Brazil’s President-Elect Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign has been eviscerated by the media.
Bolsonaro ran a law-and-order campaign and frequently displayed homophobic and misogynistic behaviors through his rhetoric.
After criticizing Brazil’s government during a 1999 interview, Mr. Bolsonaro was asked whether he would shut down Congress if he were president.
“There is no doubt. I would perform a coup on the same day. [Congress] doesn’t work. And I am sure that at least 90 percent of the population would celebrate and applaud because it doesn’t work. The Congress today is useless … let’s do the coup already. Let’s go straight to the dictatorship.”
Instead of focusing on all of that, I want to take a look at his environmental policies.
Bolsonaro wants to eliminate protections of indigenous lands.
“Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it,” said Bolsonaro during his campaign, furthermore vowing, “there won’t be a square centimeter demarcated as an indigenous reserve.”
Culture and Politics writer for the National Resource Defense Council’s (NRDC) onEarth publication Jeff Turrentine denounced Bolsonaro’s policies.
“There are many reasons, in other words, to lament the rise of this divisive, authoritarian figure to the leadership of South America’s largest country and the world’s eighth-largest economy. But high on the list is Bolsonaro’s expressed desire to further open up the Amazon rainforest to agribusiness,” Turrentine wrote. “Such a move would exacerbate the deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest, potentially displacing more than a million indigenous people and degrading a globally crucial carbon sink.”
Not only will the Amazon rainforest be irreversibly damaged, the impact it could have on climate change could put us all too close to the point-of-no-return.
Researchers Aline C. Soterroni, Fernando M. Ramos, Michael Obersteiner and Stephen Polasky estimate that the implementation of Bolsonaro’s policies could result in an annual loss of 10,000 square miles of rainforest, “a figure similar to the deforestation rates measured at the beginning of the 2000s and an increase of 268 percent from 2017.”
In a recent tweet, Marina Silva, Brazil’s former environment minister, expressed her fear that Brazil is, “entering a tragic time in which environmental protection will amount to nothing. The Bolsonaro government hasn’t even started and the backsliding is already incalculable.”
Like President of the United States Donald Trump, Bolsonaro only cares about the economic gain his administration can bring to Brazil.
Which makes sense when looking at Brazil’s current economy.
Brazil is in a recession with over 12 percent of its population (25 million people) unemployed and an appalling murder count at over 63 thousand in 2017. That’s 175 deaths per day.
The Brazilian people want drastic reform and now, and Bolsonaro has promised that at the expense of our whole planet.
Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords in 2017, claiming the Paris agreement was a deal that aimed to hobble, disadvantage and impoverish the US.
Now Bolsonaro wants to decimate the Amazon rainforest and put the whole world in danger for a few political points.
How long would Brazil benefit from increased agriculture and revenue before climate change would destroy everything?
The answer is not long, and that’s not worth the future of the entire human race.