THEIR IDEA OF ‘SUSTAINABLE CAPITALISM’ IS TO SELL OFF THE RAINFOREST AND BUILD MEGA-PROJECTS ~ Rafael Sanz, desinformemonos ~ COP 30 has begun in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará and the main city in the Brazilian Amazon, a territory roughly the size of two Mexicos. The only reason it isn’t burning as it did in 2024 is that this is a La Niña year, meaning slightly more abundant rainfall in 2025. It will be the thirtieth time that lobbyists and representatives of governments and corporations from around the world gather to discuss fictions and unrealistic adjustments, green reforms for capitalism, and innocuous decarbonisation targets that they themselves routinely fail to meet, all while temperatures rise in the oceans, forests, and territories inhabited by humans. And in 2025, the various global climate representatives arrive in a rather complicated Brazil. The first scene from this Brazil is the recent Penha-Alemã massacre in Rio de Janeiro, where at least 128 bodies were executed by the state in the open air and piled up in a public square. The bodies had barely cooled when the media were already repeating the chorus from the state government itself (responsible for the “operation”) that all the dead were members of the Comando Vermelho criminal faction. Whether they were or not remains unknown. What is known is that the police’s main targets, the drug kingpins, were neither victims nor arrested, the city was paralysed for days, and the affected communities were collectively punished for the presence of criminal groups there, both legal (128 corpses) and illegal. But this approach to security is a constant throughout the country. In Rio, everything has been tried, from community policing models (Pacifying Police Units, UPPs) that have proven to be just as violent and prone to abuse as the regular police, to the infamous GLOs (Law and Order Guarantee Operations), in which the federal government authorises the use of the Armed Forces to assist the state police with public safety. In 2017, for example, General Walter Braga Netto led the GLO that promoted a military occupation of some Rio favelas, including Complexo do Alemão. A candidate for Bolsonaro’s vice presidency in 2022, he is now convicted of attempting a coup. And so the model arrived in the Amazon thanks to COP 30. Last Monday (3 November), President Lula signed a GLO for the capital of Pará at the request of Governor Helder Barbalho. On Tuesday morning, the military began arriving en masse with their land, water, and air vehicles. Social movements fear the repression that such security measures could generate, especially at COP 30, where Brazil is attempting to greenwash its recent environmental decisions. And by “recent” we don’t mean the tragedy we experienced under Bolsonaro’s government, prior to Lula’s current third term, in which our biomes burned like never before due to the deliberate federal promotion of expanding agribusiness and mining frontiers. Given the previous disaster, the change in administration brought with it the mistaken idea that the Brazilian state would be an ally of the rest of humanity in the fight against the socio-environmental collapse we witness daily. It is not. Throughout this administration, contrary to campaign promises to demarcate Indigenous and Quilombola territories and close the gap with extractive sectors (agribusiness, mining, hydroelectric projects, and highways), we have seen the opposite. Delays and bureaucratic obstacles have hindered the protection of already demarcated Indigenous lands and the demarcation of new territories. The encroachment of agribusiness into natural areas, culminating in the Day of Fire in 2024, not to mention the frenzy to build highways, railways, and hydroelectric plants that will primarily serve to distribute the predatory agribusiness’s production and facilitate the mass arrival of foreign data centers, with their high energy consumption and low-quality jobs for the working class. On the eve of COP 30, the energy transition model we are going to present to the world is based on the premise of treating hydroelectric power as “clean energy,” in contrast to thermoelectric and nuclear power plants abroad. But they fail to include deforestation in the equation, which is the main cause of carbon emissions here. Belo Monte, a hydroelectric dam built in Altamira (a municipality in Pará affected by the recent GLO), destroyed the once-lush Xingu River, turning it into a lake, but that’s not all. It also facilitated the arrival of a development model that doesn’t consider preserving the rainforest. The entire region has suffered deforestation and successive fires ever since. The model under which hydroelectric plants are built requires the construction of roads and railways that cut through the forest. These roads are necessary to transport all the grain, timber, minerals, and electricity produced in the most remote corners of Brazil. This infrastructure will also serve the small towns that are beginning to grow as a result of this model, which places greater demands on the previously preserved local environment. Two current examples in the transportation sector illustrate this model: Ferrogrão and the reconstruction of the BR-319 highway . Ferrogrão is a planned 933 km railway, starting in Sinop (in the state of Mato Grosso, a central area for soybean and corn production in Brazil’s Midwest region) and reaching the port of Miritituba. From there, the transported produce would travel down the Amazon River to the Caribbean Sea, then be shipped to California and China. This multi-billion dollar project offers no social or ecological benefits to Brazil beyond satisfying the immediate interests of agribusiness. On the contrary, it will cut through conservation areas like Jamanxim National Park and affect hundreds of Indigenous and peasant communities. But there are two aggravating factors: first, the mere mention by the federal government of building the railway has already stirred up the region’s land market, which operates in a gray area between legality and illegality, between speculation and displacement; The second aggravating factor is that the transport of agro-industrial production to China and California would be carried out through the Panama Canal, whose capacity for use is already compromised due to the climate crisis. And every time a railway or road is built in a previously untouched or relatively undisturbed natural area, what is known as the “fishbone effect” occurs—precisely a consequence of the booming grey market for land. Observe a wooded area from above, as if from a satellite or drone. The main road is opened, the backbone of the “fish.” Gradually, with the land market in full swing (literally burning everything down), secondary roads are opened to provide access to the newly occupied areas. And so we see how the landscape transforms into something resembling a fishbone. This is the main concern of serious environmentalists and the communities living in the region where the BR-319 highway, which would connect Manaus (capital of Amazonas) and Porto Velho (capital of Rondônia), is slated for reconstruction. The problem is that this area, following a herringbone pattern, would extend the arc of deforestation all the way to Manaus and open the way to still-preserved areas of the western and northern Brazilian Amazon. This would cause the collapse of Brazil’s most resilient Amazonian ecosystems. Brazilians would be the first to feel the effects, with their rainfall system completely destroyed. But the world would also see a slight increase in temperature, exacerbating the global climate crisis. Another problem with the charade of the ecological transition is that it doesn’t address the quilombos (settlements of escaped slaves), indigenous lands, and conservation areas, instead focusing on parcelling out forests and promising their preservation through privatisation and maintaining the same logic of private property that has brought us to this point in history. Let’s remember that before capitalism, human societies were never a threat to life on the planet, only to themselves. The illusion surrounding the utopia of reforming capitalism is completed with the final touch to this cake of ashes and fire: weeks before the start of COP 30, Ibama (the Brazilian Institute of the Environment, a federal agency) authorised Petrobras (the state-owned oil company) to investigate the feasibility of oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River. This is simply a highly turbulent oceanic zone, where a single spill could affect several neighbouring countries. An authorisation to investigate that will undoubtedly become an authorisation to exploit, given the direction of the political debate. But they want to sell us the idea that we are going to drill in a very complex area from an environmental impact standpoint, extract rivers of oil, and burn it so that, who knows, one day we can finally abandon fossil fuels. Perhaps when we are all dead. And while we watch year after year the “climate representatives” celebrating their parties and discussing their fictions, temperatures continue to rise, forests continue to fall, and people continue to live and die in increasingly worse conditions. It is impossible to debate the climate issue without including capital and the state in the equation as a problem rather than a solution. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Indigenous people from various regions protest during the free land camp in Brasilia, 4 October. Joédson Alves/Agência Brasil The post COP30 farce in Lula’s Brazil appeared first on Freedom News.

UNDER MOROCCAN OCCUPATION, RENEWABLES PROJECTS ARE BEING USED TO REINFORCE DOMINANCE ~ Tommaso Marconi ~ While renewable energy is seen as part of the solution to many environmental issues we are facing, it is also used as a pretext by capitalist lobbies and occupying states to overcome territorial sovereignty and implement privatisation. The case of Western Sahara is clear: two-thirds of the territory has been occupied by the Moroccan army since 1975, and now Morocco’s main tool to continue the occupation has become the green transition. The invasion of the former Spanish colonial territories started in November 1975. The Moroccan army used napalm and a devastating amount of violence to gain those territories and forced thousands of Saharawi to flee and become refugees in Algeria and then Europe. In February 1976 the Saharawi liberation movement Frente Polisario declared an independent Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic.  (SADR); in the same month the King of Morocco signed a treaty with Spain and Mauritania where they divided the territory. When Mauritania retreated its army, Morocco entered the zone and occupied it to control the coast until Guerguerat, just north of the Mauritanian border.  In the 1980s, the Moroccan army started building a huge sand wall (the Berm) to stabilise the frontline with the area in which Frente Polisario was active. Today, that wall is the longest in the world, measuring over 2,700 km and surrounded by mined zones. To meet the enormous cost of maintaining and defending the wall, the Kingdom of Morocco exploits and exports Saharawi resources — fish and phosphates. CORRUPTION Various rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have resulted in difficulties for European corporations to enter the trade in Saharawi resources. A treaty on free trade of fish and sand with European corporations was ruled illegal by the European Court in 2015; for the UK that meant the total exit of British enterprises from Western Sahara until 2021. In response, Morocco has resorted to more aggressive diplomacy in Europe and other international spaces.   In November 2022 a huge scandal was disclosed in the European parliament: the Qatargate (also known as Moroccogate). It was proven that Moroccan agents had been corrupting Members of European Parliament (MEP) using an Italian politician, Antonio Panzeri, as a middleman. Some results that Morocco gained from this strategy were: the denial of the Sakharov human rights prize to two Saharawi activists; the passing of resolutions against Algeria, which has been favouring Polisario and hosting Saharawi refugees; the modification of a European report about violence and human rights to erase the Moroccan cases; and an attempt to reverse the rulings against a fishing treaty, which banned EU companies from fishing off the Laayoune shores.  The Abraham Accords signed in 2020 between the USA, Israel, Bahrain, the UAE and Morocco, included complicit recognition of the occupations of Palestine by Israel and Western Sahara by Morocco. Israel has since increased its trade with Morocco, including new drones Morocco has used in the war against Frente Polisario. Crops at Growing Hope cooperative farm in Laayoune refugee camp. Photo: Darya Rustamova The Moroccan army and its colonial administration of Western Sahara’s occupied territories are actively hiding information and data about the exploitation of natural resources. The Western Sahara Resources Watch monitors the exploitation and produces detailed reports on it, but we do not actually know the size of resources that are being extracted and seized by Morocco and sold off in the global market. The biggest phosphate mine in Western Sahara is the Phosboucraa, but Moroccan institutions do not publish the amount of phosphate extracted there. Instead, they greatly publicise the renewable energy used for extracting and processing the phosphates. The Kingdom’s priority in its green transition is to provide stable energy to its biggest asset, the phosphate mining industry. Thus, the mine receives 90% of the electricity consumption from solar and wind power plants.   RENEWABLE ENERGY Since 2017, the Moroccan Kingdom has rapidly been investing in the green energy sector, after realising that it lacks fossil fuel reserves, and it needs more energy. At international meetings of states who are parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it craftily depicted itself as the most proactive country in renewables in Africa: Marrakech hosted two such meetings, lately in 2017. Since then, renewable energy projects have multiplied, and many more renewable energy power plants have been built. Morocco exploits land, air and sea in Western Sahara despite having no sovereignty over it. Western Sahara is connected to the Moroccan grid via the capital Laayoune. A new 400kV power connection is planned between Laayoune and Dakhla, and to Mauritania.  Through this power-line, Morocco plans to export renewable energy to West Africa. Exports to the EU will occur via existing and planned submarine connections with Spain, Portugal and with the UK. The UK project would see a 3.6GW submarine high-voltage direct current interconnector between the UK and the Occupied Territories, which would generate energy to meet 6% of the UK’s demand. All these plans are particularly focused on cutting the energy trade of Morocco’s first competitor and geopolitical enemy in the Mediterranean region, Algeria. Morocco’s strategy underlines the place of energy in realising the Kingdom’s diplomatic efforts in securing support for its occupation in traditionally pro-Saharawi independence, pro-Polisario, sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria). The final purpose of this strategy is to strengthen economic relations with African countries in return for recognition of its illegal occupation.  The implications for the Saharawi right to self-determination are huge. These planned energy exports would make the European and West African energy markets partially dependent on energy generated in occupied Western Sahara. The Saharawi people are 500,000: around 30-40,000 live under the Moroccan military occupation and the rest live in the Tindouf refugee camp (the capital of the exiled SADR) in Algeria and some dozen thousands are refugees in Europe. One form of oppression by the Moroccan army against the Saharawi remaining in the Occupied Territories, is by threatening to cut off the electricity in the neighbourhood of Laayoune where most Saharawi live, to make it impossible for them to record violence against the community.  Morocco is quite successful in attracting international cooperation projects in the field of renewable energy. The EU sees the country as a supposedly reliable partner in North Africa, not least because of its alleged role in the fight against international terrorism and in insulating the EU from migratory movements. Demonstration at the Berm wall, 2014. Photo: Darya Rustamova There are hundreds of foreign businesses involved in the exploitation of occupied Western Sahara’s natural resources. One of the most active is Siemens Gamesa, because it is involved in all wind power fields in occupied Western Sahara. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (Siemens Gamesa) is the result of a merger, in 2017, of the Spanish Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica and Grupo Auxiliar Metalúrgico, inc. in 1976, and the German Siemens Wind Power, their “green” division. The renewable energy company develops, produces, installs and maintains onshore and offshore wind turbines in more than 90 countries; but the most critical is its participation in 5 wind farms in the Occupied Territories, one of which provides 99% of the energy required to operate the phosphate extraction and export mine of Phosboucraa.  The European Union continues to promote the sector and create alliances with Siemens Gamesa regardless of being aware that the company operates in occupied territory and therefore violating international law. According to the position of the German government, as well as that of the European Union and the United Nations, the situation in occupied Western Sahara is not resolved. Siemens Gamesa’s actions in the occupied territory, like those of other companies, contribute to the consolidation of the Moroccan occupation of the territory. Business activity in the occupied Saharawi territory has been addressed by multiple UN resolutions on the right to self-determination of occupied Western Sahara and the right of its citizens to dispose of its resources.  On the ground, it is almost exclusively an outside elite that benefits from the projects: the operator of the energy parks in Western Sahara and direct business partner of Siemens Energy and ENEL is the company Nareva (owned by the king). The Saharawi themselves have no access to projects on their legitimate territory, especially those living in refugee camps in Algeria since they fled the Moroccan invasion. Instead, Saharawi who continue to live under occupation in Western Sahara face massive human rights violations by the occupying power.  Saharawi living in the occupied territory are aware that energy infrastructure—its ownership, its management, its reach, the terms of its access, the political and diplomatic work it does—mediates the power of the Moroccan occupation and its corporate partners. The Moroccan occupation enters, and shapes the possibilities of, daily life in the Saharawi home through (the lack of) electricity cables. Saharawi understand power cuts as a method through which the occupying regime punishes them as a community, fosters ignorance of Moroccan military manoeuvres, combats celebrations of Saharawi national identity, enforces a media blockade so that news from Western Sahara does not reach “the outside world” and creates regular dangers in their family home. They also acknowledge that renewables are not the problem per se but are a tool for the colonialist kingdom to advance the colonisation in a new form and with news legitimisations from foreign countries. The new projects are being built so fast that the local opposition to them is ineffective. The Saharawi decolonial struggle is deeper, the final goal is liberation and self-determination; they acknowledge that the renewable power plants will be good when managed for the goodwill of the Saharawi in a free SADR. As a fisherman from Laayoune said in an interview about the offshore windmills: “They do not represent anything but a scene of the wind of your land being illegally exploited by the invaders with no benefits for the people”.  People interviewed: Khaled, activist of Juventud Activa Saharaui, El Machi, Saharawi activist, Ahmedna, activist of Juventud Activa Saharaui, former member of Red Ecosocial Saharaui, Youssef, local Saharawi from Laayoune, Ayoub, youth activist from Laayoune injured by police, Khattab, Saharawi journalist (interviewed with Ayoub), Asria Mohamed, Saharawi podcaster based in Sweden. The post Green colonialism in Western Sahara appeared first on Freedom News.