‘Love motels’ and Amazon oil drilling are just a few of the ways this global gathering is mired in chaos

By Laura Paddison, CNN

(CNN) — Ricardo Teixeira has spent the past few weeks freshening up Love Lomas, the “love motel” he owns in the Brazilian port city of Belém. He’s also mulling how to tone down some of the rooms’ more sensual aspects, including erotic chairs and menus of sex toys for sale. It’s all in anticipation of welcoming a very different type of guest than his usual clientele.

Love motels are common throughout Brazil, with rooms available by the hour often booked for romantic trysts. But as tens of thousands of people descend on Belém for COP30 — the world’s biggest annual climate summit — a dearth of accommodation has led to a scramble for beds. Love motels like Teixeira’s are ready and willing to fill the gap.

The prospect of diplomats, scientists and climate activists being asked to specify which erotic features they’d like removed from rooms is striking, but it also speaks to a serious issue. As delegates compete for beds, rates have spiked and some developing countries and non-profits say they are being priced out of the summit.

“Their voices (will be) silenced in the very rooms where decisions about their survival are being made,” said Harjeet Singh, a COP negotiations veteran and founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation.

Accommodation woes are just one example of the chaos and uncertainty some experts say have paved the way to this summit.

COP30 was billed as a landmark gathering, where countries would chart a course to dramatically cut climate pollution. Instead, huge polluters have missed multiple deadlines to submit national climate goals, President Donald Trump is fresh from a speech calling climate change a “con job,” the US says it will not send a delegation to the summit, and Brazil has just approved oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon — all the while, global temperatures tick upward and climate targets slip out of reach.

In 2015, under the Paris climate agreement, countries agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with the ambition to keep it below 1.5 degrees. “Ten years later, we need to have very honest and very tough conversations on whether we’re actually following that roadmap,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change.

Brazil’s choice of Belém as the COP30 location was symbolic. The city is known as the “gateway to the Amazon,” and the aim was to focus minds on the existential danger this vast rainforest faces from the barreling climate crisis.

But Belém was not set up for the influx that accompanies COP. The city typically has around 18,000 hotel rooms but is expecting roughly 50,000 people.

The official COP30 website lists hotels, many of which are dozens of miles outside Belém, for prices ranging from about $200 a night to more than $1,000, most requiring minimum stays of 11 nights. One head of a negotiating delegation told CNN they were being charged more than $20,000 for two weeks in a three-bedroom apartment.

Organizers insist there will be rooms for all and have scrambled to arrange extra accommodation, including on cruise ships, and are offering extra assistance to the most vulnerable nations.

But some countries and non-profits have been forced to send skeleton teams, or no one at all. “Our fear is that these logistical barriers might prevent the full participation of everybody that needs to be there,” Monterrey Gómez told CNN.

As well as logistics, the “Amazon COP” is also being overshadowed by Brazil’s decision in October to greenlight exploratory oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River. Activists have decried the decision as hypocrisy. “Brazil is asking the world to come to Belém to save the most critical ecosystem, while at the same time auctioning it off to the very industry that is destroying it,” Singh said.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has defended the decision. “It would be incoherent, an irresponsible action, if I said we will no longer use oil,” he said Tuesday in a speech ahead of COP30, as reported by AP.

Promoting climate action while simultaneously approving new fossil fuel projects “is the sort of contradiction we’re dealing with right now,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate with the research group E3G. “There’s pretty widespread complicity,” he told CNN. And it brings into stark focus one of the thorniest issues at COP: the future of fossil fuels.

Two years ago, at COP28 in Dubai, countries made an unprecedented call to transition away from oil, coal and gas. It was heralded as a breakthrough, remarkably the first time a COP final agreement had referred to fossil fuels.

Since then, however, the world has changed; there’s a huge Trump-shaped hole torn through climate diplomacy. Petrostates and oil companies are increasingly emboldened to push back against any language blaming fossil fuels for climate change or committing to phasing them out.

When it comes to transitioning away from fossil fuels, there is “no timeline, no targets, no rate of change, no program to support countries and communities in that transition,” Meyer said.

A flurry of reports released in the run up to COP suggests this transition is happening far more slowly than needed.

A UN analysis of countries’ current climate policies found they put the world on course for a 2.8 degree Celsius temperature rise, far above 1.5 and a level of warming that could push the planet over several catastrophic and potentially irreversible tipping points.

Another UN report assessing the climate impact of countries’ formal goals for cutting planet-heating pollution over the next decade found there was not enough data to “draw wide-ranging global-level conclusions,” because too few countries have submitted them.

The original deadline for these goals, required under the Paris climate agreement, was February; 95% of governments missed it. Major climate polluters, including India and Saudi Arabia, still have yet to formally submit.

“There is limited appetite right now from countries to step up and come forward with ambitious climate action or pledges,” said Niklas Höhne, an international climate policy expert at the NewClimate Institute, an independent non-profit. In part, this is due to turbulent geopolitics, including conflict, war and a global shift to the right, he told CNN.

The actions of the US, the planet’s second largest climate polluter, may also be an influence. Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” in a speech at the UN in September, and the US has since confirmed it won’t send a high level delegation to COP30.

But its absence will hover over COP30 like a shadow — and it could still exert influence. The US has proven to be a powerful disruptive force at international climate negotiations this year, helping derail what would have been two historical agreements: a global plastics treaty and a tax on the shipping industry’s climate pollution.

US actions send “a chilling message to the world… (and) gives other laggard countries a shield to hide behind,” Singh said.

It’s hard to know what will emerge from COP30, but experts say there are real signs of hope outside the talks, not least the remarkable clean energy boom unfolding even as global political momentum to tackle climate change falters.

“The climate negotiations are the lowest common denominator of what countries are willing to do in the current political circumstances,” Höhne said, and outside of the fraught negotiating venues in Belém is a “totally different world.”

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