Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president.
Credit: Wagner Meier/Getty
The Amazon rainforest is on fire — and the consensus is that Brazil’s far-right populist leader, Jair Bolsonaro, is to blame.
Bolsonaro, who took office in January and has been referred to as “Captain Chainsaw,” gutted funding for agencies protecting the massive rainforest, essentially giving wink-and-nudge approval for illegal loggers to do their thing. Fire is used as a tool for clearing Amazon land for ranching, and the more trees are cut down, the more vulnerable the rainforest is to wildfires. There have been almost twice as many fires detected in 2019 so far as there were in the entirety of 2018.
It’s hard to overstate how threatening this policy is to the climate. The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest: its trees scrub the Earth of a significant amount of CO2 and have captured a huge amount of carbon and methane within their branches and roots. If you lose the trees, a lot of greenhouse gases get released and it becomes harder to capture emissions […]
The burning of the Amazon rain forest is a trajedy , as it produces 20% of our atmosphere’s oxygen, and there are many activists that are protesting this.
However, of greater concern to me is that our Oceans, rivers, and lakes produce 70% of the earth atomosphere’s oxygen and stores vast amounts of carbon from phytoplankton and other green algae. These algae also store vast amounts of carbon even after death. There is a growing number of dead zones on our Oceans floors due to oil spills, radiation from Fukishima, other nuclear sites, and pollution and very few activists are on board to change this.