The global community is ramping up to gather in Belém for COP30—the 30th climate summit since the UNFCCC was formed. The shift in venues from COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last November—ecologically desertified and oil-stained birthplace of the Anthropocene—to the edge of the last remaining great rainforest frontier could be a metaphor, or just another invasion beachhead.

Throughout July, the Parque da Cidade was open to the public and welcomed over 500,000 visitors. It has now been officially handed over to the UN and installation of the temporary structures for the COP30 Blue Zone and Green Zone is busy across 160,000 square meters, with more than 100 pavilions rising from the grass and pavement. vimeo.com/1109671391?mc…

COP29-Baku brought together nearly 200 countries to negotiate last November. The product was a Baku-Belém Roadmap to raise $1.3 trillion per year in climate finance by 2035. That sounds great, albeit meager, on paper, but one should recall the squelching by the Obama Administration of a long-negotiated climate enforcement mechanism at COP19-Copenhagen in 2009, when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton parachuted into the talks at the last-minute, promising $100 billion per year in climate finance if countries would just stop demanding fossil phaseout. We are still waiting to see that money. It looks like the wallet-on-the-string trick.

At Baku, progress stalled on several key issues, but especially the transition away from fossil fuels. That was one of the more acrimonious. The final agreement was a win for major producer nations, including the Azerbaijan host and chair.

With the World Court’s new decision coming out firmly and forcefully for rapid phaseout under penalty of economic sanctions, negotiators will be staring down the barrel of far larger financial consequences than having to pony up $1.3 trillion per year. They will need to halt plans to drill and deforest the Amazon, among other things. cooldesign.substack.com…

Picking a city park in Belém to host delegations and support teams of up to 50,000 people has created no small challenge. The Pará region is a poster child for chainsaws and bulldozers, uprooted indigenous villages, rivers poisoned by illegal mining, wildfires, floods and mudslides.

The city suffers from poor sanitation—only about 60% of residents have access to treated sewage, making it one of Brazil’s worst cities for basic services. Many neighborhoods lack sewage, clean water, and adequate infrastructure, having begun as squats of displaced peoples from the forest. Euphemistically, they call it a “housing deficit” (around 84,000 homes short of a roof over the head), because the previous euphemism, “informal settlements,” didn’t really conceal life in the crime-ridden favelas.

Shuttling motorcades around the city is being facilitated by cutting new roads through the forest. The UN has also chartered cruise ships to counter the skyrocketing price of minimal accommodations, but keeping those ships docked for three weeks creates a different problem.

Each cruise ship can generate up to 30,000 gallons of sewage (“black water”) per day, alongside hundreds of thousands of gallons of “gray water” from sinks, showers, and laundries. Normally, cruise ships sail out and dump into the open ocean youtube.com/watch?v=9vx…—artificial whale fertilization if you will, but with microplastics, heavy metals, bacteria and viruses, pharmaceuticals and antibiotics thrown in. This time, the sludge will have nowhere to go but the relatively shallow and poorly flushed Amazon estuary, already struggling with inadequate municipal sewage treatment.

Belém, considered a gateway to the Amazon River, is relatively close to the northern tip of the ecosystem known as the “Great Amazon Reef.” It is a scientifically important mesophotic (mid-depth) coral reef system, but it lies directly athwart the river’s plume, in the path of the COPshit tsunami of 2025.

Good on ya, UNFCCC.

This week’s essay is here: cooldesign.substack.com…