On May 19, the head of IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental agency, overrode the technical opinion of the agency’s licensing department and issued a decision allowing proposed oil drilling in the FZA-M-59 drilling block in the mouth of the Amazon River to proceed for approval. Pressure on IBAMA has been intense with the approach of the massive June 17 auction of drilling rights, which includes 47 blocks in the mouth of the Amazon River.

Environmental approval of the first block is seen as essential to stimulate oil companies to risk their capital in purchasing drilling rights in the blocks that are up for auction. Direct pressure from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a likely explanation for IBAMA’s change, as indicated by his comment that he would close the issue of licensing the mouth-of-the-Amazon project upon return from his recent visits to Moscow and Beijing.

At the same time, the National Congress was racing to approve a proposed law that would gut Brazil’s environmental licensing procedures, led by the most powerful proponent of the mouth-of-the-Amazon project: Senate president Davi Alcolumbre of Amapá, the state adjacent to the project that is expecting a financial bonanza from the offshore oilfields. The Senate approved the proposed law two days later, and Lula did not defend the position of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change against approval of the bill. Both houses of the National Congress and Brazil’s political structure as a whole are heavily stacked against action on climate and other environmental issues.

A pressing issue

The issue of oil and gas exploitation in the Amazon is pressing today because decisions are about to be made by the Brazilian government that would put in motion processes that will continue to impact the climate, Amazonian natural ecosystems and Amazonian peoples for decades to come (see here and here). The issue is also pressing because we are very near tipping points both for the global climate and for the Amazon Rainforest. These tipping points are intertwined: if the Amazon forest were to collapse, it would release more than enough carbon to push climate change past a point of no return, and if global warming escapes from human control, the Amazon forest would quickly succumb.

An oil spill at the mouth of the Amazon River would be catastrophic for biodiversity because it would be uncontrollable, at least for a period of many months or possibly years. This is shown by the experience of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, when oil spilled uncontrolled for five months before, with luck and many failed attempts, a concrete dome was lowered on a cable to cover the well. That event proved that no one in the world has the technology to plug a leak at the 1.5-kilometer (0.9-mile) water depth of the Gulf of Mexico site.

The 2.95-km (1.83-mi) depth at the site in the mouth of the Amazon that is up for licensing is essentially double this depth, and the site has ocean currents that are much stronger, more complex and more variable than at the Deepwater Horizon well. The currents flow in different directions at different depths in the water column, with a surface current flowing north and currents flowing south starting at 201 meters (659 feet) in depth. In other words, no one could stop a leak, which would affect eight countries.

On land, oil and gas extraction in the Amazon forest causes deforestation with the construction of access roads and subsequent land grabbing, land invasions and deforestation. The most critical case is the immense Solimões Sedimentary Area project planned in the TransPurus region in Brazil’s state of Amazonas (see here and here). The project, which would cover an area larger than California, would be accessed by the notorious AM-366 road, planned to connect the TransPurus area with the BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) highway.

The opening of this last major area of intact Amazon forest to deforesters would be catastrophic for the climate as well as for biodiversity and local peoples. It is an enormous “elephant in the room” in the discussions of BR-319, the licensing for which completely ignores the impact of AM-366 and other state roads planned to connect to BR-319 (see here and here). The drilling rights in the first blocks have already been sold to the Russian oil company Rosneft, which claims to have the full support of the governor of the state of Amazonas, and, as one of the world’s largest companies, would have influence to obtain the state government’s priority for building AM-366 once the federal government’s planned reconstruction of BR-319 is complete.

Why has oil and gas exploitation in the Amazon not been stopped?

The tremendous influence of oil and gas companies over political decisions in Brazil is purely a matter of money. In Brazil, the discourse claiming that this extraction is needed to keep the country’s population from running out of fuel is simply mendacious. Brazil already exports half of the oil it extracts, and this percentage is expected to increase with the planned expansion of current oilfields and the opening of new ones. Brazil has much more oil in existing oilfields than it can use before the entire world must stop burning petroleum for fuel.

The opening of new oilfields, such as those proposed in the mouth of the Amazon, imply continued extraction of petroleum long after the world must stop using petroleum as fuel. The expectation is that it will take five years for these fields to begin commercial production, and then another five years to pay for the investment. Since no one will want to stop with zero profit, this implies continued extraction for many years.

This logic has even led the International Energy Agency (IEA), which is usually on the other side of environmental issues, to issue a report concluding that no new oil or gas fields should be opened anywhere in the world. The economics of opening new fields is different from that of continued exploitation of existing fields, which the IEA concludes must supply all fossil fuel use in the coming decades, with these fields continually reducing their rates of extraction to achieve net zero by 2050. Others would say that net zero must be reached significantly earlier to avoid a catastrophic escape of global warming from human control.

There is no other choice than a full transition away from fossil fuels, in addition to stopping deforestation and direct human degradation of Amazon forests, as by logging. The Global Stocktake issued by the Climate Convention at COP28 in 2023 calculated that the world must reduce its direct emissions (basically fossil fuels + deforestation + agriculture) by 43% by 2030 and 84% by 2050 to prevent the global average temperature rise from passing the 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) limit above the pre-industrial average agreed under the Paris Agreement. The amounts by which human society must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions are not subject to negotiation; they are simply fixed unless someone does another scientific study that shows the numbers should be different. Because average global temperature since 2023 has been above the 1.5°C mark, such a study would probably indicate that emissions must be reduced by even greater percentages.

The 1.5°C limit is believed to represent a tipping point both in the global climate system and for the Amazon forest (see here,here and here), where exceeding it means that the annual probability of a catastrophic shift increases sharply, and, therefore, the cumulative probability of such a shift occurring at least once would pass the 50% mark in a much shorter span of years.

The most we can do to contain global warming is to not emit any more, not burning a single liter of fossil fuel or cutting a single tree. But if the emissions that are not “directly human induced” exceed what we emit deliberately, a point of no return is reached where the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increase uncontrollably from sources such as forest fires, soil warming and tundra melting, as well as from warming seawater reducing the ocean carbon sink.

Brazil would be devastated if global warming escapes from control: the Amazon forest would be lost (including its vital water cycling function that maintains human water consumption in cities like São Paulo) (see here and here); northeastern Brazil would become a desert (see here and here), expelling tens of millions of people; the country’s agribusiness and family agriculture would be decimated (see here, here, here and here); the dense population along the country’s Atlantic coast would be exposed to unprecedented storms and sea-level rise (see here and here); and the combined effect of heat and humidity on human survival would make fatalities during heat waves a major source of mortality in much of the country (see here, here, here, here, here and here).

Meanwhile, Indigenous and local peoples are not benefited by fossil fuel extraction, as shown by the examples of the existing oil and gas projects throughout the Amazon. In addition to direct impacts, the “natural resources curse” and the “Dutch disease” are real phenomena in the Amazon (see here, here and here), as is also the case in the rest of Brazil (see here, here and here) and throughout the developing world and in much of the developed one as well (see here, here, here and here). The result is greater economic inequality and increased poverty. A vast social science literature exists on why countries with the greatest mineral wealth, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Bolivia, are also the ones with the greatest poverty, among other social ills such as corruption and authoritarianism. This pattern is not a coincidence, and it is already playing out in the Amazon.

The decision to halt the opening of new oil and gas fields in Amazonia must come from the top, that is, from President Lula. This is not a problem to be resolved through environmental regulations, via measures to minimize impacts such as oil spills and increasing inspections and enforcement of the regulations. The Brazilian government is currently focused only on the licensing procedures, as in the case of the proposed mouth-of-the-Amazon oilfields. Making sure that the letter of the law has been followed in the licensing process does not face the fundamental issue of whether these proposed projects should exist at all.

President Lula lives in a “disinformation space” with respect to this issue, where he hears only the false narratives of his minister of mines and energy and the head of Petrobras, the government-owned oil company. The president’s support for the project is clearly inconsistent with his rhetoric on climate change. In addition to cancelling all plans for opening new oil and gas fields, the president needs to recognize that the energy transition is a national imperative and should be at the same level as health and education in having guaranteed funding, rather than being something optional that depends on monetary windfalls such as the money from proposed expanded fossil fuel extraction.

Because of the disastrous impact in Brazil if global warming is allowed to escape from control, President Lula needs to assume a leadership role in global efforts to end fossil fuel use. This requires leading by example by immediately cancelling Brazil’s plans for new oil and gas fields.

Philip M. Fearnside is a research professor at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA), Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil.

Banner image: Exploratory oil drilling in the Amazon. Image courtesy of Colin Dunlop.

This article is an updated translation of a text by the author that is available in Portuguese on Amazônia Real.

See related coverage:

Mining companies use legal loopholes to move forward without environmental licensing off the Brazilian coast

Brazil set to blast 35 km river rock formation for new Amazon shipping route

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