“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” – Mahatma Gandhi.

Dear Climate Healers Family,

After attending the UN COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021, I had sworn off attending all UN COP meetings until they signified their seriousness by going Vegan, but the Loving Hut team requested me to come and give lectures at their booth in the public Green Zone at the COP30 conference that just concluded in Belem, the state of Para, Brazil. The Loving Hut team of 70 members from 12 countries went all out to convince COP attendees as they believed rightly that the time is imminent for the necessary system transformation to Planet B.

They asked me not to give up on all the attendees, even if the official process remains corrupted. During my five days at COP30, I delivered the Planet B slide presentation a total of 15 times and it was uniformly well received. Therefore, I am grateful to the Loving Hut team for their dedication, persistence and for their gentle arm-twisting.

COP30 had everything: a boycott from the US delegation, a fire that caused all official delegates to evacuate for over 6 hours, torrential rain that sprayed into the venue through holes in the roof, meat and dairy served in cafeterias even though this is like handing out free cigarettes at a cancer prevention convention, and finally, a global agreement that does not mention fossil fuels at all, much less the elimination of their use by any date.

Noam Chomsky once said,

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

The UN COPs allow very lively debates on fossil fuel use, while they took ending animal agriculture off the table, right at the outset. This happened when President George Bush of the US declared at the Rio summit in 1992 that the American way of life is not negotiable. The world went along with that farce then and it is paying the price now.

At COP30, the oil producing nations maneuvered to take ending fossil fuel use off the table as well so that the farce is now total and undeniable. Kumi Naidoo, the South African environmental activist, got down on his knees dramatically at COP30 to beg world leaders to end fossil fuel use, but he might be more effective if he goes Vegan first.

The science and the data tell us that in order to address global ecological breakdown systematically, we need to end animal agriculture first and end fossil fuel use second. That is Systems Engineering 101.

Instead, COP30 had the first ever “Agri Zone” at a UN COP conference!

Imagine a toxic mix of greenwashing, humane washing, and tech washing. That characterizes the Agri Zone that was colocated just a few miles away from the official UN Blue Zone and the public UN Green Zone. This is the first UN COP conference where Big Ag privately funded a separate Zone that was bigger than the UN Blue and Green Zones combined, in order to lure delegates with barbecues, bribes and blatant lies.

It didn’t work.

Sadly for Big Ag, the reception to our unabashedly Vegan message at COP30 was uniformly positive among the attendees. Our lectures were packed and gone are the days when audience members would question why we should transform our civilization. At COP30, they were mostly interested in how to go about it. The thousands of Vegan meals handed out to official delegates disappeared down into hungry stomachs daily, with even many national delegations “subscribing” for free meals with the Loving Hut team.

On Tuesday, Nov 18, we held a press conference in the Blue Zone at COP30, focused on “Planet B: Saving Our Planet with Integrity”, to showcase various aspects of this transformation. There were 10 Vegan organizations represented at the Press Conference:
1. Climate Healers
2. Animal Equality
3. Plant Based Treaty
4. International Vegetarian Union
5. Brazilian Vegetarian Society
6. Pollination Project Foundation
7. True Animal Protein Price Coalition
8. Mighty Earth
9. Ekaterina Sky
10. Loving Hut Vegan Restaurants

You can watch the entire press conference here. The final song got cut off because the UN has a strict policy that the microphones at a press conference will be turned off when time is up.

If only they had such strict policies about the food they served in their cafeterias.

On a more positive note, in a sign of genuine progress, unlike COP26 in Glasgow, I didn’t see ticker tapes with the names of corporate sponsors at the COP30 venue. I am truly grateful to the UN COP organizers for this small mercy.

With much love,