Brazil Bulldozes The Amazon For A Climate Summit Highway — Let That Sink In

A four-lane road to hypocrisy, paved with deforestation

A four-lane road to hypocrisy, paved with deforestation (created by author)

Brazil is hosting this year’s United Nations Climate Summit, COP30, in the Amazonian city of Belem, ten years from the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement in which countries agreed for the first time to limit global warming under 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

A climate summit in the lungs of the planet — sounds fitting, right?

And worldwide representatives will have no trouble arriving on time to their grandiloquent conferences on action plans to stop the accelerating global warming (or, at least, pretend to), as the hosting nation decided it was worth chopping and clearing 13 km (8 miles) through the Amazon rainforest to build a four-lane highway for the attendees arriving in November.

The irony is almost laughable.

For over a decade, environmental protections blocked this road. Then, the world’s biggest climate conference rolled into town, and suddenly, bulldozers followed. “Prepare” and “modernize,” said state infrastructure secretary Adler Silveira, calling it a “legacy project for the population and, more importantly, serve people for COP30 in the best possible way,” — as if pavement and exhaust fumes were the…