French President Emmanuel Macron tried to be the champion of the Amazon protection at the G7 summit, but Europe does not fully understand the problems encountered by Brazil’s most famous rainforest, experts told Sputnik.
The wildfires in the Amazonian region have been raging for three weeks and became the spotlight of Macron’s environment agenda during the weekend’s G7 summit in the French city of Biarritz.
“Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency first order in two days!” Macron said in one of his tweets ahead of the G7 gathering.
The French president has also intensified his criticism of environmental policies of his Brazilian counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro, and threatened to block the long-awaited EU-Mercosur free trade deal.
Macron’s statements prompted the Bolsonaro administration to defend itself. The Brazilian president, attacked also by the Left and the Greens, sent in the army to fight against fires and rejected the G7 offer to help with reforestation unless Macron apologizes for his harsh rhetoric.
SCALE OF PROBLEM
Apart from persisting in Macron’s G7 statements, the Amazon fires also became the top priority among environmental lobbies worldwide, which quickly inflated the issue into the state of panic. Hundreds of crowd-funding websites have sprouted up with photos and videos — some of them featuring old fires or flames that are not even in South America.
Meanwhile, experts calculated that for the surface of the Amazon forest, which is nearly as big as all of Europe, the number of fires detected is not that appallingly big. There are fewer fires per square mile in the Amazon this summer than there are in France. However, France is facing an additional challenge in the form of firefighters’ discontent.
In July, several trade unions of French firefighters announced a national strike set to last until the end of August. The firefighters called for salary re-evaluation and comprehensive rescue service reform. They had asked to be made exempt from non-urgent calls.
Nor are this year’s fires a record for Brazil. Global Forest Watch indicates that deforestation (including by fire) decreased a little under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but dramatically spiked by 250 percent under President Dilma Roussef, Bolsonaro’s predecessor, most notably in 2015 and 2016.
According to NASA-funded globalfiredata.org, as of August 23, there was a total of 105,508 fires throughout the Amazon, compared to 112,773 fires registered on the same day in 2016. In 2005, there were 250,018 wildfires in late August, double the projection at the same date for 2019.
“The panic induced by the prophet of doom Greta Thunberg and other Green activists has reached an absolute peak, when dear Greta said ‘I want you to panic’ and ‘we only have 18 months to save the planet’. This panic is ridiculous and will soon fall down like a house of cards,” Samuele Furfari, a longtime senior official at the European Commission, professor at ULB university in Brussels and specialist in fossil fuels, told Sputnik.
While the Amazon fires are, undoubtedly, worrying, flames that are raging uncontrolled in Central Africa, are much more appalling, the expert said.
“But of course Monsieur Macron could not mention it in Biarritz, since he had invited some African heads of state to the G7 to speak about ‘inequalities’. His political agenda fitted perfectly, though, with an attack on Brazil,” Furfari said. (UNI)
