Let me introduce myself
Dealing with the climate crisis we are living through is hard. It’s big, multi-faceted and hard to visualise.
It is also, as this blog keeps emphasising, solvable. As we discussed last week when talking about reaching net zero, a lot of the solutions we need are out there. They just need the right framework and backing to grow. There are reasons to keep positive.
That’s all well and good (and we sincerely believe it), but let me introduce you to one of the curveballs. One of the things we can’t always directly control. Let me introduce you to Jair Bolsonaro.
Some of you may know of Mr Bolsonaro, he has been the President of Brazil since 2019. Politically, he was elected as a right wing sentimentalist, fond of reminiscing about the good ol’ days when the armed forces were in charge. He even served as a Captain in the army. Once in power he has governed as a hardcore baby Trump. Part of his charm while campaigning for office (we use the term fairly loosely) was that for all his apparent idiosyncrasies, he was personally viewed as uncorrupt. No mean feat in a country that had lost its previous two presidents to scandals.
Like his friend further north, Bolsonaro has also been a Covid denier, describing it as no more dangerous ‘than the common flu’. Brazil now has the second highest number of Coronavirus deaths in the world after the United States. Imitation, it turns out, can take you a long way. Tragically it has taken Brazil to over 300,000 Covid related deaths. As a result, Bolsonaro’s political approval ratings have fallen again after briefly recovering last summer. He has been under increasing pressure.
But basic pandemic understanding isn’t the only branch of science that Brazil’s president has no interest in. He also has no time for the climate crisis. Only the threat of losing out on a lucrative regional trade deal with the EU was enough to stop Bolsonaro making Brazil the second country to pull of the Paris accord. Instead, he has paid lip service to remaining in the agreement whilst overseeing the destruction of huge swathes of the Amazon.
The nature of my game
And this is where our climate curveball comes in. We can’t control who gets elected as the President of Brazil but that decision is crucial to our chances of succeeding in the fight against the climate crisis.
Last year Brazil lost 1.7m hectares of forested area. To put that into some context, in total the world lost an estimated 12.2m hectares of forest and the next largest single nation loss was the Democratic Republic of Congo with just under half a million hectares. Bolsonaro cares not a jot. As far as he is concerned, the economic development of Brazil trumps any environmental concerns. For him, the priority is the increase in economic activity that comes with deforestation, whether that comes from herds of animals or short term crops. The game for this president is based on economic indicators, not the wider health of the planet.
The loss of trees in the Amazon is primarily driven by fires. Unlike the wild bush fires we’ve seen in Australia or California in recent times, these fires are started deliberately. Sometimes this is by smallholders opening an area to plant. Other types it is by illegal actors, clearing large swathes to farm commercially. These practices had been mostly successfully curbed by previous administrations. Between 2005 and 2014 the rate of deforestation slowed by as much as 80%. That progress was dramatically halted in the summer of 2019 (the first year Bolsonaro was in power) when as much as 2500 sq. kilometres as month were being burned. Not all of this is solely one individual’s fault. In the same summer other countries also experienced fires, but much of the spike can be traced to his policies and the permissive atmosphere he has generated. This wanton destruction is a huge travesty as the FT noted in an article earlier this month;
“The country is home to 40 per cent of the world’s tropical forests, 20 per cent of freshwater reserves and 10 per cent of its biodiversity. Yet during this administration, deforestation rates have surged by 50 per cent, and invasions of protected land more than doubled. A group of indigenous leaders and human rights activists have even asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Bolsonaro for “ecocide”. It need not be like this. In fact, it should not. Instead, Brazil could become a green superpower. It is already one of the biggest producers of soyabean, sugar, corn and beef. But it needs to do so based on a shift towards sustainable agriculture, a thriving bioeconomy and responsible eco-tourism. This is not an impossible dream. About two-thirds of already-cleared Amazonian land is underused, degraded or abandoned. So Brazil doesn’t need to clear more; it needs to increase the productivity of existing land. It also needs to crack down on environmental crime — such as illegal logging, illicit mining and the financial flows that sustain them — and empower scientists rather than fire them as this government has done.”
Source FT.com
A moment of doubt and pain
Fast forward to this week, and to use the colloquial phrasing, it’s all kicking off.
On Monday, the man who told Brazilians to ‘stop whining’ about the Coronavirus situation saw his Foreign and Defence ministers resign. On Tuesday Brazil recorded its highest ever number of Covid deaths. Overnight the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force all resigned in protest at the way the crisis has been handled as well as Bolsonaro’s attempts to compromise the independence of the armed forces he so wistfully glamorised whilst running for power. It seems the generals are standing up to the former Captain at last.
If Bolsonaro falls, then what? The likeliest outcome would be a temporary administration followed by an election held somewhere between now and when one is due anyway in mid 2022. That would bring back into play previous President but one, a gentleman known as Lulu who was jailed for corruption but had the conviction recently overturned. Even if Bolsonaro rides out this weeks crisis, he may still face an impeachment trial for his handling of the pandemic. Or the whiff of corruption that has come to shroud his sons over the last year or so may spread to uncover sins of the father, offering yet another way to fall from grace.
Have some sympathy
If you’re keeping up by this point you’re doing well. We haven’t mentioned the four health ministers Brazil has gone through this year, the abolition of the parts of the Environment ministry that deal with deforestation and indigenous rights, or the wider fall out of the ‘Car Wash’ scandal that saw off two presidents and precipitated Bolsonaro’s rise to power.
And this is the problem with political Climate Curveballs, it’s hard to keep track of them. How many of us have time to read about governmental crisis in South America? How many of us can honestly name the president of more than one South American nation? To spread wider, what do we know of the climate politics of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the second worst offender in the deforestation rankings? This is really quite obscure stuff. But it matters.
The truth is politics is vital both at home and around the globe. The belief that we have the answers to many of the changes we need to fight the climate crisis is tempered by the knowledge that only the right political decisions will see them adopted widely enough to have the impact we need. Electric cars, carbon taxes, better electricity grids, all those things we discussed last week, are, to a greater or lesser extent, at the mercy of the politicians we elect.
This leads to two conclusions. Firstly, we need to be motivated to participate in our political landscape at home. We must use our right to vote and we must educate ourselves as to which parties will take the hard decisions that will set us on a better course for the future. This blog will have more on that in the run up to the various elections taking place in the UK this May.
Secondly, we must try and find the time to engage more widely. This blog can be very critical of social media and the damage it has done to our democracies by allowing the spread of false information and the individualisation of the news we received on our feeds, but we can use it to our advantage. The global reach of the internet allows us to gain an understanding of what is happening around the world and to link up in solidarity with climate movements in countries we’ll never visit personally. There are places around the globe where being a climate activist can be a dangerous thing. Brazil is just one of those. Lending our support can offer vital encouragement to fledgling or under pressure movements.
The Amazon is responsible for producing 6% of the world’s oxygen, harbours more diversity of life than anywhere else on the planet and has the potential to sequester large amounts of carbon if we keep it intact. Surely that is worth our attention, our time, our research. It is far to precious to be left to those with little sympathy.
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