Brazil not burning forest, Ernesto Araújo says in US

Brazil’s Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo in Washington on Wednesday (Sep 11) challenged the reports from environmentalist institutions holding Brazil accountable for part of the country’s environment crisis.

During an address at the Heritage Foundation, in the US capital, the chancellor said that Brazil “is not burning the forest,” adding that the fires are “within the historical average.” The blazes in the Amazon account for merely “two percent of carbon dioxide emissions across the world.”

“Even if we admit that carbon dioxide emissions directly control temperature, Brazil is not the culprit,” he said. “This doesn’t mean there’s a climate crisis.”

The ideological threat

In Araújo’s view, the big threat facing Brazil and other countries is not “climate change,” as many claim, but “rather ideology.”

He went on to say that Brazil is in a position it has never been before. This, he argued, comes as a result of the global process that influenced Brazilians, who started “going to the streets spontaneously.” The minister said this group is growing, because the fight against corruption and the economic and political system, which, he said “don’t deliver services and opportunities.”

The chancellor drew a comparison between the situation before Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the election and today’s Brazil, saying that the country’s economy was “closed and subdued by the globalism in effect then.”

Today, the minister said, Brazil is creating a “liberal-conservative amalgam—liberal in the sense of economic liberalism. In this amalgam, we have the first chance ever to set into motion a really thriving economy, in a health and confident society.”