As the Amazon Rainforest Burns, Brazil's Captain Chainsaw Spins Racist Tropes
We interrupt our coverage of the antics of the very stable genius in the White House to call your attention to the following crisis...
The world’s lungs are failing. The Amazon rainforest is burning at an alarming rate. If the fires continue a cascading effect will take place, turning millions of acres of trees responsible for creating 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere into grassland.
Those who don’t give a hoot about such things would be wise to invest in boutique canned air. The possibilities for profit are endless. Maybe El Trumpo can “hereby order” American companies to start producing the stuff, lest San Pelligrino or one of them foreign brands dominate the market.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1164914960046133249?s=20
Meanwhile, in Sao Paulo, the western hemisphere’s biggest city, nightfall came at 2pm earlier this week, as the smoke blanketing the region blotted out the sun.
What’s happening in South America is just part of a larger grim picture. Much of the Arctic region is on fire. Record heat in parts of Alaska, Greenland, and Russia have converted a region associated with icy tundra to an inferno.
This past July was the hottest in human history. Temperatures reached 94 degrees in the Arctic Circle; 114 degrees in France; 120 degrees in India.
Brazil’s record number of fires can be traced to deforestation, clearing the way for government encouraged intensive agricultural and related development in the region in recent months as documented by the Brazilian Space Agency.
The newly elected President of Brazil denied his own science agency's data about deforestation and the head of the agency was fired. The government agency tracking suspected deforestation in real-time using satellite data sent out over 10,000 alerts in July alone.
President Jair Bolsonaro, called “Captain Chainsaw” in environmental circles, started in January by gutted funding for agencies protecting the massive rainforest, giving wink-and-nudge approval for illegal loggers to do their thing. Fire is used as a tool for clearing Amazon land for ranching, and the more trees are cut down, the more vulnerable the rainforest is to wildfires. There have been almost twice as many fires detected in 2019 so far as there were in the entirety of 2018.
Bolsonaro is blaming environmental nonprofit groups for the Amazon fires, saying they’re being set deliberately to make his administration look bad. According to government presentation leaked to democraciaAbierta, the country is currently facing a globalist campaign that "relativizes the National Sovereignty in the Amazon Basin," using a combination of international pressure and also what the government called "psychological oppression" both externally and internally.
From OpenDemocracy.Net:
Leaked documents show that Jair Bolsonaro's government intends to use the Brazilian president's hate speech to isolate minorities living in the Amazon region. The PowerPoint slides, which democraciaAbierta has seen, also reveal plans to implement predatory projects that could have a devastating environmental impact…
...Part of the government's strategy of circumventing this globalist campaign is to depreciate the relevance and voices of minorities that live in the region, transforming them into enemies. One of the tactics cited in the document is to redefine the paradigms of indigenism, quilombolism and environmentalism through the lenses of liberalism and conservatism, based on realist theories. Those are, according to a slide, "the new hopes for the Homeland: Brazil above everything!
Brazil’s leader is widely considered the South American equivalent of Donald Trump. In addition to the devastation, there’s a strong element of racism at work and even a slogan suitable for a baseball hat.
He’s having the same kinds of problems on the international stage as his US counterpart. Nations in the European Union are ready to scrap a major trade deal, according to the BBC. The French and Irish have already said they’re not interested in ratification under the present circumstances. French leader Emmanuel Macron said President Jair Bolsonaro had lied to him about his stance on climate change.
At Vox, Zack Beauchamp makes the argument that the wave of right-wing populism sweeping the world is a fundamental threat to progress against climate change — and thus the entirety of the human race.
This brand of populism poses a particular challenge for the effort against climate change. It’s a global issue that no one country can solve on its own; it requires collective action, negotiated through some forum like the Paris Climate Agreement. It’s a paradigmatic example of the limits of nationalism and the need for organizations like the UN and EU. You can’t propose an effective solution to a transnational problem through a narrowly nationalist framework, and yet the nationalists are here attacking both climate policies in their own country and the very idea of global governance itself.
This is a crucial time; a recent UN report claims we have 11 years to prevent “irreversible damage” from climate change. Large population centers like the United States, Brazil, and the EU as a bloc are responsible for a major chunk of emissions.
It’s especially important that wealthy countries take the lead on the issue. Poorer countries are less likely to act when they think they’re unfairly bearing the burden of a problem kickstarted by Western industrial development. Backsliding in the US and Europe hurts climate action everywhere.
Right-wing populists are often framed as a threat to Western democracy — and they certainly are that. But the stakes are even bigger than they appear at first glance: It’s not just the survival of Western democracy that’s at stake, but the planet itself.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben called for action in an op-ed at the New York Daily News:
Because we understand physics and chemistry enough to know that everything’s connected. What happens in the Amazon matters to Americans. What happens in Alberta sets fires in California. What happens in Texas floods people in India.
All of this explains why, on Sept. 20, the largest day of climate action yet will take place on every corner of the planet. Following the lead of Greta Thunberg and innumerable other youth climate leaders, adults will join for a day in the climate strikes that have galvanized the world this past year. Athletes and chefs, bus drivers and college professors — millions of people will be taking part of the day off to join in this worldwide protest, organized at globalclimatestrike.net.
Joe Biden's campaign proves it's out of touch… Simply awful timing
https://twitter.com/caseytolan/status/1164579581782704128?s=20
Finally, in case you missed it, the Benghazi Investigation is closed.
https://twitter.com/DoctorHenryCT/status/1164891663862521858?s=20
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Lead image--fires along the Rio Xingu-- via NASA