Monday, December 03, 2018

“The party is over”

Renowned climate sceptic, Brazil’s incoming far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro has criticised the government’s environment agencies and said he will strip them of their powers to impose “fines all over the place”.

 He said he wanted to remove enforcement powers from agencies tasked with protecting the country’s national resources. His words echo statements made during his presidential campaign, in which he said environmental regulations were holding back development in Brazil. He has previously said he will build a motorway through the Amazon rainforest and pull out of the Paris agreement. Brazil recently announced it was abandoning plans to host next year’s key UN climate talks, and on Saturday Mr Bolsonaro said he had a hand in that decision. The official reason given was “budget constraints”. The new government will herald a stark change in Brazil’s direction since the nation hosted the crucial UN Earth Summit in 1992 that laid the foundations for current efforts to tackle climate change.  Not only has Bolsonaro aligned himself closely with fellow climate skeptic Donald Trump, his foreign minister pick Ernesto Araujo has described global warming as a “Marxist plot”Though the president-elect has now backtracked on his original pledge to follow Trump’s lead and withdraw from the international Paris climate agreement, there are still major concerns about his plans for the Amazon rainforest.
An open letter signed by major NGOs in October indicated that if plans to expand farming and mining in the forest go ahead, deforestation of one of the world’s most biodiverse regions will “explode”
Bolsonaro also reiterated previous pledges to “integrate Indians into society” by scrapping existing native reservations, despite the wishes of tribes to maintain their way of life.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-environment-climate-change-amazon-deforestation-a8663596.html

For more background see:
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2018/no-1372-december-2018/material-world-brazil-people-elect-a-populist/

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