Traditional wisdom says that no one knows what will come out of a judge’s head or a pregnant woman’s belly (before genetic testing and ultrasound). From representatives of the Jair Bolsonaro government at COP26, it is almost certain that ideas will emerge that are destined to increase Brazil’s discredit.
The country has nothing positive to show at the summit on the climate crisis in Glasgow, Scotland, starting on Sunday (31). Of negative results and misfortunes, there is plenty. We will arrive there as outcasts, and not without reason.
From the outset, the Brazilian government makes a terrible figure in what matters most to contain global warming by 1.5ºC above the average temperature before the Industrial Age: carbon emissions. The world needs to neutralize them around 2050, but starting a drastic reduction as early as 2030, an implausible goal in the shadow of the record registered in 2020, despite the general halt by the pandemic.
At the current rate, the atmosphere will warm by more than 2°C, possibly reaching 2.5°C or even 3°C, with a worrying acceleration of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and fires. That’s even if all the promises of national governments are fulfilled.
In a graph that has reverberated in recent days, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP, or Unep, in English) presents Brazil as the only significant country to worsen goals assumed for this decade. The image is in the report “The Heat is On” released on Tuesday (26).
Manipulation of the national voluntary target (known as the NDC) began in December of last year. While reaffirming the purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 37% by 2025 and 43% by 2030, Planalto gave a climate ride worthy of Paulo Guedes’ workaround to break the spending ceiling.
In absolute terms, the percentages, although unchanged, will imply an additional emission of 500 million tons of CO2-equivalent (CO2eq) and 400 million CO2eq, respectively. It’s not magic, it’s smart: the government changed the calculation basis, changing the methodology that estimates the production of gases.
The premise of the Paris Agreement (2015) was that signatories progressively improve their decarbonization commitments. Only Brazil has the right to retreat, even if it stealthily manipulates data, which makes its reliability in the eyes of negotiators in Glasgow go down another step into the basement of irrelevance.
The maneuvers are not limited to the Planalto Palace. In Congress, a bill by the ruralist senator Kátia Abreu (PP-TO) prospered, which, under the guise of improving the Brazilian goals for 2025 and 2030 (increasing the respective reduction percentages to 43% and 50%), smuggled the possibility of, by decree, the government review the projection of emissions in 2025.
In other words, more scope for sleight of hand. The anti-environmental agenda is going full steam ahead in the Parliament hijacked by the centrão’s retrograde interests, as proven by repeated attempts to de-characterize and loosen the rules of the 2012 Forest Code.
No wonder, in a country that has a fifth of the GDP coming from agribusiness and 40% of the Congress affiliated with the ruralist caucus, where ranchers pontificate. The avant-garde of backwardness, which has a great overlap with the BBB bench (ox, bullet and Bible), to which one more B, for a Pocketnarist, should be added.
One goal everyone shares with the Planalto is to let the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest (20% already destroyed) and the cerrado (50% devastated) run rampant. Here’s what this ecocida alliance has to show in Glasgow: steady increases in deforestation and fire rates during Bolsonaro’s 34 months in office.
Computing all emissions from agriculture, from deforestation to the methane produced in the belly of cattle, the sector accounts for almost three quarters (72%) of the Brazilian climate pollution. Eternal producer of commodities, the country ranks fourth among those that have emitted the most carbon throughout history – not to develop, but burning the natural capital of biodiversity and environmental services with low job creation.
It is not a rush to make it easy for anyone to ask for money from other governments. That was what the neophyte minister of the Environment and head of the Brazilian delegation to the COP26, Joaquim Leite, intended as a starting point for the negotiation.
Although he does not go to Glasgow, Vice President Hamilton Mourão sang the same litany that Brazil needs to be “combative” and demand a reward for keeping the forest standing – says the general who spent R$ 550 million on scenographic military operations to fight deforestation, without being able to contain it.
The Planalto’s most glaring inconsistency with regard to international financing is in the Amazon Fund. Due to ideological nagging, Bolsonaro paralyzed the compensation program for avoided deforestation maintained by Norway and Germany, freezing the use of R$ 2.9 billion already deposited.
The Presidency’s record on any topic related to forests is grim. IBAMA and ICMBio, in charge of supervising and promoting conservation, were hamstrung by the herdsman Ricardo Salles, jettisoned from Amazon incursions by Mourão and suffocated by Bolsonaro with a tourniquet in the funds and replacement of personnel.
The president also refuses to demarcate and ratify new indigenous lands (TIs) and quilombolas. In addition to being a precondition for the cultural and physical survival of various peoples, as mandated by the Constitution, they present deforestation rates (2%) much lower than those observed in biomes in general.
In this refusal, Bolsonaro has the approval of the Federal Supreme Court. The Court omits itself in the decision always postponed on the controversial thesis of the timeframe, which in practice would make the constitutional mandate unfeasible (the 1988 letter gave a period until 1993 to ratify all ILs).
With nothing to present at COP26, the Bolsonaro government has produced a new example of the one thing it stands out for: misleading, if not fraudulent, news. On Monday (25), a ceremony launched the Green Growth program – which has no goals, details, costs or sources of funding.
From the mouths of pocketnarists in Glasgow will emerge only words, devoid of reality and inspired by perennial conspiracy doctrines among the military. For offspring of the military dictatorship, the environmental issue is a pretext for foreign powers to impede national development.
Anyone who speaks what he wants (especially lies and forgeries), professes the same traditional wisdom, listens to what he does not want. Bolsonaro and company have neither the honesty nor the intellectual capacity to understand, from what is said in Glasgow, that other nations only pay attention to Brazil for its gigantic potential to damage the Earth’s climate.
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