August 26, 2019, Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia) https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/26/urgent-action-required-against-environmental-pirates/
There is a new type of pirate on the
international scene. These are not the swashbuckling brigands of yore but
national leaders who are intent on plundering and pillaging the world’s
most-environmentally sensitive resources. From the Amazon rainforest, described
as the “lungs of the Earth” because it provides 20 percent of our planet’s
oxygen, to Greenland and the Antarctic, unscrupulous and ignorant leaders are
placing the entire planet in jeopardy. These leaders include Donald Trump and
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who fancies himself as the “Tropical Trump.” In
rejecting scientific methods of measuring and tracking the adverse effects of
climate change, political leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro, Philippines President
Rodrigo Duterte, and others are practicing a form of epistemological nihilism,
which posits that environmental and climatic science proving the effects of
cascading man-made climate change are untrue.
It is a close race to determine
whether Trump or Bolsonaro are having the greatest negative impact on Earth’s
climate. Although both reject sound scientific methodology, Bolsonaro slightly
edges out Trump due to the fact that the “intellectual” guru for Bolsonaro, a
far-right Brazilian “end-times” evangelical “Christian,” is a Virginia-based
conspiracy monger named Olavo de Carvalho. Among his other fanciful notions,
Carvalho entertains the idea that the Earth is not a sphere but flat.
As wildfires of biblical proportions
plague Alaska, Siberia, and the Amazon Basin, unprecedented heat waves hit
Europe, and the Greenland Ice Sheet and Western Antarctica melt as Trump
figures out how to annex Greenland from
Denmark, Bolsonaro is fiddling while
the Amazon rain forest burns. Called the “lungs of the Earth” because of its
provision of 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen, the Amazon is plagued by
Brazilian farmers committing systematic arson to open up more grazing land for
cattle. Bolsonaro, who, like Trump, pulled his nation out of the Paris Climate
Agreement, has encouraged overdevelopment of the Amazon Basin and given a green
light to the forest’s ecocide and genocide of one million indigenous tribes
that for millenia have called the region their home.
Bolsonaro and Trump are acting in
tandem to see who can do the most damage to the Earth’s environment. Trump has
called global climate change a “Chinese hoax” and has scrapped most of the
federal environmental protection laws, putting him at loggerheads with state
governors and attorneys general and the leadership of America’s automotive
industry. Bolsonaro, who rejects climate science like some modern age Luddite,
has severed the role of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE)
in conducting satellite surveillance of the Amazon rainforest and fired its
director for providing accurate statistics on the rate of Amazon destruction.
Bolsonaro is outsourcing the function to a private company, one of several
linked to his business network of corrupt political cronies. Bolsonaro, in
Trumpian fashion, accused the director of the Brazilian Institute of the
Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) of being on the payroll of
a “foreign NGO.” Bolsonaro rejected IBAMA’s determination that in July 2019
there was a 278 percent increase in deforestation of the Amazon from the rate
measured for July 2018.
Bolsonaro’s antics have earned him
sharp rebukes from Europe, where the effects of planetary warming have resulted
in dramatic consequences, including scorching heat waves. The Elysee Palace
issued a statement that Bolsonaro lied to President Emmanuel Macron when he
told the French leader that he would protect the biodiversity of the Amazon.
France and Ireland announced their opposition to a trade deal between the
European Union and the Mercosur trade bloc, which is now dominated by
right-wing regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Germany and Norway
suspended their financial assistance to the Brazilian government’s Amazon fund
due to the inaction of the Bolsonaro regime in failing to live up to its
commitments to protect the Amazon region.
Macron was prepared to discuss the
destruction of the Amazon at the G-7 summit in Biarritz. However, noting that
Trump would likely balk at a traditional summit communiqué, decided to forego
the consensus statement because, among other issues, Trump was likely to defend
his fellow environmental pirate, Bolsonaro, against any move to single out
Brazil for criticism.
Trump and Bolsonaro are not the only
environmental pirates on the loose in the world but they are the most
destructive. Duterte of the Philippines has categorized climate scientists as
“noisy” and he fired one of his government officials for attending too many
climate conferences. Duterte is also a skeptic about the benefits of the Paris
Agreement. Other climate scofflaws include the Central American nations of
Guatemala and Honduras, both ruled by right-wing authoritarian regimes.
Insufficient attention to crippling droughts that have forced many Guatemalan
and Honduran farmers and their families to migrate north to the United States
to face even greater trauma inflicted by Trump’s border security forces have
been the hallmarks of the regimes in Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi
is another leader who has a jaundiced view of the actual causes behind climate
change, an event that will eventually lead to the melting of the Himalayan
glaciers and result in the drying up of India’s major rivers that provide water
to most of India’s massive population. In 2014, Modi answered a question on
climate change from a student from Assam, a Himalayan state already beset by
the ravages of climate alteration. Modi replied to the student, saying,
“Climate change? Is this terminology correct? The reality is this that in our
family, some people are old . . . They say this time the weather is colder.
And, people’s ability to bear cold becomes less . . .We should also ask is this
climate change or have we changed. We have battled against nature. That is why
we should live with nature rather than battle it.”
Modi is not quite an environmental
pirate on the scale of Trump, Bolsonaro, and Duterte, but he has shown great
promise to achieve such ignominy. Someone already ranking among the
environmental policy pariahs is Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. At a
recent summit of the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu, Morrison prevented the
gathered leaders of Oceania to issue a strong final communiqué calling for
urgent action to deal with rapidly cascading climate change. Morrison, who is
owned and operated by Australia’s coal companies, insisted on a watered-down
final statement by the leaders, an action that bitterly disappointed the forum
host, Tuvaluan Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga. Tuvalu may be among the first to
succumb to rising sea levels, making it the world’s first ex-situ nation
resulting from climate change. While Morrison was away in Tuvalu, Australian
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, Australia’s fanatical equivalent of US
Vice President Mike Pence, said of the embattled Pacific islanders, “They’ll
continue to survive because many of their workers come here to pick our fruit.”
The racist diatribe was not lost on island inhabitants across the Pacific
expanse, from Palau in the west to Tahiti in the east.
Environmental pirates are also found
in the leadership of the far-right political parties around the world,
including the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD policy plank on the
climate preaches classic climate change denial canon in stressing “the influence
of CO2 on global temperatures cannot be proven and carbon emissions
reduction measures thus do nothing to protect the climate.”
The rise to power of the
eco-nihilists – Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Morrison, and others – will intrigue
future historians. They will ponder why, faced with sound scientific data,
certain world leaders insisted on doing nothing to prevent the demise of their
own nations, as well as global civilization.
*Wayne Madsen: Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist.
A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National
Press Club
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