About “Indigenous Actions at COP”
The Hopi social justice activist Jacob Johns led a group of 25 to the Brazil meeting. He tells John Feffer how this COP exposed fossil fuel's power more than previous ones. But he saw solidarity too.
It is mid-January and it is raining. By all historical metrics, there should be feet of snow on the ground. Instead, the sky is a bruised grey, weeping a steady, unseasonable rain. Indoors the atmosphere is equally heavy.
John Feffer, the Director of Global Just Transition at the Institute for Policy Studies, is on Zoom holding a Project Save the World and “Just Transitions” conversation with Jacob Johns, a Hopi and Akimel O’odham environmental defender. They are debriefing the recent COP30 summit in Brazil—a conference that was billed as the “Amazonian turning point” but is being eulogized today as the moment the facade of international climate diplomacy finally crumbled.
While both men are ostensibly on the same side—fighting for a livable planet—a slight tension hums beneath their dialogue – not of animosity, but of perspective. Feffer is a creature of policy, a man who looks for the levers within the machine that can be pulled to effect change. Johns, fresh from the frontlines and wearing the exhaustion of a “wisdom keeper” who has seen wisdom ignored for too long, seems initially to see the machine itself as a death trap.
The Brazil Betrayal
The conversation begins with a dissection of the recent Conference of Parties (COP) in Brazil. For Feffer, the location held promise. Brazil, under President Lula, on the edge of the Amazon, seemed the perfect stage for a resurgence of civil society.
“It’s disappointing,” Feffer admits, his tone measured. “Azerbaijan and Baku, it’s predictable you’re going to have oil interests – but Brazil? People expected, look, it’s Lula, and there are lots of civil society organizations.”
Johns, however, cuts through the geopolitical optimism like a knife. He describes a summit where the infrastructure collapsed under the weight of corporate infiltration. He notes that one out of every 25 people at the COP was brought there by the fossil fuel industry.
Jacob Johns
“We’re seeing the facade being lifted,” Johns says, his voice carrying the weight of the 25-person delegation he led there. He describes a literal and metaphorical fire—the COP venue catching fire, a symbol of the world burning while delegates brokered backroom deals. “The Conference of the Parties is usually dominated by the United States government... acting as obstructionists.”
