Brazil Takes a Hard Turn Toward Climate Change Denial

The politics of climate change aren't always what they seem. We like to imagine that science is the domain of the left, at least relatively speaking, but in Brazil, it took a hard-line communist to get climate denialism installed into the very top of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. This would be Aldo Rebelo, the ministry's new chief, who in 2010 attacked global warming as an "environmental scam."

In fact, it's much more than a scam, according to Rebelo. In a 2010 open-letter, the then-legislator went all-out against the environmental movement: "Contrary to what think those who have changed much more than change the world," he wrote, 'the so-called international environmental movement is nothing in its geopolitical essence of imperialism than a beachhead." So: Control is control, even if it's controlling emissions.

It's a pretty weird stand. The country's president, Dilma Rousseff, has spoken out on the need to limit carbon emissions and the country has generally been trying to position itself as a leader in climate change negotiations. Recent Rousseff appointments have also included that of Katia Abreu, an aggressive defender of factory farming practices that's been working with Rebelo on an overhaul of the country's forest protection laws.

Those revisions are quite clearly pro-industry and pro-deforestation, as an analysis in ​Science published last April found. "The agribusiness lobby should see this as a big win," explained the study's lead author, Britaldo Soares-Filho, ​at the time.

As Helena Nader, the president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, ​told Science Insider, the appointments are pure politics. "Rebelo is a representative of a party that strongly supported [Rousseff's] reelection," she explained. The country's more general ​reversal on environmental issues can also be seen as an economic effect, as Brazil, like most of Latin America, enters the GDP doldrums.

There's a lesson here, of course. All of this stuff, everything we do and can do to mitigate climate change, is subject to politics in the end. Not science.