UN Climate Change Conference in Brazil guilty of real environmental racism: Sheila Gunn Reid

UN Climate Change Conference in Brazil guilty of real environmental racism: Sheila Gunn Reid
Sheila Gunn Reid discusses how the United Nations has been dumping its construction waste from conference facilities in a vulnerable community.

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RebelNews+ Clips - November 20, 2025 -News Analysis

On last night's episode of The Gunn Show, Sheila checked in from Belém, Brazil, where tens of thousands of climate change activists and delegates have gathered for the UN's 30th climate change conference.

Although Sheila typically rejects the use of the phrase "environmental racism" — as it's typically used in Canada to simply describe oil companies attempting to provide well-paying oil and gas jobs to Indigenous people in their communities — she explained how the UN is engaging in real environmental racism in Brazil.

"If anything deserves that label, it’s powerful international elites quietly hiding their mess in a powerless, working-poor neighbourhood that has zero ability to fight back," she said.

"The elites — they don't actually care about the environment — they just care that everything around them is pretty, and they don't care about how other people have to live," Sheila continued.

Sheila and her videographer, Kian Simone, travelled into a favela called Vila da Barca on the edge of Belém. The community has no proper sanitation, very little electricity and homes aren’t hooked up to a sewer system. It's also very dangerous.

The Rebel News journalists saw for their own eyes the site where the UN is dumping its construction waste in the impoverished neighbourhood.

"The people of Vila da Barca can’t stop it. They don’t have a voice inside the UN conference centre, where journalists are more interested in recycling talking points than asking hard questions about where the garbage actually goes," said Sheila.

The UN Climate Change Conference has also been criticized due to the Brazilian government reportedly using the event as justification for the construction of a new highway through the rainforest.
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