heatwaves, mega-fires, floods and mass climate-driven displacement, a group of 250 scientists this week asked Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to champion “a fast, fair, effective, and full phaseout of fossil fuels” in the lead-up to the COP30 climate talks later this year in Brazil.
“As we rapidly approach the 10-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement, history will remember this moment when leaders will either decide to do what is scientifically and morally right or if they will keep the status quo,” the scientists wrote in the June 18 public letter to Lula. “The time for courageous leadership, backed by science, is now.”
In the Amazon region where new drilling is proposed under what the Brazilian government called an emergency plan, Indigenous people have said they weren’t adequately consulted, and Brazilian and international climate advocacy groups have criticized his government for its continued support for fossil fuel development projects in the environmentally sensitive area, especially in advance of COP30 in Belém in November. Lula has said his country needs to develop its fossil fuel resources to pay for the energy transition.
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The letter was delivered to Brazilian Ambassador André Aranha Corrêa do Lago at the United Nations climate conference taking place in Bonn, Germany, through June 26.
“I took the letter to the head of the Brazilian delegation, who’s in charge of COP30, Ambassador Andre,” said Australian climate scientist Bill Hare, who also heads Climate Analytics, a global nonprofit climate science and policy institute.
“He received it, well,” Hare said. “I asked him to try and make sure that he got to President Lula, and he said he would do his best. I told him some of the signatories are from Brazil, and he said he knows many of them personally and appreciates their deep concerns.”
Hare said that, given a “complicated political situation” in Brazil, it’s hard to know if Lula might reverse the approval for the offshore drilling projects, which could result in billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions if fully developed.
“It really does come down to the will of the president of Brazil,” he said. “The bigger picture is, the scientific community has shown that we don’t lack the technology, we don’t lack the available investment capital or finance. What we do lack is the political will to change direction.”
The authors of the letter noted that the 10 years since the Paris Agreement have been Earth’s hottest on record. And 2024 was the first time the global annual average temperature exceeded the most ambitious target of the climate pact of limiting human-caused warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 Celsius) above the pre-industrial average.
The scientists’ letter to Lula noted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 2021 report that “existing fossil fuel extraction plans alone” would drive heating past the temperature goal of the Paris deal.
“The only Paris-aligned pathways require deep, immediate, and sustained cuts in fossil fuel use, with energy systems powered predominantly by renewables,” they wrote. “Delay is no longer an option.”
The IPCC report, synthesizing findings from hundreds of peer-reviewed climate studies, found that global emissions must fall by 48 percent by 2030 to reach the goal, but emissions have increased every year since the report was issued.
Dangerous Tipping Points Grow Near
Hare said leading Amazonian scientists and physicists initiated the letter because they were deeply concerned about the rising level of risks to the Amazon.
“There’s a risk that the Amazon is approaching a tipping point that would lead to its transformation, over time, into a savanna,” he said. Recent wildfires, heat and drought in the Amazon have “set off alarm bells in the scientific community that unless we begin to phase out fossil fuel emissions, the tipping of the Amazon and other systems will become inevitable.”
He said the loss of the Amazon would be a humanitarian catastrophe and part of the motivation of the letter “is to call on President Lula to not go ahead with expanded licenses for gas and oil in the Amazon and offshore of Brazil.”
More fossil fuel development could lead to the “tipping point of this amazing rainforest, which has stood, as far as we can tell, for the last 65 million years, through all the changes that have happened,” he said. “But it could be coming to an end in the next 50 if urgent action is not taken.”
Paulo Artaxo, a professor of environmental physics at the University of São Paulo and a co-leader of the letter, with climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London, said he’s not hopeful the letter will have much of an effect on Brazil’s policy, but that scientists need to keep putting the scientific facts in front of political decision-makers.
“There are no signals that the oil drilling in the Amazon delta will be reversed,” he said. “One of the main issues is that stopping exploration of fossil fuel needs to be a global strategy.” But global climate planning is increasingly threatened by the current decay of multilateralism, he added.
“Our two main tasks are to eliminate fossil fuel exploration and use, and deforestation, especially in the Amazon region,” he said. The gist of the letter to Lula is that, “basically, if we want to avoid a global heating of three degrees Celsius, we have to immediately stop fossil fuel exploration and use in all economic sectors, that is the main message.”
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Bob Berwyn an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
