Lula is putting Brazil at the forefront of the climate battle and vowing to stop the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
by Juan Cole, Informed Comment
The president-elect of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, addressed the COP27 climate summit in Egypt on Wednesday, announcing that “Brazil is back.” He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to say that Brazil is ready to join again in efforts to build a healthier planet, a fairer world, capable of welcoming with dignity the totality of its inhabitants – and not just a privileged minority.” Lula’s predecessor, the far right crank Jair Bolsonaro, had canceled a planned COP climate summit in Brazil itself, and did whatever he could to destroy the Amazon rainforest and thereby to remove a major carbon sink that is helping the planet avoid an even worse climate emergency.
In his speech, Lula recognized that the conference’s invitation to him to speak even before his inauguration was an “acknowledgment that the world is in a hurry to see Brazil participating again in discussions about the future of the planet and all the beings that inhabit it — the planet that always warns us that we need each other to survive — that alone we are vulnerable to the climate tragedy.”
Lula’s life has been one of fighting for the collective good, whereas Bolsonaro had been about individual greed and selfishness, and the devil take the hindmost.
The president-elect of the world’s ninth-largest economy by nominal GDP lamented, “We spend trillions of dollars on wars that only bring destruction and death, while 900 million people around the world have nothing to eat. We are living in a time of multiple crises – growing geopolitical tensions, the return of the risk of nuclear war, food and energy supply crisis, erosion of biodiversity, intolerable increase in inequality.”
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