He’s been president a week – and already Bolsonaro is
damaging Brazil
Eliane Brum
Jair Bolsonaro’s messianic brand of capitalism threatens
minorities and the rainforest that protects the planet
Thu 10 Jan 2019 07.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 10 Jan 2019
07.02 GMT
‘The Bolsonaro administration promises a ‘new era’ – a
return to a time free of doubts and insecurity.’ Photograph: Sergio
Moraes/Reuters
The world needs to understand what Brazil has become, before
it’s too late. Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s Brazil is not just another country that
elected a far-right president at a time when the world’s most powerful nation
is led by Donald Trump. It’s not just South America’s version of the current
trend of countries sliding into authoritarianism, like we’ve seen in Hungary,
Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. It’s not simply a peripheral nation with a
pathetic leader. Brazil has become the apocalyptic vanguard that signals how
radical this moment is – one with the power to worsen the climate crisis at top
speed and blight the entire planet.
Bolsonaro was elected
in October, on his pledge to go back ‘50 years'. Brazil lived under a military
dictatorship then
The election of Bolsonaro is a response to what we might
call civilisation’s new discontent. Maybe people can’t identify the source of
their anxiety, which has driven up the consumption of tranquillisers and
sedatives. The average citizen might apply more familiar labels to the
corrosion of their quality of life, air, and water; to a relentless fear of the
“other”; to the feeling they’re walking in quicksand. But what’s underpinning
this new discontent pervading all areas of human experience is our climate
crisis.
Bolsonaro was elected in October, on his pledge to go back
“50 years”. Fifty years ago, Brazil lived under a military dictatorship. For
Bolsonaro and his followers, who are outright defenders of torture and the
elimination of adversaries, it was a glorious era. Despite the terrifying menace
of nuclear war, the world was still a place where science promised nothing but
progress and solutions – it delivered no bad news, like global warming, that
led to limitations on an individual’s daily life or on government actions. It
was a time when white, heterosexual men held power and knew precisely who they
were. They may have faced some resistance from minorities, but they still
enjoyed absolute hegemony.
We cannot comprehend what is now happening in Brazil – and
around the world – unless we understand that our culture wars are tightly bound
up with humanity’s need to say goodbye to 20th-century illusions of power and
face a planet made more hostile by human hand. Things will soon reach
catastrophic levels if nations and their residents do not unite in a global
effort to do something extremely hard and unpopular: impose limits on ourselves
to counteract global warming.
The election of Bolsonaro ties all this together like no
other event. The Bolsonaro administration promises a “new era” – a return to a
time free of doubts and insecurity, with certainty about what a man is and what
a woman is and a clear sense who’s in charge of the public sphere and the
family. Their ultra-conservatism is at times corny, at times biblical – but never
innocent.
Soon after Bolsonaro’s inauguration last week, the minister
of women, family, and human rights, Damares Alves – an evangelical pastor –
stated in a video that now “girls wear pink and boys, blue”. Beside her, a
supporter held an Israeli flag. Some neo-Pentecostals likewise waved Israeli
flags at the inauguration. These religious groups, who are growing numerically
and wielding greater power in Brazil, voted overwhelmingly for Bolsonaro.
A significant portion of them believe Jews will play a role
in fulfilling scriptural prophesies about the return of the Messiah. It must be
remembered that Bolsonaro was baptised in the River Jordan, in Israel, a couple
of years before the presidential campaign. Now in power, he has announced that
Brazil will move its embassy to Jerusalem, which, say these evangelicals, will
be the “stage for Armageddon”. In a recent visit to Brazil, Israel’s prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared: “We have no better friends in the world
than the evangelical community.”
Ernesto Araújo, the dogmatic foreign minister, said
Bolsonaro’s rise will be marked by “God through the nation”. He has also
written that climate change is an “ideology” dreamed up so imperialist nations
could determine Brazil’s future. “The people who say there are no men and women
are the same ones who preach that countries don’t have the right to protect
their borders,” Araújo stated in his inaugural speech.
This Brazil, stitched from a patchwork of dogmas, might be a
fascinating topic of study if it didn’t put the whole planet at risk.
Ideological discourse serves to instil the notion of destiny and to ensure
cohesion within a population frightened about everything it might lose, from
salaries and jobs to symbolic positions in the realms of race, gender, and
sexual orientation. When Bolsonaro says he’s going to “free Brazil from
political correctness”, he’s pledging to break both the “chains” that force
people to respect minorities and those that curtail devastation of the Amazon
forest.
In his first days in power, the president shifted
responsibility for demarcation of indigenous and quilombola territory – which
makes up a large part of the protected Amazon – to the agriculture ministry.
This government sector is controlled by agribusiness, responsible for much of
deforestation and eager to get their hands on the remaining forest. Bolsonaro
promised to turn the public land occupied by indigenous peoples into private
land where mining and agribusiness concerns can reap profits. The goal is to
make more forest land available for capitalist speculation: cattle, soybeans,
mining, and major construction projects.
This is why government ideologues fabricated the idea that
“communism” – a system never implemented in Brazil and now largely irrelevant
worldwide – is a looming threat to Brazilians. The supposed “international
Marxist plot” serves to justify turning the forest into a commodity. In this
fantasy, indigenous peoples, who are the chief barrier to destruction of the
Amazon, are portrayed as a “threat to national sovereignty”.
The deforestation rate for 2018 was the highest in a decade.
The mere possibility that Bolsonaro might win had a liberating effect on
deforesters and further inflamed conflicts in a country where more
environmental defenders are killed than in any other.
Without the world’s biggest tropical forest, there is no way
to control global warming. If Bolsonaro’s messianic capitalism is not stopped,
life on this planet will be much worse for everyone. For a contingent of
neo-Pentecostal evangelicals, this may be welcomed as an apocalypse preceding
the final salvation of “true believers”. For most of humanity, it will bring
nothing but horror and suffering – perpetuated by the stupidity of a species
with delusions of grandeur.
Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty
•Eliane Brum is a Brazilian journalist, writer and
documentary maker
Warming oceans likely to raise sea
levels 30cm by end of century – study
Seawater temperature is rising
faster than predicted, which is likely to worsen extreme weather events around
the world
Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent
Thu 10 Jan 2019 19.00 GMT Last
modified on Fri 11 Jan 2019 00.25 GMT
A family wades through seawater
that flooded their village in Kiribati central Pacific. Warmer oceans are a
major factor in increasing the severity of storms and extreme rainfall.
Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images
The world’s oceans are warming at
a faster rate than previously estimated, new research has found, raising fresh
concerns over the rapid progress of climate change.
Warming oceans take up more space,
a process known as thermal expansion, which the study says is likely to raise
sea levels by about 30cm by the end of the century, on top of the rise in sea
levels from melting ice and glaciers. Warmer oceans are also a major factor in
increasing the severity of storms, hurricanes and extreme rainfall.
Oceans store heat so effectively
that it would take decades for them to cool down, even in the unlikely scenario
that greenhouse gas emissions were halted urgently.
The report, published on Thursday
in the journal Science, found that the warming of the oceans was accelerating
and was matching the predictions of climate change models, which have shown
global temperature rises are likely to lead to extreme weather across the
world.
Zeke Hausfather, co-author of the
paper and a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, said:
“While 2018 will be the fourth warmest year on record on the [earth’s] surface,
it will most certainly be the warmest year on record in the oceans, as was 2017
and 2016 before that. The global warming signal is a lot easier to detect if it
is changing in the oceans than on the surface.”
Oceans absorb more than
nine-tenths of the excess energy trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases,
and play a key role in regulating the world’s climate.
But the role of oceans in the
global climate system was overlooked for many years, in part because of a lack
of data and the difficulty of studying the marine environment. Only in recent
years have scientists come to realise the full importance of oceans, which have
effectively absorbed much of the impact of climate change in recent decades,
but are now understood to be reaching their capacity as a buffer.
East Antarctica glacial stronghold
melting as seas warm
Read more
Separate recently published
research extrapolated temperature estimates for the oceans for the past 150
years, and found substantial warming.
Published in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, that research found the total heat taken up by the oceans in the last
century and a half was about 1,000 times the annual energy use of the world’s
population.
A Guardian analysis of those
findings suggested that the amount of energy absorbed by the oceans was
equivalent to an atomic bomb per second for the past 150 years. Scientists said
this was unsustainable in the long term without seeing further massive effects,
including extreme weather, fiercer storms, and sea level rises.
The heating could also affect sea
currents around the world, with unpredictable consequences.
Late last year, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world would face dire
effects from global warming from 2030 unless urgent and drastic measures are
taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The new Science paper analysed
four studies published between 2014 and 2017, which corrected for discrepancies
between different types of ocean temperature measurements and gaps in
measurements.
Satellite monitoring, buoys and
ships are all used to gather data on the effect of climate change on the
oceans. In the past decade, a network of 4,000 buoys known as Argo has provided
an unprecedented data set on the temperature, salinity and acidification of
oceans.
By taking the four studies, with
different methodologies, into consideration the authors of the new analysis
were able to build a fuller picture than was previously possible, with
calculations extrapolated back to the 1970s.
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