Lo those many years ago, when I toiled for CSC, there came the announcement that one of the major data centers (perhaps the main one?) would be decamped to Australia. Now, since at least my undergraduate days, I've known that Australia is (and always has been in human times) the driest piece of real estate with people on it. I was astonished, of course.
For about as long, I've also been aware that Brazil's agriculture has been of the slash and burn variety. Bolsonaro, being a rightwing idiot, has promoted it even more. Exactly how long Brazil has used slash and burn, I haven't found, but
Available literature indicates that deforestation rates in the Amazon Basin of Brazil increased after the early 1960s due in large part to national policies supporting road building, tax and credit incentives to large corporations and ranches, and colonization projects for the rural poor.
So, at least half a century.
Back to Australis. Comes new reporting that climate change deniers are in full throat rampage, even as the effects diminishes their lifestyle.
In few places is the challenge of adapting to climate change more immediate than in Australia, where 80 percent of the population lives within a few dozen miles of a coastline susceptible to rising seas and more punishing storms, and where the arid interior bakes under record temperatures.
I guess conditions haven't gotten much better since I left CSC?
In sum, then, from an ecological point of view, we're already all Brazilians. We treat the environment as a short term impediment to instant needs, not giving a shit what we'll leave to our kids and grandkids. All this from 'conservative' politicians. Obviously, they don't admit what the word they use to self-describe actually means.
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