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

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