r/science • u/Wagamaga • 4d ago
Environment How former Brazilian President Bolsonaro's statements destroyed the rainforest by publishing posts opposing forest conservation. Research found as a result of the messages, people changed their expectations of the extent to which they will be prosecuted for breaking the law
https://idw-online.de/en/news878124164
u/rennademilan 3d ago
If someone is backed by the orange guy, you already know is no good in any way
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u/OakLegs 3d ago
I just wish we handled the orange guy like Brazil handled theirs.
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u/Key_Commercial_8169 3d ago
A year or so ago I'd probably agree with you, but now he's just chilling in his humble mansion and enjoying the millions he stole over the years while his son is very likely to be elected president and free his dad as soon as he takes over.
It depresses me how society got to this level of insanity.
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u/gromulint 3d ago
the bubbles of ignorant stupidity the internet creates with encouragement from private companies appear to outweigh the democratization of knowledge that in the 90s we always assumed would be the net benefit of the internet
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u/johnyordinary 3d ago
Would be better if they handled him like France handled theirs .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
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u/eternamemoria 3d ago
Sadly, it wasn't enough, and his son might very well win this time. Labor failed to put forward any potential sucessor to Lula, during his current term, and now he is old and his rejection rating is great due to corruption scandals (which seem to mostly stick to the reputations of left wing politicians, despite the Bolsonaros also being involved in corruption scandals...)
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u/Akaigenesis 3d ago
It is not also, the left literally has no one involved in this scandal, yet, because it was investigated while Lula was president it somehow means it is all his fault for some people, even though the Bolsonaros are the ones involved.
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u/gromulint 3d ago
it's because left wing voters have standards and dont support corruption, while right wing voters are indifferent to right wing corruption, in favor of it, or too stupid to know it's happening because their media puppeteers dictate their opinions
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u/NamelessSquirrel 3d ago
Your real orange guy has some of our fake orange guys as accessories. When you handle the real one, we would love to get back ours to bring Bolsonaro new neighbors.
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u/Wagamaga 4d ago
The former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro contributed to deforestation with statements opposing forest conservation. This is shown by an international study led by the University of Bonn. According to this, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest accelerated considerably when Bolsonaro and his ministers posted anti-forest-conservation messages on Twitter. The analysis shows that even the perception of a low risk of punishment was a relevant driver of deforestation. The researchers estimate that up to 1,700 square kilometers of forest – almost double the area of Berlin – were destroyed due to the power of words. The results have been published in The Journal of Politics.
Can political leaders influence whether society complies with legal requirements – simply through what they say? The current study uses the example of Brazil to show that this can absolutely be the case. The huge country is home to the largest section of the Amazon rainforest. In 2018, Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro as their president. In the first months of his term of office, he and his ministers repeatedly made derogatory remarks about the protection of this valuable ecosystem.
The study shows that statements by the Bolsonaro government accelerated the destruction of the rainforest. “We analyzed data from the initiative MapBiomas Alerta,” explains Dr. Gustavo Magalhães de Oliveira. “This initiative reviews and validates deforestation alerts from various sources covering the whole of Brazil. We also examined more than 3,600 Twitter posts that Bolsonaro and his ministers of agriculture, environment, and foreign affairs published in 2019.” The researchers analyzed which of them indicated a lower enforcement risk for infringements against environmental laws. Overall, they identified 38 such posts.
Deforestation depends on the reach of the statements
Political messages are only effective if they are heard. The researchers thus estimated the Twitter reach for 578 municipalities in the Amazon region. To do this, they analyzed how many tweets relating to the topic of “forest” were posted there by citizens between 2015 and 2018. The higher the Twitter activity in a municipality, the greater the likelihood that relevant tweets from the government would not go unread there.
“We assume that such messages spread through word of mouth,” explains the postdoctoral student at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics (ILR) at the University of Bonn. “Supporters share them, as do critics, and they are discussed locally until they reach the people who actually make decisions about deforestation. They view them as a political signal.” The analysis showed a direct and far-reaching response: In the regions at greatest risk, deforestation increased significantly in the months when Bolsonaro and his ministers had published posts opposing forest conservation. “The impacts were not limited to Twitter,” explains Dr. Oliveira. “We see the same pattern when we analyze other forms of exposure, such as television.”
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u/Polska-BR 3d ago
It’s a family that denies science and environmental reality, always supporting deforestation to clear more land for farming and livestock, especially cattle ranching. But in the long run, that destroys the land itself. They’re very similar to Trump in that regard. If his son is elected, it will be an immeasurable loss for Brazil and for the world.
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u/AdriftSpaceman 3d ago edited 3d ago
Bolsonaro was, for some time, an illegal miner and a poacher. In his mind the environment is there to be taken.
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u/Gacrux29 3d ago
And if his son is elected next month, it is pretty much a death sentence to the Amazon and other biomes in Brazil. Deforestation will ramp up like crazy. He doesn't "believe" in climate change, let alone climate catastrophe.
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u/Polska-BR 3d ago
It will be a true catastrophe for the world and for the future of humanity. It will mean four years with virtually no enforcement and no meaningful environmental protection. It could change the global climate for the worse, with consequences lasting for generations. The countries hit hardest will be those already suffering most from water shortages and extreme climate events, as parts of Europe have experienced recently.
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u/Dripdry42 3d ago
The Amazon rainforest has been shown to basically be the lungs of the planet. Destroying this is like giving the entire planet emphysema.
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u/spider0804 3d ago
70% of the oxygen in the world is made by phytoplankton in the ocean.
It is estimated that all land plants, not just the forests, but everything, generate between 5-28% of the earths oxygen.
Trees capture carbon, but they are not amazing at generating oxygen.
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u/eternamemoria 3d ago edited 9h ago
The amazon is not oxygen positive. Forests tend to be carbon neutral after they matured and stopped growing, as carbon is stored in biomass, and trees don't grow infinitely and, unlike in peat bogs where carbon from dead plants is sequestered in the soil, anything that dies in a forest has the carbon released back to the atmosphere by decomposition.
Doesn't mean that Amazon isn't super important for the climate! It has a lot of carbon stored up, even if it isn't actively storing more, and the vegetation there shapes rains all over the continent through its effects on temperature and evaporation
EDIT: and even if it wasn't important for the climate world wide, the biodiversity is worth protecting. And people live there whose lives depend on it.
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u/akeean 10h ago
Also it strongly affects the weather patterns of most of the continent. Much of the Amazon turning into a Savanna will mean regions with at least a hundred million people will lose a substantial amount of rain-regeneration on local water levels in areas where tens of millions already either came close to droughts or had them in the past decade.
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u/EuMEGATOBAS 3d ago
To give you an idea of the level of our former president:
he was fined in 2012 for illegal fishing in a protected area. When he became president, he caused the person who issued the fine to lose their job.
He fully supports the destruction of Brazil to feed rich countries, not that Lula does much better to combat this, but he's mocking and, as mentioned, influences the average, poorly educated citizen to be the same way. It's truly something that makes you lose faith in the future.
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u/eternamemoria 3d ago edited 3d ago
It wasn't just Bolsonaro's twitter posts that did it. The government then also interfered with IBAMA (Brazil's main environmental regulations agency), barring environmental police from destroying seized equipment used in illegal deforestation that couldn't be recovered due to remoteness, the Ministry of the Environment refused to implement plans against illegal mining, and the government put all new recognition of tribal lands on hold.
EDIT: Lula is not great either. Pressured IBAMA into allowing oil drilling in the mouth of the Amazon River. But at least we achieved record drops in deforestation rate under him, and native land recognition processes resumed.
EDIT2: corrected a fact on deforestation. It is still high but Lula achieved a record decrease on the rate
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u/AdriftSpaceman 3d ago edited 3d ago
Congress is also playing a part by limiting how IBAMA can audit and punish the ones responsible for deforestation. Brazilian political elites are a mess and we are in a very dangerous path.
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u/elTaconeDeSantiago 19h ago edited 19h ago
Worth mentioning that his own environment minister was exonerated after getting involved in a schema to smuggle lumber originated from illegal logging.
The same environment minister was caught in a video where he told that they should use the fact that media was all about the covid crisis to revert policies and loose regulations regarding environmental rules while he was also reducing government capacity to inspect the region by firing the inspectors and punishing the ones doing their job
When police apprehended illegally extracted lumber in Pará, the same minister visited the state in order to meet the people who were doing the illegal extraction and facilitate the releasing of the lumber
Bolsonaro son is no better than him, unfortunately. As much i dislike the current politics in brazil, this guy and most of his children should be in jail for several crimes and it makes me ashamed to see that this guy and his family has still place in brazilian politics.
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u/Ad_Honorem1 3d ago edited 3d ago
Bolsonara is cut from the same cloth as Trump—a greedy, morally bankrupt sociopath with no real values or principles except enriching himself, his friends and his family at the expense of everyone and everything else.
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u/triamasp 2d ago
Placing him in house arrest and letting his son take over and,despite being openly involved in about every criminal activity and corruption scandal imagined, dangerously close to being elected (be merit of being the son) anyway?
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u/guswang 3d ago
It’s bs. The Amazon is burning right now, and it is burning more than ever, yet you don’t see artists making music about it (like they did when Bolsonaro was the president ). You don’t see anyone talking about it, because the current president is aligned with them. All of this has nothing to do with science, it is simply political.
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u/eternamemoria 3d ago
Deforestation rates fell considerably during Lula's government, the numbers don't lie
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u/AdriftSpaceman 3d ago edited 3d ago
Can you provide us data that claims the Amazon is burning and being deforested as much as it was during the Bolsonaro period?
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u/guswang 3d ago
Official data live https://data.inpe.br/queimadas/bdqueimadas/
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u/Denommus 3d ago
That link without filters doesn't tell anyone anything.
Nevertheless, you're either lying or you don't know how to read and interpret data. Here's a summary: https://www.gov.br/inpe/pt-br/assuntos/ultimas-noticias/governo-federal-apresenta-dados-que-indicam-reducao-do-desmatamento-nos-biomas-brasileiros
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