A study published this week found that Canada’s devastating 2023 wildfire season – which covered some of America’s largest cities with toxic plumes and affected 100 million Americans – resulted in Canada being responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any country on earth except China, India, and the United States.
Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, awoke shrouded in wildfire smoke on Monday as a record number of fires blazed in the greater Sao Paulo state and the greater Amazon, killing at least three and threatening to engulf one of the world’s largest ecosystems.
The Amazonian regions of Brazil have spent much of August hidden under a plume of toxic smoke, suffering the highest number of documented forest fires in nearly two decades.
Officials overseeing the Brazilian Amazon registered almost 3,000 fires during February, marking a new record for the South American country, according to data released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
Former Vice President Joe Biden threatened an economic war with Brazil during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, stating that the South American nation would suffer “significant economic consequences” if it did not adhere to Biden’s preferred environmental policy.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro accused actor Leonardo DiCaprio in a Facebook live video on Thursday of funding non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who later used his money to set the Amazon Rainforest on fire.
Brazil’s first lady, Michelle Bolsonaro, interrupted her husband, President Jair Bolsonaro, during his weekly Facebook Live broadcast Thursday with a bouquet of flowers and a kiss to celebrate their twelfth wedding anniversary.
President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil told the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday that European nations pressuring the world to violate his nation’s sovereignty in defense of the Amazon Rainforest were guilty of “colonialism” and environmentalists were guilty of viewing indigenous Brazilians as “cavemen.”
An editorial in China’s state-run China Daily on Wednesday dismissed the G7’s offer of $20 million in firefighting aid to Brazil as “chump change” given the scale of the Amazon crisis and inadvertently revealed one of the reasons China is interested in the outcome: Brazil is a major source of soybeans, a crop central to the trade war between the United States and China.
President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil decried environmentalist panic over fires sprawling over the Amazon Rainforest on Tuesday, noting, “I would like there to be fewer fires, of course, but they are under the average of the past few years.”
The government of Brazil issued a stern rejection on Monday of attempts by French President Emmanuel Macron to involve Europe in the nation’s response to sprawling fires in the Amazon rain forest, scolding France to pay its share into the Paris Agreement on climate change and branding Macron a “colonialist.”
Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – Many high-profile figures seeking to denounce the fires in the Amazon — from Madonna and Cristiano Ronaldo to Leonardo DiCaprio and Emmanuel Macron — have unwittingly ended up misleading millions on social media, either sharing photographs of the region that are years old or images taken in other parts of the world.
