More than half of Brazil is wracked by drought. Blame deforestation
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Every time I read such news I have a feeling I'm being fed a lazy political narrative rather than the complex truth. WaPo certainly benefits from the views from the "climate doom" crowd at the expense of their mental health and there will be no improvement because the crowd is ignorant and powerless.
No doubt.
The Amazon is just a political weapon to criticize governments with. Last president was directly blamed for these fires by a lot of people, locally and abroad, they even spoke of sanctions. These same people are eerily silent now that the fires are worse and the communist in power is doing pretty much nothing about it. There are zero mentions of him and his people in TFA, so you're probably right that it's just a climate doom article, not about actually changing anything or piling on political pressure on anyone in particular. Nobody really cares, it's just a political weapon used by international think tanks to influence things here.
The simplest truth is nobody really cares about that jungle. Least of all the brazilian government which has much more important things to take care of such as crushing the population with taxes to cover the exorbitant costs of such vital and necessary things as the president and his wife's year long tourism, useless made up positions for allies and supporters as well as regaling the rising judge-kings of the judiciary. There's also the fact these burns are caused by actually valuable economic activity. This country is basically China's private soy farm, nobody's about to screw with the guys doing the farming.
If you gave me a button that burned down the entire Amazon and made a semiconductor industry magically show up in its place, I wouldn't even think twice before pushing it.
I wouldn't. It would be a really bad deal.
It's not like the article is wrong. There is a link between deforestation and droughts. Droughts and heat waves are becoming more severe and common in Brazil. The point is that the well was poisoned. Mainstream environmentalism was contaminated with politics so it's pointless to engage with it as it will accomplished nothing by design. It doesn't make sense to waste time and sacrifice your mental sanity for nothing.
My opinion is droughts and heat waves are complete non-issues if your nation is rich and developed enough. Brazilian heat is unbearable so I installed air conditioners. They eat up a lot of energy which is expensive so I installed so many solar panels on my roof that my house turned into a micro power plant which brought my energy bill to near zero. Droughts? Surely irrigation technology exists, maybe the government should try subsidizing its development and use instead of wasting time and money on their ceaseless corruption. Then we'd be able to farm plants even in the most arid climates imaginable. Whole point of technology is to not be at the mercy of geography and mother nature.
There are solutions for everything. It's just that people gotta pay for it. They can't pay for it if they're miserably poor. The government won't pay for it either because it's irredeemably corrupt. They fail to provide the most basic infrastructure and yet they actively get in your way if you try to do it yourself. We just can't have nice things.
I see these articles and I think: maybe if we had some actual industries in this place we'd be able to do all these things and so much more... I'd trade a million Amazons for a prosperous nation.
Government will not solve anything and is unfit to deal with those events as it's for everything else. This was demonstrated by it's poor performance this year dealing with the floodings in April/May and presently the country-wide fires. As always it's up to the affected and the civil society with their tax constrained resourced to deal with the gross.
Droughts and fires can be mitigated by technology and planning but it's not like magic. As you said it's expensive and Brazilians are not only cash constrained but everything that is tech related costs multiples than what someone would expect to pay in other countries and is harder to find. And Brazil is risk and everyday is a different surprise be it from petty criminals or the pros (government employees).
Certainly if Bolsonaro was still the country's president the mainstream narrative would blame him for all that is happening and call him a genocide worst than Hitler because he is the scape goat. But as it is the sacred sheep who is in power nobody dares to criticize the government. It's no coincidence the timing of X ban. Not only this deviates the public discourse from this tragedy but also silenced any mainstream opposition.
Also a share of those fires are not natural but deliberately caused by people. Maybe someone is profiting from this like narcos in São Paulo or it's a mass hysteria thing. Well, there's plenty of evidence of both cases. Also this is nothing new just the scale that is abnormal.