Essay by Eric Worrall
They might need to bulldoze more rainforest to accomodate all the climate activists.
UN tries to limit staff going to Cop30 in Brazil due to high price of hotels
Accommodation costs at climate summit in Belem are pricing out some developing countries and media outlets
Staff and agenciesWed 17 Sep 2025 02.44 AEST
The United Nations has urged its staff to limit attendance at the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil in November due to high accommodation prices, while government delegations are still scrambling to find rooms within their budgets.
The move comes as delegations grow increasingly concerned about the cost of accommodation in the coastal Amazon city of Belem hosting Cop30. Brazil said it was working to increase the number of available hotel beds, but soaring prices for accommodation have stoked calls from some governments to relocate the conference, which Brazilian officials have rejected.
“In view of the capacity constraints in Belem, I would like to kindly request that heads of the United Nations system, specialized agencies and other relevant organizations review the size of their delegations at Cop30 and reduce numbers where possible,” the UN climate secretariat’s executive secretary, Simon Stiell, said in a document published on the UN website.
…
At a meeting of countries’ representatives and UN officials last month, the UN asked Brazil to subsidise hotel prices to ensure rooms for $100 a day for delegates from the world’s poorest countries and $400-$500 a day for other countries, according to an official summary of that meeting.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/16/un-tries-to-limit-staff-going-to-cop30-in-brazil-due-to-high-price-of-hotels
…
I love the UN demand that Brazil should throw a subsidy at an accomodation supply crisis. A bit like throwing gasoline on a fire.
The city of Belém sounds like an interesting place. Despite being the gateway to the Amazon River, it is claimed Belém has a surprisingly low Malaria risk. But there are lots of suggestions online that Belém has a problem with Typhoid, including a substantial outbreak in 2024.
Typhoid Fever is a horrible disease, which is transmitted by consuming contaminated food or drink.
I once caught Typhoid after a trip to Asia. My mum found me delirious and running a high fever in the house I was renting. I was hallucinating I was freezing cold, and had 3 sweaters on and the heater turned up to maximum, but was actually burning up with fever. Typhoid is insidious – the symptoms appeared slowly, so slowly they never triggered any mental alarm bells. At the peak of my illness I had no idea how unwell I was, or how long I had been sick. Lucky my mum paid an unexpected visit, she had probably tried to phone me and didn’t get an answer. Mum took one look at me and dragged me straight to the doctor, despite my protests I was fine. Thankfully what I had was not a drug resistant strain, a single massive dose of antibiotics broke my fever.
What can I say – if you are planning to attend COP30 despite the risk, probably best to avoid share accomodation. Be careful what you drink, and stick to eating hot, well cooked food with sparkling clean utensils.
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It astonishes me how many people attend for only, what, 200 countries? 30K, 50K, that’s just bonkers. Even if 10K are media, that’s still 100 per country! Shows how unserious they are. They’re just big fat junkets, and excuses to get some hookers away from the more puritanical countries.
The puritanical countries have just as much vice as any Western country. One night wandering about Dubai I came across an old stone building with an ornate but heavily reinforced steel door. All the windows were blacked out with reflective silver. Lots of single guys coming and going on mopeds. The polite grinning doorman invited me inside, but I politely declined his invitation. I’m guessing it probably wasn’t a mosque.
One of the oldest occupations known to mankind… of all nations, and religions.
Actually, that does sound like a Mosque.
Lots of male attendees will be looking for Brazilians.
They will certainly be a welcome improvement after the professional ladies of Glasgow.
30K-50K … Bonkers? I thought 30K – 50K was Hookers
Well, hookers wouldn’t do very well without bonkers, would they?
Sometimes the line between COP delegate and intimate entertainer is a little blurred.
Did COP29 Delegates Trade Intimate Dinner Dates for Food?
Aren’t the attendants supposed to bring their own tent and airbed?
Isn’t Australia supplying Crocodile Sleeping Bags?
(Made from Live Crocs)
Brazil can make pirana sleeping bags.
That would be Anaconda sleeping bags, and Piranha bidets.
No need to “Trim” attendees just put them “Outback” in convenient Crocodile Sleeping Bags
Apparently it’s already been suggested:
Already people are cashing in, as per usual in the world of Climate Scientology!
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhealth/2025/02/i-wont-beautify-belem-or-remove-the-poor-for-cop30-says-lula.shtml
Joy – maximise your exposure to Malaria with a side order of Zika.
But I thought the attendances were dropping?
I doubt it. Lots more poor people are showing up in the hope of a handout.
There was a hilarious story from Azerbaijan that some attendees blew so much of their cash on accomodation they were surviving by raiding canapés, or arranging intimate dates in exchange for food.
Did COP29 Delegates Trade Intimate Dinner Dates for Food?
Who knows what sordid tales will emerge from the Brazilian accomodation shortage?
Brazil nuts.
I don’t think this will be their best jolly
Just set up a couple camps with tents and piss pots for these deranged reality fugitives…that might bring them back to normal. Barbed wire fences and watchtowers are purely optional. sarc
A few nights in direct contact with that natural Amazonian forest they claim to love will probably be very educational. And yes I did see that Southpark episode :-).
This looks like a COP-out to me. “Climate Change”, as defined by CAGW is dead. It died, “not with a bang but a whimper”. This story is just more of the whimpering. By many accounts we have already reached the 1.5 C “tipping point”, and nothing has tipped. Nothing will. Now, the ‘Endangerment Finding’ is all but gone. There will be no more COPs, at least, none that are successful.
The bad news is that the Left is already looking for the next crisis.
If the goal of such COPs is reducing CO2 emissions, name one that was successful!
I’ve been to three of them, once as an invited speaker. All of them were ridiculous fiascos with a large amount of bracketed text in any supposed draft agreements. It was utterly impossible that this process would ever work. Indeed, it failed twice with the Kyoto Protocol and the Kyoto Extension Agreement. It’s now failing again with the collapse of the Paris Accord. (At a few of the conferences, delegates were still frantically trying to hammer out agreements as the venue staff were packing away chairs and taking down tables.)
The goal of COPs was not primarily to reduce CO2 emissions. It was to facilitate north-south financial transfers. Maurice Strong set it up this way in the Rio 93 Climate Conference.
As to success, it depends upon whom you ask. UNFCCC-27 in Sharm El-Shaikh was notorious for attracting tens of thousands of whores from all across Europe and Asia to Egypt’s ‘party town’. So they made a huge profit on the climate racket.Much the same thing happened in Bali at UNFCCC-13 in 2007. Again, another party town where the whores cleaned up.
Why is the UN concerned about the cost of accommodations. Do they pay for them? And why did the UN agree to hold their monster conference in a rainforest? That outfit is getting nuttier and nuttier.
Countries pay for their own delegations. The UN has to pay for its own staff hosting the UNFCCC event. Given that they usually need hundreds, this costs a lot.
They often host the December confernce in ridiculous places. Sharm El-Shaikh, Bali, Lima in Peru were perhaps the most absurd places to hold a huge international conference. Until, that is, they decided to strangle themselves by holding it in Belem.
Don’t kid yourself . . . the UN provides no product or service that produces income for itself . . . instead, it exists by “assessing” funding from member nations, of which the US is the largest contributor.
The US assessment funds 22% of the UN’s regular budget and is targeted to be 26% of its peacekeeping budget, as decided in the December 2024 General Assembly negotiations. However, the US Congress has set a cap of paying no more than 25% of all peacekeeping funding for the UN.
Of course, this is an application of the meme “the rich should pay their fair share”, which sounds great to everyone except “the rich”, a term almost always conveniently left undefined.
So the UN gets its funding almost entirely from the richest nations on Earth. The United States, China, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom contribute 59% of the UN’s annual general funds, paying for lavish hotels, meals, transportation and hookers as needed.
In my experience, this normally means ‘anyone who has more than me’!
Returning from Brazil, on a Sao Paulo to Miami flight, I became very ill with some type of gastroenteritis. Fortunately, the plane was not very full and I was able to take a complete row next to a lavatory, where I spent much of the flight. That was the most acute sickest I’ve been as an adult, twice as bad as Montezuma’s revenge if you know what I mean.
I think I picked up the bugs while enjoying a fresh water pool at a jungle resort days before.
Consuming watered down caipirinhas, one may risk the same, though they take the edge off the heat and humidity.
In 1992 I contracted giardia from a Disneyland area hotel swimming pool. The water seemed a bit hazy and eye friendly. Had that ugly disease for 6 weeks, mostly because of an incompetent doctor that wouldn’t prescribed the cure because my (stool sample) tests kept coming back negative, In desperation I changed to another doc (you could do that back then), who listened to me whine for a couple minutes and then wrote out the prescription, in two days I felt human again.
They need to start holding these things in places like Mogadishu.
Perhaps Nome, Alaska in the winter. They might appreciate warmth a little more.
Have them take the Amundsen trip to the South Pole. They won’t even make it off the ship.
“with sparkling clean utensils”
Might I suggest alcohol wipes to clean your utensils before eating. Even if they are washed in hot water, they are often rinsed in cold water.
I rode my motorcycle down Baja in 06. In spite of my food/water caution and paranoia, I ended up with a delicate condition on the ride back up. I heard bananas and nuts were good for dealing with this. I wasn’t going to be tucking bananas into my riding jacket, but I did buy a bag of mixed nuts at a petrol/store. Those were the oldest and most vile nuts I’ve ever eaten, but they worked.
If governments worldwide were more realistic and responsible, they’d concede that the COP conferences have been a consistent failure since Day 1 and quit wasting tax revenue on them. If delegates have to be sent, there shouldn’t be more than a handful per country, at best; and when we consider that since the beginning of these conferences, global carbon emissions have continued to rise, how can they possibly be justified any longer? The solution is simple: those who want to attend should have to do so on their own dime or ,better still, concede that they’ve been a failure and simply lay these conferences to rest once and for all.
Thanks for the warning details about typhoid, Eric. The most interesting thing in Belem is O Theatro da Paz (Peace Theatre). It is in Praça da República. It was built in the neoclassical style of the Paris Opera. People should visit it, not COP 30.
I’d love to see South America one day. But Typhoid was a pretty horrible experience. Most of the time when you are sick you know you are sick, but Typhoid was different – I ended up so confused I didn’t realise how unwell I was. The lethargy is also dangerous, it almost wasn’t worth the trouble to fetch a drink of water. Well worth taking a few precautions.
I don’t know what to say except I have no sympathy for them.
If they were really concerned about the appearance of fighting climate change then they should hold this meeting over the Internet. The technology to do so has been available for decades.