Itaborai: Can oil, the climate villain, be used to pay for its own demise?

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva thinks so. He is pushing for more oil exploration, including offshore from the Amazon rainforest, while casting himself as a global leader on climate change.

"The world is not yet ready to live without oil," Lula, the host of this year's COP30 UN climate conference, told a local podcast.

"I am against fossil fuels whenever we can do without them. But until we can, we need to use them. Oil money will help us develop biofuels, ethanol, green hydrogen, and other initiatives," he said during an event earlier this year.

Brazil is the eighth biggest oil producer and Lula wants state energy giant Petrobras to be the "largest oil company in the world."

At the same time, he urges world leaders to step up in the fight against the climate crisis and he has pledged zero deforestation by 2030.

Critics say Lula's position is contradictory; others see it as pragmatic.

"It's becoming increasingly clear that developing countries won't be able to count on rich nations to finance their climate agenda," said Jorge Arbache, an economics professor at the University of Brasilia.

It's much harder to force a country like Brazil not to extract oil than it is to tell a rich-oil producing nation like Norway the same thing, according to him.

He said the question should be how to use this oil, "and within what environmental parameters.

Off the coast of the Amazon in northern Brazil, the world's mightiest river crashes into the ocean, sending a muddy brown plume of freshwater hundreds of kilometers into the blue-gray Atlantic -- a striking color contrast visible from space.

Plans for oil exploration in the biodiverse Foz do Amazonas basin have become a symbol of Lula's environmental contradictions.

After being denied a license to explore for oil in 2023, Petrobras recently passed a key environmental test by the Ibama environmental agency -- despite serious concerns noted by the regulator over plans to protect wildlife in the case of an oil spill.

Petrobras said in a statement that it expected to receive a drilling license soon.

Black Gold, Green Promises: Brazil's Climate Paradox