Between them Donald Trump and the even more extreme Jair Bolsonaro, the recently elected President of Brazil, represent a catastrophic threat to the planet and therefore to the future of humanity. Climate change is a real and immediate threat and these far right climate deniers are making it worse.
The difference between nuclear war and climate change has been that nuclear war required our ‘world leaders’ to actually press a button but climate catastrophe requires only that they sit back and do nothing. But Trump and Bolsonaro are doing worse than nothing. By pulling out of the, already inadequate, Paris Accords, and systematically rolling back environmental protections Trump is doing his best to make climate disaster inevitable. By planning to open up the Amazon to ‘development’ Bolsonaro is copper fastening that disaster.
Forests absorb carbon dioxide [CO2] from the atmosphere and so lessen the greenhouse effect. The Amazon basin is the largest forest in the world. It has already been seriously reduced by logging and other forms of deforestation. Opening it up to further privatisation will triple the rate of deforestation and thus both limit this mitigation and lead to further release of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere thus actually speeding up climate change which is already proceeding at a catastrophic rate.
Sacrificing the Amazon Rain Forest will also destroy the living environment of Brazil’s indigenous peoples and intensify the mass extinction of species already underway. The World Wildlife Fund estimates 60% of wildlife has been eliminated since the end of WW2. The Amazon Rainforest contains the world’s greatest concentration of diversity.
When Trump says climate change is a hoax got up by the Chinese what he really means is that when it comes to his and US capitalism’s economic competition with China he doesn’t give a damn about the environment just as when it comes to arms sales to Saudis he doesn’t give a damn about human rights. When Bolsonaro says environmentalism holds back Brazilian development, he simply means profits come first.
This is not primarily ignorance; it is class politics. The real position of Trump and Bolsonaro and of a significant layer in the international ruling class is who cares about the environment, who cares about catastrophic climate change; we will be alright, we will head to our air conditioned mansions behind security gates and ‘beautiful barbed wire’ and the ordinary people can starve in famines, burn to death in forest fires or drown in the Mediterranean.
They are literally the enemies of the people – blustering, boasting and lining their and their friends pockets while the planet roasts, wildlife is destroyed and humanity heads for hell.
