A Message from Hazel Healy
The United Nations COP30 climate summit ended on Saturday, Nov. 22, with a watered-down deal, in the face of intransigent petro-states and amid intense industry lobbying from the fossil fuel and agribusiness sectors.
DeSmog was on the ground in Belém, Brazil, producing reporting and impact you won’t find anywhere else — all on a shoestring budget. With the world on fire (and at one time, literally the venue at the climate talks), we gave everything we could to the effort.
Can you pitch in to help cover our costs?
Here are a few highlights of our COP30 impact:
Activists with Kick Big Polluters Out staged an action inside the conference center to condemn the presence of more than 300 lobbyists for food and ag majors at the climate talks — as revealed by DeSmog.
Clima Ácido, an influencer crew, worked with us on a video about the food and ag sector’s use of other Instagram influencers to sway public opinion ...
... reporting that Observatorio do Clima, a network of Brazilian environmental groups, featured on billboards in Belém, the Amazonian city hosting COP30.
Please chip in anything you can right now.
Just a few more highlights of our food and ag reporting:
We revealed how JBS, Cargill and other multinationals spent months ahead of COP30 hiring trusted doctors, models and other influencers to carry industry’s preferred health and environmental messages to their hundreds of millions of Instagram followers.
We unpacked eight vaguely green and upbeat phrases — from “bioeconomy” to “regenerative agriculture” — that agribusinesses like to tout, reporting co-published in Portuguese through a collaboration with Outras Palavras.
We mapped the more than 140 routes that industrial food and farming companies and trade groups took to influencing COP30’s discussions.
Check out all 21 stories covering corporate polluters and their ad and public relations enablers, most reported by our small-but-mighty team of three journalists on the ground in Belém (that's us in the photo!), with backing from colleagues around the world.
Please support DeSmog today with a one-time gift or a monthly contribution — big or small, every buck helps us continue shining light on the forces striving to cloud climate science, undercut laws and treaties, and delay climate action.
Thank you for your support of DeSmog,
Hazel Healy
DeSmog UK editor-in-chief
P.S. Please don’t wait. Give what you can today!
