The 121 paragraphs of the Workers’ Party’s document “Guidelines for the Reconstruction and Transformation Program of Brazil” regarding the planet’s climate crisis have new things and good things. The problem is that new things are superficial and good things are few.
The biggest novelty is the emphasis given to environmental issues. As of item 47, therefore, before half of the list of good intentions, the objective of economic development appears to be conditioned to the imperative of being also sustainable from a socio-environmental and climatic point of view.
It is true that job and income increases and price containment come before the promise to fight the predation of natural resources and strengthen the National Environment System and Funai. One would not expect anything else at a time in the country when wages are falling and inflation is galloping.
In any case, seeing the theme of sustainability as prestigious and, moreover, enriched by the qualifiers “socio-environmental” and “climatic” represents an advance. Or rather, a resumption of the lines that guided policies in the area in the first PT governments, before the developmentalism of President Dilma Rousseff.
It is good, therefore, to see the reaffirmation of the commitment to national targets in the Paris Agreement (2015) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It sounds more credible coming from a party that had Marina Silva (Rede) in the Ministry of the Environment than from a government that preferred the cowboy playboy Ricardo Salles (PL).
At this time of the climate crisis, however, limiting yourself to observing goals from seven years ago is too little. The increase in national ambitions is currently on the agenda of international negotiation, and the document does not touch on that.
The guidelines bow to the former minister, whose party participates in the PT-led alliance, in claiming her success from 2004 to 2012 in reducing deforestation, our biggest source of climate pollution. They promise a relentless fight against illegal logging and, realistically, the promotion of zero net deforestation.
In other words, the document implicitly recognizes the impossibility of preventing any and all deforestation, even because landowners are legally entitled to do so. The proposal is to compensate for the loss of natural vegetation with the restoration of degraded areas and reforestation.
How implacable, however, would the fight against illegal deforestation become? In both Lula administrations, the devastation was reduced with property embargoes, lists of municipalities champions in overthrows and credit restrictions by official banks.
None of these instruments appear in the guidelines. If they talk about revoking the spending ceiling and “Brazilianizing” fossil fuel prices, they could also mention in a more concrete way, by what means they intend to stop the carbon hemorrhage with Jair Bolsonaro and the carte blanche for predatory agriculture.
There is an update essay tuned with the climate emergency when the document defends a tax reform that “contemplates the transition to an ecologically sustainable economy”. Again, it would be preferable to specify specific measures, such as the carbon tax advocated by Bernard Appy.
The word “carbon” appears only once in the text, and then in a strange expression, “carbon gas” (carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide, perhaps). There is also no talk of decarbonizing the economy, electrifying transport, electric cars or alternative and clean energy (only in renewables).
The reason for these omissions is transparent: PT remains enamored with the pre-salt layer and chained to the role inducing development that it attributes to Petrobras. He continues to see it as a carbon company, not an energy company, the opposite of what one would expect from a program that is truly committed to the climate transition.
Self-sufficiency in oil and expansion of refining trump everything. And “Brazilianizing” gasoline and diesel prices means reducing them, which will encourage their consumption, when the planet’s climate demands that the burning of fossil fuels be reduced.
There is talk of diversifying the energy matrix, but only with “renewable” energies. There is no specific mention of electricity from wind or photovoltaic sources, as would be mandatory in guidelines tuned to what goes around the world.
The concept of renewable energy, it must be remembered, includes hydroelectric plants, another fetish in the Rousseff model of energy security. Not to mention the opportunities for bargaining in pharaonic works like Belo Monte, a monument to the generating inefficiency that is killing the Xingu River, a symbol of the civilized indigenous policy that the country once had.
In the current version, the PT guidelines use the climate issue to make a nod to the Sustainability Network. For a program worthy of the name to come to light, it would need to start a serious conversation about Earth’s most serious problem.
The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.
