The worst week in the country’s climate history. Wildfires, extremely high temperatures, terrible air quality. As Pedro Serrano pointed out recently.

the situation in São Paulo is frightening: for at least two weeks the sky has not been visible due to the smoke. And it’s not just São Paulo that’s facing this problem. Throughout the country, the situation is similar. Belo Horizonte and Brasília, for example, have gone more than 140 days without rain. The Amazon and the Midwest are covered in smoke. Brazil is burning, with some regions showing levels of humidity comparable to deserts, and São Paulo is among the cities with the worst air quality in the world.

This is the third time the climate crisis has worsened: we’ve had the disasters of the Bolsonaro government, putting the Pantanal and the Amazon at risk; the destruction of Rio Grande do Sul; and now, a new step in the climate catastrophe, with the heatwave and fires.

The governments’ responses are insufficient

Starting with the federal government, which has shown itself to be ineffectual by taking too long to come up with a coordinated response. At the very least, it should have called a national TV network, made the issue serious by declaring a climate emergency and naming those responsible for the arson as public enemies.

The National Congress, embroiled in negotiations for Lira’s succession¹ and dominated by the Centrão², is at the service of those who set the fires. Parliament is dominated by landowners. State governments, allied with agribusiness, are silent. In the midst of a historic drought, the Lula government has announced that it will invest in rebuilding the BR-319, the so-called “road to the end of the world”, in a nod to the devastating agribusiness.

To deal with the acute climate crisis, we need a bold approach that goes through a number of levels:

In addition to declaring a state of emergency, measures at the “cutting edge” are essential, such as those presented by Congresswoman Monica Seixas in São Paulo: distribution of masks, holidays when the air quality is unbearable, a cooling plan for extreme heat.

We need to strengthen and invest in the bodies responsible for protecting the environment, such as Ibama, ICM-Bio and others; the recent civil servants’ strike demonstrates how the government has failed to treat the areas that are vital to tackling the problem as strategic, while attending to fiscal adjustment first and foremost.

The main perpetrators of the fires are the agribusiness landowners. They need to be tackled by breaking with the super-concentrated agro-export model, pointing to another path, with an agrarian reform that changes the production matrix to a sustainable model at the service of healthy food production.

Brazil needs to suspend new oil exploration frontiers (such as the Equatorial Margin), affirming a real and renewed energy transition.

Combined with this, the January 8 coup plotters must be fought and punished. These are the same people who are setting fire to the Amazon, the gold miners and land grabbers. The basis of the coup is the same as those destroying Brazil.

A left to face the catastrophe

One of the leading climate authorities, scientist Carlos Nobre, has announced his concern that the events we are experiencing could lead to the so-called “point of no return”, due to the average rise in temperature and the destruction of biomes.

The urgency that drives us calls for a left that is up to the task. With these flags, we are defending an emergency plan with concrete lines of action, at the service of broad popular mobilization. We will be joining the demonstrations called for the 20th, 21st and 22nd, taking advantage of the traditional “tree day” date, together with spaces such as the “Climate Coalition”.

In the upcoming elections, we advocate that the PSOL acts within these parameters – electing its benches with this commitment. And to fight for the mayoral candidacies of the PSOL and of fronts supported by the Party to be the vanguard of the struggle for another model.

The only way out of the looming catastrophe is to pull the emergency brake – with a program and mobilization.

Footnotes

1. Arthut Lira is the president of the chamber of deputies in Brazil. ↩︎
2. “Centrão” are the right-wing and center-right parties that historically occupy the majority of seats in the Brazilian national congress. ↩︎