The ecological collapse caused by capitalism cannot be solved with more capitalism.
Marcus Kollbrunner, Liberdade, Socialismo e Revolução (ISA in Brazil)
(This article was first published on 17 November 2025 in Portuguese)
“Our nature is not a commodity” was one of the slogans heard at the large “Global Climate March” that brought together 70,000 participants in Belém, Brazil, on Saturday 15 November. The demonstration saw a large turnout from indigenous peoples in the Amazon region, who are fighting against deforestation, mining that poisons the water, fossil fuel extraction, the privatisation of rivers and large construction projects that threaten their lives, territories and the climate.
The march was organised by the “People’s Summit”, which took place from 12 to 16 November, parallel to the official UN Climate Change Conference COP30, and brought together 25,000 participants from over 1,000 organisations from 65 countries.
For the first time since 2021, the UN Climate Change Conference is being held in a country where protests are allowed, and there is strong criticism that negotiations are being conducted over the heads of indigenous peoples.
“COP is a negotiation, and what they are negotiating is our territories. You can’t talk about the climate without listening to us”, said Auricélia Arapiun, an indigenous leader from Tapajós, at a protest on 12 November, when demonstrators entered COP30’s Blue Zone. On 14 November, the entrance to the summit was temporarily blocked by the Munduruku indigenous people.
The protests were directed at various projects by Lula’s government that threaten the Amazon region. The government recently issued a decree threatening to privatize access to three rivers in the Amazon for use as waterways for transporting goods. In addition, new railways are being built through the rainforest to transport soy, corn and other goods for export. The government has also been pressuring environmental authorities to grant permits for test drilling for oil in the sea off the mouth of the Amazon River, where it hopes to find new large oil deposits. Those permits were granted recently. All these projects show how hypocritical all the talk about protecting the environment at the official COP meeting is.
As it says in the final statement from the People’s Summit: “Environmental crimes and extreme weather events that cause death and destruction are becoming increasingly common. This demonstrates the failure of countless global conferences and meetings that promised to solve these problems but never addressed their structural causes.”
No capitalist solutions
According to the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition, 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have registered to participate in COP30, the highest number to date. And they are being heard.
While Brazilian President Lula talks about the need to develop a “roadmap” for phasing out the use of fossil fuels, new oil fields are being sought for drilling. Norway, which prides itself on being a major financier of environmental projects, is expanding oil production in the Arctic.
“Humanity has missed the 1.5-degree target,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently. “Even if countries live up to their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and that’s a big ‘if’ – the world will warm by 2.3°C to 2.5°C by the end of the century”, writes the UN Environment Programme. The fact is that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
The tone from governments and the establishment has also changed. Although most governments have not embraced Trump’s climate denial outright and still pay lip service to the need to combat climate change, the emphasis is more on adapting to climate change than on preventing it. A clear example of this is billionaire Bill Gates, who has written an essay arguing that it is too expensive to stop climate change and that we should instead invest in cheap programmes such as vaccinating children. As if the problem were a lack of resources, at a time when trillions are being spent on weapons and data centres, which contribute to environmental destruction.
At the same time, governments are trying to find false “solutions” that will appeal to the “market”. Lula is now trying to gain support for the launch of an investment fund to save the rainforests, the “Tropical Forest Forever Facility” (TFFF), a proposal that originally came from the World Bank. The proposal is for governments and private investors to invest $125 billion into a fund with an estimated return of 7%, with 4% going to investors and the rest going to pay $4 per hectare of protected forest. The indigenous peoples gave the right answer in their protests: ‘stop treating our forests as commodities’.
An appeal from more than 170 environmental organisations and social movements entitled ‘NO to TFFF, YES to forest rights’ rightly stated: “TFFF incorrectly and misleadingly views deforestation as a market failure that can be solved by putting a price on tropical forest ecosystem services to attract private investment. The ecological collapse caused by capitalism cannot be solved with more capitalism.”
Climate protests have been at a lower level since their peak in 2019, but the protests in Belém show that there is potential to resume the struggle and link it with other burning issues in a fight against the root cause of all these problems, the capitalist system.
The People’s Summit statement contains important contributions in this direction. It states that “The capitalist mode of production is the main cause of the growing climate crisis” and highlights the need to “counter false market solutions. Air, forests, water, land, minerals and energy sources must not remain private property or be appropriated, as they are common assets belonging to all peoples.” The statement also highlights the struggle against all forms of oppression, for trade union rights and against imperialism and war.
We need an environmental movement that is independent of governments that are trying to sell us the illusion of ‘green capitalism’. For this, it is necessary to fight for a socialist alternative, where large corporations, banks and wealth are taken over by workers around the world and used through democratic planning to satisfy real social needs and restore the environment, not to generate profits for a small elite.
